Laptop presents unique rendition of Tom Waits’ holiday anthem “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis”

NYC artist Laptop presents their first holiday release: a winter transmission that sits oddly and perfectly within the band’s catalog. Tom Waits’ 1978 classic “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” is recreated as a deadpan jazz-robotic confession, equal parts heartbreak and smirk, performed as if a soul adrift at 2 AM in search of a payphone that still works. This feels like a postcard from every December that ever went wrong—and the small, stubborn hope that things might just go right anyway.

In the early 2000s, Laptop released three cult classic albums on Island Records, with frontman Jesse Hartman having started off as a teenage Voivod with Richard Hell before co-founding the indie rock band Sammy and releasing albums via Fire Records and Geffen Records. Hartman recently revived the band, driven by a dual-frontman dynamic with his son Charlie, this track reveals the intimate, lonely, late-night side of this project, sitting with you after the party ends and winter blows in under the door.

For Jesse Hartman, this song is personal. He has been playing this song since he was 13 years old at the family piano, long before Laptop existed, long before forming Sammy and long before joining Island Records. Hartman shares, “This was the first song that showed me you could mix sadness and humor in the same line. It basically formed me. This song is the blueprint for Laptop whether I knew it or not.”

While Laptop and Waits are both artists obsessed with doomed characters, disappointing heroes, and the poetry of failure, Hartman’s version is a departure from Waits’s gravel-and-whiskey delivery. This take leans into Laptop’s signature swing between warmth and machinery: jazz chords, cold synths, more groove, and Hartman’s dry, controlled, emotionally sideways vocal. It’s not whispered or fragile, it’s performed with the same unsentimental elegance that defined Laptop’s early-2000s covers (Billy Joel) and deep cuts (“We Never Made It to Venice”).

The basic tracks were recorded in Valencia in 2023, engineered by Iñaki Ariste Aznar, with Hartman on bass and drums by Mike Desmerais (Brian Eno, The Winkies). Upon their subtle, modern rhythmic bed beneath the retro-jazz harmony, Hartman finished the song in New York this Thanksgiving, pulling the performance into the present moment. Family members fill the edges of the arrangement with warmth: Odetta Hartman (backing vocals), Camellia Hartman (violin), Ben Jones (keyboards), and friend Billy Aukstik (trumpet). Just like a frozen street corner dressed in unexpected color.

“Waits wrote one of the great American monologues. This character isn’t just down on her luck, she’s inventing better versions of her life while she’s telling it. She’s lying, but she’s lying to survive. I didn’t want parody. I wanted to show the hope inside the hopelessness,” says Jesse Hartman.

This is standalone offering, outside the song cycle leading to their 2026 album “On This Planet”, which produced the singles “Indie Hero”, “Additional Animals”, “I Don’t Know” and “Weirder”. But it fits the themes Hartman has been exploring lately: aging, reinvention, myth-making, and the personal fictions we tell ourselves to get through the night. The holiday backdrop adds a chill: this is a Christmas song for people who can’t quite afford to believe in Christmas.

Musically, the track is Laptop stripped and rebuilt: a chiming electric piano, an icy synth pad, and a rhythm section that feels like a jazz band learning to operate inside a drum machine. Hartman delivers the lies, the hope, the heartbreak, and the punchline with the kind of detached affection that made Laptop an indie cult favorite. The final confession (“I need the money to pay my lawyer”) lands with dry humor and real ache.

As of December 12, this single can be found on major streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music and Bandcamp, where the band’s latest singles are also available. Laptop’s forthcoming album “On This Planet” is slated for release in Spring 2026 via Hurricane Cove Records.