Speaker 1: US Studios forty seven new parents. Clara had been a
musician for twenty years before she came up with the idea.
She had played in coffee shops and small concert halls,
written songs for other people, recorded three albums of her
own that had sold modestly, and gathered a small but
devoted following. She was forty two now, and the idea
arrived one morning in late autumn, while she was making
tea in her kitchen and watching the steam rise from
the kettle and curl into shapes in the cold air.
She was going to write a lullaby for every child
born in her town that year. Not the same lullaby
written once and re used, a different one for each child,
each one written specifically for that particular baby and that
particular family. It was an ambitious project, perhaps too ambitious,
but Clara had always been the kind of person who
said yes to things before she had time to talk
herself out of them. She began by going to the
local hospital and asking the nurses in the maternity ward
how many babies had been born in the town so
far that year. The number was forty seven. Forty seven lullabies.
She wrote the names down on a small piece of
paper and folded it into her pocket and walked home
through the cold streets, feeling both excited and a little overwhelmed.
The first family she visited was the Andersons, who lived
in a small house at the edge of town near
the river. Their daughter, named June, was three weeks old.
Clara sat in their living room with her guitar and
asked them questions. What were their hopes for June. What
songs did June's mother remember from her own childhood. What
was the weather like the night June was born? What
did June's father want for her when she grew up.
The answers were simple and sincere, and full of the
particular love that new parents have for children who are
still mostly a set of possibilities rather than a set
of facts. Clara listened and took notes in a small notebook,
and then sat with her guitar and played a few
chords and sang a melody that came to her as
she listened. It was a simple melody, gentle and lilting,
with a chorus that repeated the baby's name, June, June,
Little June, Sleep now in your dreaming. The parents cried
a little Clara cried a little too. They recorded the
song on Clara's phone, and Clara promised to send them
a finished version within the week. Then she thanked them
and walked back through the cold streets to her apartment,
where she spent the rest of the afternoon working out
the chords and refining the melody until it was exactly right.
The second family was the Patels, who had just had
twin boys named Rohan and Arjune. They were still in
the hospital, so Clara visited them there, sitting in the
plastic chair beside the mother's bed while the babies slept
in their small, clear bassinets. The parents had come to
this country only two years before, and the father told
Clara's stories about his own mother back in India, who
had sung him to sleep every night until he was
twelve years old. He remembered her voice, but not the words,
only the warmth of it, the way it filled the
room and made the world feel safe. Clara wrote two
lullabies for the twins, one in English and one that
used a few words of Hindi that the father taught her.
They were simple songs, full of gentleness, and the mother
cried when she heard them. They recorded the songs on
Clara's phone, and Clara went home and spent the rest
of the day putting the final touches on the recordings,
mixing them with very soft ambient sounds so they would
be gentle enough to play next to sleeping babies. The
project took Clara eight months to complete. She visited forty
seven families. She wrote forty seven different lullabies, each one
tailored to that particular child and that particular family. She
recorded each one in her small home studio, mixing it
with sound that seemed appropriate. The sound of rain for
babies born on rainy nights, the sound of crickets for
some more babies, the sound of wind chimes for babies
whose parents loved the garden. Each recording was about three
minutes long, just long enough to settle a baby into sleep.
She did not charge anything for the songs. She gave
them away as gifts, sending the recordings to the families
along with a handwritten note that thanked them for letting
her into their lives for an afternoon. Some families wrote
back to thank her. Some sent photos of their babies
sleeping peacefully with headphones on. Some sent updates months later,
telling her that the lullabies had become part of the
bedtime routine, played every night for the baby and sometimes
for the parents too. By the end of the year,
Clara had recorded forty seven lullaby for forty seven children.
She put them all on a small website she had built,
organized by the baby's first name, so any parent could
find their child's song and play it whenever they wanted.
The website had no ads, and no payments, and no tracking.
It was just forty seven songs quietly waiting in the
digital dark for someone to come and listen. On the
last day of the year, Clara sat in her apartment
with a cup of tea and played through all forty
seven lullabies in order, listening to the melodies she had
written for children she had met only briefly, but had
come to know in some quiet way through their songs.
The music filled her apartment, layer upon layer, melody after melody,
each one different and each one exactly right for the
child had been written for. When the last lullaby ended,
she sat in the quiet for a long time, feeling
the particular fullness that comes from having done something that
mattered in a small way. She was not famous. The
project had not made her rich. But forty seven children
somewhere in her town were falling asleep to songs that
had been written specifically for them, and that was enough.
That was more than enough. The next year, she would
do it again. She had already spoken to the hospital
and they had agreed to send her a list of
the new babies born in the town. She would write
forty or fifty new lullabies, and she would give them
away as gifts, and she would sit again at the
end of the year listening to all of them played
together in her small apartment. It was not a project
that would change the world. It was not the kind
of thing that made headlines won awards. But it was
a quiet and good thing, and it filled her days
with meaning. And somewhere in the town, on any given night,
a small child was drifting off to sleep listening to
a melody that someone had written just for them. And
that was the kind of beauty that Clara believed the
world could always use more of.