All they want for Christmas is to ride shotgun. Superstar pop divas Lady Gaga, Dua Lipa and Chappell Roan go a-SUV-caroling in “A Very Carpool Karaoke Christmas,” a holiday special that was unwrapped as a surprise release Sunday night on Apple TV+ and Apple Music.
The hour-long installment of the Emmy-winning “Carpool Karaoke: The Series” was put up on Apple’s platforms in a surprise release Sunday night at 9 p.m. PT/midnight ET. It remarks a return of the franchise after a fifth season that wrapped up on Apple TV+ 18 months ago.
Zane Lowe assumes the role of host for all three segments of the hour-long special, introduced as its guest driver and duet partner in a brief prologue that begins with franchise mainstay James Corden effectively handing over the keys via a phone call from Britain.
Lowe’s ostensible mission is to shuttle Roan around her native Missouri, Lipa around Tokyo before a gig, and Gaga around Los Angeles on her way to a studio session. The last “drive” ends with Lowe joining Gaga’s band on electric guitar for an in-studio cover of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” that is also being released independently as an audio track.
The hour plays like a transitory modern version of an old-school Christmas variety special, with each of the guests prompted to loudly sing along to classic holiday tracks as well as their own biggest hits. In performance mode, all three pass the crucial “Carpool Karaoke” test, with their lung power, sense of movement and overriding charisma feeling unconstricted, seatbelt or no seatbelt.
The caroling ranges from Lipa singing along to the Ronettes’ “Sleigh Ride” to Roan’s karaoke take on Wham’s “Last Christmas.” Gaga is the only one of the three with an original Christmas song to bring up. She tells Lowe that her preference in Christmas music is for “something wholesome and sentimental… you know, a song that the whole family can get together and sing,” before breaking into her deeply salacious 2008 single “Christmas Tree,” which melds bits of “Deck the Halls” with saucy assertions that “underneath the mistletoe, everybody knows we will take off our clothes” and “my Christmas tree’s delicious.”
Speaking of Gaga, the Chappell Roan segment begins with the singer leading Lowe through her parents’ farm and introducing him to a chicken named after Lady Gaga. They then load into the SUV with her parents, Kara and Dwight. The entire carload sings along with “Pink Pony Club,” and the host asks Roan’s mom how she feels about having partially inspired that signature song. “I started to tear up just listening to her sing it just now,” says Kara. “We love her so much and we’re so proud of what she does and who she is and what she stands for. I love singing it with her at her shows and I love it when you can just see the people just respond to that song so much. And even when we’re grown up, we really care about what our parents think about us.”
“Yeah,” adds Roan’s teary-eyed father, “I hope that that’s something that she always knows, that we love her so much and we could never not be proud of her. I think about this a lot and try not to get emotional about it. I already am… What she has taught me as a father is respect for other people and all people, and that’s what I want people to understand. Everything that is about her is about loving everybody, and she has taught me that.”
Roan talks about growing up “quite religious,” something she experienced as very suffocating. I know for a lot of people, it’s actually very freeing. For me it almost did the opposite, where I felt like I couldn’t be myself, that who I was was a sin and I was going to hell no matter how good of a person I was or how much I loved God, for being gay. And I just couldn’t handle feeling ashamed anymore.” Although Roan says she found liberation moving to L.A., she adds of Missouri, “I’m so grateful I’m from here,” even if in “a conservative community, I understand the fear and where it comes from. It’s scary when it’s something you don’t know or understand. So it’s like one degree every conversation. Right? It’s conversation after conversation and not just giving up on people that had helped you when you were in diapers. Like, that’s just not how I personally operate. The door has to be open or there is no learning.”
The talk lightens up when Roan meets up with a couple of high school friends at Andy’s Frozen Custard and orders a concoction called the James Brownie Funky Jackhammer. “I would literally rather have an Andy’s Frozen Custard custom than the Grammy. I’m not kidding,” she says.
In Gaga’s segment, a fourth celebrity makes a cameo appearance on the special, after Gaga shares video footage of her late grandmother singing AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” “I brought you Brian Johnson for Christmas,” Lowe says, stopping to let the AC/DC singer into the car. “You want to hear something funny?” Gaga asks him. “I was in the ‘Stiff Upper Lip’ video (in 2000)… I was 17 and I was an extra in the back… and I was headbanging. And they were like, ‘Don’t headbang. We want it to be modern.’ And I was like, ‘No, I can’t (stop). Like, there’s only one move that I can do.’”
Beyond also covering a bit of Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog,” Gaga sings along with her recent global charttopper “Die With a Smile” and talks about cutting it with Bruno Mars between sessions for her own upcoming “LG7” album. “It was crazy,” she tells Lowe. “I went to see him at like 10 o’clock at night. He played me the idea and then we wrote the second verse, then we cut it at 2 in the morning. Bruno had me singing for four hours. He had an exact way that he wanted to hear it and I wanted to give him that.
In Tokyo, Lipa goes Christmas shopping with Lowe, and sings part of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” alongside the Whitney Houston original, after telling the story of how as a youth she got up on stage at a Katy Perry concert with a few other audience members to join in on that cover. “I was like, I want to be on that stage. I want to perform. I want to do rooms like this. I now play ‘Dance With Somebody’ at the end of every single one of my shows.”
