When Rob Thomas was making his new album Something About Christmas Time this past summer, he had a loop of Hallmark Christmas movies running in the studio to get into the holiday spirit. Now, one of the songs on the album, “A New York Christmas ’21,” is featured in A Royal Queens Christmas, a new Hallmark movie that’s premiering this Saturday

Not only is the song in a Hallmark Christmas movie but, as Rob tells ABC Audio, “It’s also in a Hallmark Christmas movie about a girl from Queens, New York. And my wife is a girl from Queens, New York, so I feel like it’s all very, very fitting.”

Rob explains why it’s also fitting that he included “A New York Christmas” — a remake of a single he first released in the early 2000s — on the album.

“I wasn’t going to really put it on there, except for that that song was written…the December after September 11,” Rob recalls. “I was going into Blythedale Children’s Hospital [in New York] to do a live set. And I didn’t want to go in without acknowledging that something kind of poignant had just happened — and for us as New Yorkers, especially. And so I wrote this song, literally, I think like three nights before I went into Blythedale.”

“It was the 20th anniversary of that Christmas this year,” Rob continues. “And so — between the fact that it was the 20th anniversary and somehow, we still all, as a nation, but us as a city, a community, we’re all having this kind of collective grief again — it just seemed poignant to kind of put that back into the mix.”

A Royal Queens Christmas premieres Saturday at 8 p.m. ET on the Hallmark Channel.

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