Holiday music isn’t all sleigh bells and sentimentality. Alongside the familiar standards runs a quieter, older tradition: the sad holiday song.

From Elvis’s Blue Christmas to Joni Mitchell’s River, these tracks acknowledge a truth the season often glosses over—this time of year can sharpen loneliness just as easily as it inspires joy. They’re songs built on absence, distance, and the emotional weight that settles in when everyone else seems to be celebrating.

That tradition was the starting point for me when I wrote ‘Longest Night of the Year (Christmas Tears)’, a song rooted firmly in an Alberta experience.

The story follows a father working in the northern oilsands, alone on a subarctic winter night. Temperatures push past minus forty. The sky is clear enough to see the aurora cutting across the horizon. From the cab of his truck, he watches the lights and thinks of home—of the family he’s providing for but can’t be with.

This new Sunophonic regeneration leans into the grit of the story. The vocal is rougher, more expressive. The arrangement folds into a folk palette, with a big sounding middle section that settles into the final refrain.

I think this new arrangement really suits the moment and the landscape—dark, cold, and brutally honest.