For Leona Lewis—like many people—pandemic Christmas in 2020 was memorable for all the wrong reasons. “It was really awful,” she tells Apple Music. “I was away from my family and I hadn’t seen them for a year. I felt very isolated. It was the worst Christmas ever, basically.” Yet the experience prompted her to do something she had wanted to do for years: return to her 2013 Christmas album Christmas, With Love, on which she’d spawned a huge Christmas hit (“One More Sleep”) and covered iconic festive songs including “White Christmas”—done as Otis Redding had—and “Winter Wonderland.” “I didn’t want to record a whole new album, because I very much love this album and what it represents for me,” says Lewis. “After what happened last Christmas, I was like, ‘I have to do this, because I’ve been so down this whole time.’ I want this album to bring a bit of comfort to people after a crazy year.”
Christmas, With Love Always features the original record’s 10 tracks, as well as two new numbers. There’s “Kiss Me It’s Christmas,” a romantic, soul-inspired duet with Ne-Yo, as well as a stirring cover of “If I Can’t Have You”—the 1977 Bee Gees-written track also performed by Yvonne Elliman—which showcases the incredible voice that catapulted Lewis to fame almost exactly 15 years before this album’s release. “The song really reminded me of this time many years ago where I had broken up with this person that I was totally in love with and I had my first Christmas without them,” says Lewis. “It sums up that whole feeling for me, of how I felt so lonely that Christmas. I wanted to have a reflection of everything, because Christmas is everything. It's life, it's love, it's pain, it's sadness, it's happiness, it's joy, it's peace, it's disturbing. It's not just one thing.”
Tracks like “One More Sleep” may now be a ubiquitous feature of Christmas in the UK, but releasing festive music back in 2013 felt like a bit of a risk. “It was a little bit daunting because no contemporary artists were really [doing that],” says Lewis. “But I knew that it was something I really wanted to try at some point, so we were just like, ‘Let's just do it. Let's do a Motown-inspired album. Let's try and make it as authentic as possible. Let's have fun with it.’ And it just felt right to do at that time for me.” All these years later, it’s still not lost on her that the music she created back then now soundtracks other people’s Christmases, in the way that her favorite artists—including Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, and Stevie Wonder—soundtracked her own growing up. “For me as a kid, Christmas was such a fun time of year, surrounded by a lot of love,” she says. “So if I have a song that is becoming part of people's Christmases as well, that's so cool. That music really can live on.”