Today
marks the debut of the official music video for Keith Urban’s first
Christmas song, “I’ll Be Your Santa Tonight.” Co-written with Shane
McAnally, Urban describes
the track as “classic in its melody, retro 50s vibe in its structure.”
“I’ve
always wanted to record a Christmas song, but I really wanted to try
and write something new,” says Urban. “So, Shane came to my house and
we wrote, really about
a Christmas gone terribly wrong. No snow. Too much fog. Nobody can
make it to the party. It’s going to be a colorless Christmas, until her
man comes through.”
“I’ll
Be Your Santa Tonight,” possesses a whimsical, playful feeling that
comes through in its lyric, so it’d only stand to reason that Urban’s
attempt to create an ‘appropriate’
Christmas environment, during Nashville’s Summer months, would prove…
unsuccessful.
As
Urban explains, “We started writing in my studio, which I decked out
with colored Christmas lights, a tree, tinsel and of course I put the
A/C on artic, so it was freezing!
Shane says to me, ‘Do you have a piano? and I say, Yeah, but its
upstairs.’ So, we head upstairs to the living room – nice and warm and
toasty, with no Christmas decorations of any sort. Of course, we end up
writing the whole thing there – go figure.”
The
song’s video was directed by one of Urban’s longtime video
collaborators Chris Hicky. It depicts several Keiths, snow falling,
simultaneously playing piano, guitar
and bass. “I wanted to keep the video loose and a bit more
performance-based than the actual story line, because everybody has
their own version of what a song should look like, so I didn’t want to
touch on that too much.”