In one of the more poignant scenes of the new documentary “20 Feet From Stardom,” the singer Darlene Love recalls a Christmas memory. In a career slump, long after her shining moments in the 1960s singing Phil Spector hits, Love had resorted to cleaning houses to make ends meet.
She was tidying up a bathroom on Christmas Day when “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” came on the radio. It’s perhaps her most famous song, a staple of holiday music that she has since performed annually on “Late Show With David Letterman” for nearly 30 years.
That was it. Love knew right then and there that she was meant to sing — and to be heard.
“There for a while I didn’t think I’d be singing anymore,” she says from her New York home on a recent morning, not long after the kickboxing class she had taken at 5 a.m. (Love is 72.)
