Fairytale of New York

The song announces itself with a swirl of uilleann pipes and fiddle before tumbling into something that sounds like a pub at two in the morning — rowdy and warm and slightly out of control. The Pogues built their sound on the collision between traditional Irish folk instrumentation and punk energy, and this is their masterpiece of that form: simultaneously raucous and heartbreaking, funny and devastating. Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl trade verses as two lovers who have wrecked each other across a lifetime, their exchange tipping from tenderness to cruelty and back again in the space of a single chorus. MacGowan's voice is deliberately rough, almost ruined, and that roughness is the point — it carries the weight of experience and bad decisions and love that has curdled into something still warm but also toxic. MacColl's voice is clear and bright by contrast, and the dynamic between them captures something true about long relationships: the way people who have hurt each other can still recognize what they once were. The song is set at Christmas in New York among Irish immigrants, and it holds within it an entire world of displacement and nostalgia and disappointment. It is a song for December, for airports, for the strange emotional exposure that holidays bring — for anyone who has ever loved someone complicated.