Crowder is celebrating the holidays with his Milk & Cookies: A Merry Crowder Christmas album, out now. The Texas native had an unlikely incentive to do the holiday project: a Marvel TV special, The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, filmed in his Georgia home.
“Everybody’s gotta do a Christmas album, and I’ve been putting off the Christmas album,” Crowder tells Everything Nash. “I was like, ‘Do we need another Christmas album? We don’t need another Christmas album. It’s the same songs. Everybody sings the same songs. And do we need another version with me singing them?’ Well, here’s what happened: I got a knock on the door, and it was Marvel Studios, who make the Marvel movies. They said, ‘Hey man, we want to shoot a Christmas special, Guardians the Galaxy.'”
Once Crowder found out about the plot, which involved Kevin Bacon being kidnapped from his house, the singer was all in — after he asked if they would blow things up in his house.
“‘Please tell me you’re gonna blow things up,'” Crowder remembers saying. “They’re like, ‘As Guardians, we’re gonna blow things up.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, this is wonderful. Absolutely.’ So our house turned into Christmastime early on in the year, February or March, something like that. And when Marvel does Christmas, they do it like they do. I think they bought all of the inflatable Christmas blow-up things that you can stick in a lawn. They were all in my lawn. And I’m like, ‘If I’m ever gonna do a Christmas album, one, with a follow-up, it could be named Milk and Cookies, and two, with Christmas happening in my yard and in my home, this is gonna be probably the year to do it.'”
Although the entire process of having a Marvel special filmed at his house, and having that inspire his own Christmas album sounds a bit ludicrous, even to Crowder, he is grateful for the entire experience, even if it was far from the norm.
“That’s what happened,” Crowder says. “We got a knock on the door. And a superhero movie came by and I’m like, ‘This is the year of Christmas. This is the year we do the Christmas album. It’s a no-brainer.’ And they told us a plot. And it’s that the Guardians are gonna come and give the best Christmas gifts ever given, which is Kevin Bacon.”
Crowder was definitely able to get in the holiday spirit, even though it wasn’t anywhere close to the holidays, thanks to his environment while the Guardians of the Galaxy special was being filmed.
“The funniest thing is, they had all these Christmas trees that were stunt trees, because the only reason a Christmas tree is in the movie is to be destroyed utterly at some point. And so they had stunt trees, so when the tree got destroyed, they could just bring in another tree, decorated exactly like the first tree was … I didn’t know they had stunt trees. But we were staying there at the time they were shooting, and they were storing all of these stunt trees in our bedroom. I would wake up in a forest of wonderland, a Marvel wonderland.
“And when you wake up and you’ve had a really good sleep, and you’re like, ‘I don’t know where I am or who I am.’ That happened on the regular, waking up in my forest,” he adds.
The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special premieres on Disney+ on November 25. Milk & Cookies: A Merry Crowder Christmas follows Crowder’s Milk & Honey album, released in 2021. Find Milk & Cookies: A Merry Crowder Christmas and all of Crowder’s music at CrowderMusic.com.