This year Elizabeth Chan, the world’s only full-time Christmas music artist, has covered the modern holiday classic “Mary Did You Know?” as a tribute to her late friend and mentor, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, who died last year at age 53 of complications from cancer.
“It’s a commemoration of a friendship that had an incredible impact on my life, on my career,” she tells ABC Audio. “He was the one that first saw that I could be who I am today. And it only takes one person. And for me, he was that one person.”
Spurlock, best known for his Oscar-nominated documentary Supersize Me, and Chan had been friends since 2011, when she answered an ad he’d placed online and ended up being featured in his show The Failure Club, about people chasing their seemingly impossible dreams. That helped kick-start her career as a Christmas music artist.
With “Mary Did You Know?” Elizabeth is fulfilling a request from Morgan.
“The thing about me is that I’m known for my original music … but Morgan had always begged me. He always said, ‘Elizabeth, can you do a cover in your style? It would be so Chan-tastic,'” she laughs. “And I always told him no.”
But once he passed, she decided to record “Mary Did You Know?” It’s Morgan’s mother’s favorite holiday song, but there’s more to it than that.
“I don’t really do covers lightly,” says Elizabeth. “It wasn’t like I was going to do the song because it was Morgan’s mother’s favorite song. It was that it was so meaningful for me to cover the song for her. And because when I listen back to the lyrics … it resonated with me in a different way that as a Christmas artist I was able to transform.”
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