Lalah Hathaway recently gifted the world an early Christmas present by doing a duet with her late father, Donny Hathaway, for his well-known song and the Black Christmas anthem, “This Christmas.”
The song has been covered numerous times by renowned musicians like Chris Brown, Usher, The Temptations, Mary J. Blige and Destiny’s Child. But to Lalah, singing and recording her rendition of Donny’s most famous song wasn’t just her doing a cover but her connecting with her father. However, she was hesitant to do the cover.
“At the beginning, I felt entirely out of pocket because it’s such a beloved song,” she told VIBE in an interview. “I tend to do covers, and my dad tended to do covers. A lot of the songs people love that they attribute to him are covers. I think the same will be true of my career.”
She continued, “But, it’s a hard one to do because so many people love [this] song. It was a hard one, spiritually, to meet because, for me, it wasn’t a conversation that we were ever able to have. I struggled with that a little. But, literally five minutes into the session, I was good. I knew it was real, what I heard in my mind, and so it worked out.”
While Lalah’s version differs from her father’s, she didn’t drastically change the song. It’s the same, but Lalah slowed down the rhythm and replaced the brass instruments (horns) with piano—an acoustic version!
In conjunction with the track, the singer included a music video containing an animation of her late father singing alongside her without using a hologram.
“It’s animated, and it’s illustrated because it’s real, and it’s what we had,” she said. “I don’t have a hologram. That’s a little spooky to me. For me personally, to take some of the stuff that we’ve seen in the same way that we took this song that everyone has heard and just put a new spin on it and place us in the same place because otherwise, it would never happen.”
She added, “I feel really happy about the way we represented him. I didn’t want to do something that you didn’t see him at all. I wanted to do as much as I could.”
Watch Lalah’s music video below.
