kfor.com
>MINNESOTA – A couple from Minnesota has re-imagined the classic Christmas song “Baby It’s Cold Outside” for a 21st-century audience, changing the song’s lyrics to emphasize the importance of consent.
>Singer-songwriters Lydia Liza and Josiah Lemanski, both from Minneapolis, said they were inspired to rework the song after bonding over a mutual dislike of the original’s lyrics, which were penned in 1944 by Frank Loesser.
>The duet features a man trying to dissuade a woman from leaving a party despite her repeated protestations that she has to go home.
>“What’s in this drink?” is one of the female lines. “What’s the sense in hurtin’ my pride?” implores the male voice.
>The song’s seeming disregard for the woman’s desire to leave never sat well with Lemanski or Liza.
>“I’ve always had a big problem with the song. It’s so aggressive and inappropriate,” said Lemanski, 25.
>Liza, 22, said she felt the same way as her boyfriend.
>“We started thinking of the open-ended questions that song has,” she said. “You never figure out if she gets to go home. You never figure out if there was something in her drink. It just leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth.”
>So Wednesday night, the couple decided to write a complete set of new lyrics.
>“We wrote the whole thing in an hour and then we went back and used my little demo-recording microphone and did that in 15 minutes,” Liza recalled.
>And though the melody is still the same, the lyrics strike an entirely new chord.
