Exclusive Premiere: Watch Alex Whorms’ Cozy New Video for New Holiday Single “Christmas Morning”

By: Staff –

Canadian artist Alex Whorms is back with a cozy new video for her new holiday single “Christmas Morning”. Watch it exclusively via Aesthetic Magazine below.

Warm and inviting, the video for “Christmas Morning” distinctly personifies the heartfelt lyrics of the song by bringing both Whorms’ memories and imagined moments from the song to life. Teaming up with Canadian director Jason Lin and cinematographer Raymond Tuquero and filmed in her childhood home, the music video invites viewers along as the artist flips through family photo albums, sets out milk and cookies for Santa, and performs the cinematic ballad on the piano. With incredible attention to detail, the video opens with the glow and crackle of the fireplace and features a number of personal mementos, including actual VHS footage of Whorms’ family from Christmases past. With both a passion for and extensive experience in the film industry herself, the video came together with the generous support of the Hamilton film community who provided a number of pieces of vital production equipment that helped complete the project. Notably, the video was partially filmed at night, yet through the incredible expertise of the crew and combination of lighting styles, blackout curtains, and intentional reflecting of light, the video glows as if it was filmed in the early morning light. A beautiful and comforting visual indulgence in the feeling of warmth and gratitude that Christmas morning provides, Whorms’ elegant and graceful video for the song flawlessly sparks her favourite memories in the imagination of the viewer.

“Christmas Morning” is full of my childhood memories of holiday magic and the heartwarming feelings I still get every year when we come home to celebrate together,” said Whorms.

Joining the incredibly small group of approximately 2.1% of female producers in the industry today, Whorms wrote both music and lyrics for “Christmas Morning” as well as co-produced the track alongside Mark Lalama (Dizzy & Fay, Susan Aglukark). The song was mixed by Grammy Award winning engineer Harry Hess (Barenaked Ladies, Billy Talent).

While some artists work to master their chosen genre and others may even manage to define one, Alex Whorms crafts music that is essentially a genre unto itself. Seated at her beloved keyboard, the young vocalist and composer flows freely and flawlessly between styles and sounds, gracefully blending classic singer-songwriter pop, jazz, soul, rock, classical, folk and almost anything else that strikes her fancy — while investing everything with honest tales and authentic emotions drawn from her own life and experiences. Even she has trouble assigning it a name. “I’ve struggled to explain my sound to people for a long time,” she laughs. “The ideas I have are all over the place. I’m inspired by so many different styles.”

 A self-described “classical music kid” who became a “musical theatre nerd” in high school, Whorms went from practising piano five hours a day to reading charts in pit bands and conducting choirs while still in her teens. She loved the dramatic melodies, the lyrics that told stories and became a fan of composers which include Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Rodgers and Hammerstein. 

One day, the wheel landed on a Sarah Slean song, and Whorms’ world widened. “I found her music incredible because it was dramatic, and her lyrics are poetry. It was sensitive and beautiful. I could relate.” Slean led her to Regina Spektor and Tori Amos, Fiona Apple and Sarah Bareilles, Julia Michaels and Laila Biali — and before long, Whorms had found a new passion. She began studying the craft of songwriting, honing her skills as a performer and bandleader, sharpening her pen as a lyricist. “My daily journal entries turned into poems, then song lyrics. Writing helped me figure things out,” she says. “I like songs to be real and moving. Not overpolished and not oversimplified. Because life is so full of curveballs; it isn’t simple.”=

After releasing her 2017 EP Our Lives and 2019’s Burgundy, Whorms’ won the 2019 Hamilton Arts Award for Emerging Artist in Music, and she also performed at Canadian Music Week in Toronto (2019), Hamilton’s Festival of Friends (2018, 2021) and New York City’s Sidewalk Cafe (2017). 

Then the pandemic hit, putting Whorms’ tour abruptly on pause. She began working remotely as a screen composer, creating instrumental soundtracks for film and television. During this time, she also released “quietly beautiful and moving” solo renditions of Bing Crosby’s “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” and Jann Arden’s hit single “Insensitive”, which Darryl Sterdan of Tinnitist calls “a piece of pure piano-based heartbreak”. “As I adjusted to pandemic life, I wrote several albums’ worth of new songs, finding bits of meaning in our shared lockdown challenges.” The first of these new compositions, a holiday song called “Christmas Morning”, will debut on Nov 1. Dedicated to Whorms’ family, the track features Drew Jurecka (Dua Lipa, Alvvays) on violin, Davide Direnzo (Holly Cole, Alanis Morisette) on drums and production by Mark Lalama (Dizzy & Fay, Susan Aglukark).

Having also been reunited with her band and listeners in person, Whorms returned to the stage in September of 2022 with a sold-out show at Hamilton’s LIVELab. “Playing live again and having new songs to share is invigorating,’ says Whorms, who will be splitting her time between Ontario recording studios and stages this fall. “I’m finally back where I belong.”