A new dad's soundtrack: Edvard Grieg, Lou Reed, burps and giggles

When you become a parent, your soundtrack changes. The literal, everyday soundtrack changes, filled with more wailing, burping, giggling, babbling and farting than you ever thought possible. It changes the way you go about your work. More than that, though, your relationship with music as an adult shifts in the grand reorganization that is your life.



Anything becomes a lullaby, from Edvard Grieg's The Hall of the Mountain King to the Beatles catalog to "Big Rock Candy Mountain." These are all things that I have hummed and sung in hushed and desperate tones to get my boy to sleep. Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" is a particular favorite of mine; I can carry on the bouncy "doo do doo" line for as long as I want, the verses are essentially interchangeable and repeatable, and I'm not worried yet about giving him the talk about what Holly and Candy were really up to.


The other great thing about so much music is its ability to be easily transformed into a narrative about what's going on with the baby. Until the little tyke actually starts talking, one of the great shifts in the changing soundtrack is that it is a tether to a slight level of sanity and self-amusement, a recognition of the absurdity of being awake at three o'clock in the morning trying to get a little boy to go back to sleep, or how much food manages to wind up outside instead of in when trying to feed, or really anything to do with diapers. Loose rhyme schemes, bouncing melodies — they are a portal for my pre-parent self to look and say, "Huh, oh yeah, that's what you're up to? Good luck with that."

Take the simple, loosely A A B B C C rhyme scheme that Lou Reed rolled around in his mouth for "Walk on the Wild Side," for example. In the small hours, humming to myself, that becomes:

Fitzgerald is a fussing baby,
Doesn't realize that he should sleep.
Your diaper's changed but you're wide awake
Please stop crying for goodness sake,
I said, "Hey, babe,
C'mon fall asleep."
I said, "Hey, babe,
C'mon fall asleep."

It even already has the tender "babe" in there to blunt any of the over-exhausted frustrations! The same trick works with just about any memorable melody: Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy has been creeping into my mind, but it usually takes this form:

Eat this food, won't you please put it
In your mouth,
In your mouth
And not over your face!


A lot of this ridiculousness comes from the fact that right now, I'm not sure that I know any better ways to share with him the music I love or the songs that have shaped me — tiny teethmarks don't do any good for an LP. This nonsensical mix of humming, radio stations, bedtime playlists and swaddled bounce-alongs is the best we have to maybe get some of the wonders of music into his life, before he gets a chance to rebel against us and ask us for the classic back catalog of One Direction as a teenager.

I hope it's working. I think on my own family traditions around music and can't wait to make him a part of them, before he's even aware of them. I think about this coming Christmas, when my family will be together. We will be in the kitchen, there will be rye bread cooling and meatballs sizzling and invariably, there will be music. There will be Handel's Messiah on, and at some point, we will have to improvise upon that grand oratorio:

For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given,
and he shall get all his dirty diapers changed!
and His name shall be called Fitzgerald, poop machine, little peanut, the everwaking sleeper, the sweetest boy.

Carl Atiya Swanson is a writer, theatermaker with Savage Umbrella, artist advocate at Springboard for the Arts and brand new dad. You can find him at coffeeshops around the Twin Cities, or online at carlatiyaswanson.com.

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