Please don’t play it again, Diane.
That’s the bah-humbug feeling you’ll be having after listening to Diane Keaton’s new holiday single “First Christmas.”
Putting the “Black” in “Black Friday,” the yuletide tearjerker is much more mopey than merry, sucking all of the holiday spirit out of you.
And with Keaton’s painful performance — it’s the cringe that stole Christmas — the whole thing is just sad in every way.
Why this acting legend, at 78, felt that this was the gift that we needed to start the season, we’ll never know.
This bummer of a ballad, drearily drenched in strings, is about spending your “First Christmas” without the one you love.
“Hearing ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’/It only makes me miss him/When you love someone for so, so long/Yet they’re not coming home,” warbles Keaton, tentatively talk-singing through it.
And when it comes time to pour on the melodrama in the chorus, her limp vocals fall flat right along with the tired lyrics: “The snow falls on my window/I wish that I could let go/It’s a silent night/It’s another year/The first Christmas without you here.”
“First Christmas” was co-written by Carole Bayer Sager, who has penned songs for everyone from Barbra Streisand and Dionne Warwick to Diana Ross and Michael Jackson.
But Keaton isn’t anywhere near that club.
At this point in her career, though, the Oscar winner for 1977’s “Annie Hall” can do whatever stuffs her stocking.
“I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S FINALLY HERE!” Keaton gushed on Instagram last week. “MY DEBUT HOLIDAY SINGLE, ‘FIRST CHRISTMAS,’ IS COMING OUT FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 29TH.”
Alongside the single cover where she is rocking one of her trademark turtlenecks, she added, “SO EXCITED TO SHARE THIS SONG WITH YOU ALL.”
Indeed, her longtime Christmas wish is finally coming true with this project.
“I had a fantasy of being a nightclub singer that I carried through even into my early 20s,” Keaton told Metro Canada in 2014. “I sang a couple of gigs, as they call them, but I was not very good.”
While singing has been her secret passion, the “Something’s Gotta Give” star admitted that “I’m aware of the limitations of my voice.”
Although she took voice lessons for years, she found that she had “a very small voice.”
Still, that hasn’t changed her tune about singing. “I have this love of it,” said Keaton, who previously duetted with singer Ashe on her 2022 single “Love Is Letting Go.”
“I love music. I love singing ballads and sad songs, it’s just so much fun.”
