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Shh...appreciate the playlist - and don't wake the baby
(by Tim Woodcock - May 14, 2008)
Baby Freya is now two months old and sleeping with some sort of regularity. I love watching her doze, but it’d be nice if, like the rest of us in the household, she wanted to sleep for long chunks of time at night.
If I can lull young Freya off to sleep, I will have done a good turn. If her slumber is deep enough that regular background noise will not wake her, better still. Enlightened self-interest, I believe they call it.
So when it is time for enforced naptime or the last feed of the night it’s good to have some calming music in the background. It would be cruel to subject anyone, most especially a baby whom you are trying to calm, to my singing. But compiling playlists for an iPod, sure, I can do that.
However, compiling this particular playlist was much more difficult than I thought it would be. Punk rock, primitive blues and rockabilly were not going to cut it — so that was a large chunk of my music collection out the window. Sure, there are mellow songs I could have laid my hands on, but I needed music that’s soporific for a baby and interesting enough to keep an adult awake. That’s not an easy combination.
What’s more, I discovered, as I rifled through my collection, a mellow song is hardly the same thing as a lullaby.
I thought about “Perfect Day” by Lou Reed, formerly of the Velvet Underground. It is just the most tender, ridiculously beautiful pop song. “Oh it’s such a perfect day/ I’m glad I spent it with you.” It could so easily become saccharine, but Reed’s cracked voice and steely delivery prevents that.
But, this being Lou Reed, there is a kicker line, a twist — “You made me forget myself; I thought I was someone else, someone good.” It’s not too much of a stretch to read the song as being not about devotion to a person, but about addiction to drugs. So I put a question mark next to that one.
The next song that came to mind was the folk song “Hush, Little Baby.” It seems to me that it’s the lullaby of lullabies because it’s as quiet as can be, and you can just add as many verses as needed to weave its spell. “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word/ Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird/ If that mockingbird don’t sing/ Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.”
But what if our girl takes the words literally? The song is a whole series of promises I can’t keep. Is exposure to such ideas going to turn her into a demanding little materialist? Let’s strike that one off.
Zero for two.
How about Leadbelly’s “Goodnight, Irene”? The simplicity of the melody and symmetry of the lyrics has a lot to recommend it as a lullaby. “Irene, goodnight, Irene, goodnight/ Goodnight, Irene, goodnight, Irene/ I’ll see you in my dreams.” Sounds good on the surface, but if you go with the original bluesman’s version, there’s no escaping the darker themes of infidelity and suicide. (“I love Irene, God knows I do/ Love her till the seas run dry/ And if Irene turns her back on me/ I’ll take morphine and die.”)
Great song? Absolutely. Great lullaby? Perhaps not.
It became clear that I would have to go beyond my own musical comfort zone to find the soothing smoothies I needed.
I became ruthlessly utilitarian in my quest to obtain such music, and the next step perhaps should have been my first. I checked out a huge bunch of CDs from the library and burned them to my computer. Cynical marketing techniques were no barrier to me — primarily I wanted cherry-picked classical music presented with no surrounding context. I was attracted to CDs with lousy names such as Decaf Classics and The Most Relaxing Classical Album in the World Ever … Part Two. So my hard drive filled up with erratically labeled classical music to be sorted later. I can hold my head up high and say I managed to steer clear of Muzak, though I did pick up a CD called Meditation (Greatest Hits).
Now, when I put my computer on “random play,” there’s a chance I’ll be assaulted by “My Heart Will Go On,” the cornball theme from Titanic. Honestly, I didn’t mean to put it on there!
The whole exercise made me feel a little dirty, I have to say. The lullaby playlist seems to help when Freya is riled up, but it hasn’t got much integrity as a collection of music — just a bunch of pretty little things, full-length pieces reduced to the quiet bits in the middle and never allowed to swell to a crescendo. If someone were to come into the room and ask me what I am playing, chances are I wouldn’t have a clue.
Still, there were some prized discoveries. I had never heard Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez as it was intended. It is an unusual arrangement meant for classical guitar and orchestra, and I was familiar with it from the Miles Davis version on his Sketches of Spain album, in which the trumpet takes the place of the guitar. Davis puts it best: “That melody is so strong that the softer you play it, the stronger it gets, and the stronger you play it, the weaker it gets.”
But most music isn’t like that. The softer you play it, the punier it sounds.
I was almost back to where I started.
“Hush little baby, don’t say a word/ Papa’s gonna put the playlist on/And if that playlist don’t work/ Papa’s gonna pass you back to Mom.”
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