How I Abandoned Indie Music to Become a Human Jukebox for Twins

Somewhere around the eighty-fourth consecutive rendition of The Wheels on the Bus, you experience a big sort of ego death. I was standing in the kitchen at 6am, wearing a t-shirt entirely crusted in dried porridge, aggressively miming the swish-swish-swish of the windscreen wipers to an audience of two hostile toddlers who were demanding more. Before they arrived, I had foolishly built a Spotify playlist titled 'Cultured Infant,' packed with acoustic Radiohead covers, early Simon & Garfunkel, and obscure indie vinyls I assumed we would enjoy together on a sheepskin rug. The delusion of the expectant parent is truly a beautiful, tragic thing.

What I actually became is a human jukebox. When you're frantically trying to figure out which baby songs to sing at 3am to stop a dual-meltdown, you realize very quickly that your aesthetic preferences don't matter. Acoustic indie rock just depresses them, and jazz makes them furious. They want the hits. They want the repetitive, mind-numbing classics, and they want you to perform them with the manic energy of a daytime television presenter.

My NHS health visitor, a woman who looks like she has survived three wars and could comfortably wrestle a bear, told me during a check-up that I should be singing to them constantly. She claimed it releases a massive hit of oxytocin for both of us, which I'm fairly sure is just the brain's way of drugging you so you don't walk out the front door and keep walking. She also said something vaguely scientific about how listening to repetitive syllables helps them map out the structure of language, though right now Twin A mostly just shrieks at the toaster and Twin B communicates entirely through disappointed sighs. So, the science might be sound, but I filter all of these developmental promises through a heavy layer of sleep-deprived skepticism.

The terrifying reality of letting an algorithm choose the music

If you take nothing else away from my descent into musical madness, please understand that you can't trust the little cylindrical robot sitting on your kitchen counter to curate your morning routine. I learned this the hard way on a rainy Tuesday when both girls were screaming in stereo because I had the audacity to peel a banana incorrectly. My hands were covered in mashed fruit, so I shouted at the smart speaker to just play something, anything, for infants.

If you loosely yell at a voice assistant to find lil baby songs, you won't get soothing lullabies about sleeping sheep. You will get the platinum-selling Atlanta rapper Lil Baby. The bass dropped hard enough to rattle the windows, and my living room suddenly sounded like a nightclub at 2am, leaving the twins stunned into absolute silence while I frantically tried to shout over the aggressive hi-hats to turn it off.

Thinking I could outsmart the machine the next day, I asked it for a specific mood. They were crying, so I stupidly asked the algorithm to search for melanie martinez cry baby songs, vaguely remembering the album cover had a vintage pastel crib on it and assuming it was some sort of modern, hipster nursery rhyme project. It's not. It's alternative pop wrapped in a childhood aesthetic, featuring incredibly explicit, deeply adult lyrics about dysfunctional relationships and emotional trauma, which echoed through my kitchen while Twin A blissfully chewed on a table leg. Unless you want to spend your afternoon explaining some very creative profanity to your mother-in-law when she drops by, you'll need to abandon the smart speaker roulette entirely and just build an offline playlist that won't suddenly switch to drill music.

Meanwhile, playing classical Mozart is supposed to make them mathematical geniuses, but I haven't seen any evidence of them understanding basic fractions yet.

What works when they're basically newborn potatoes

In those first two months, they're entirely useless but highly demanding. Their vision is terrible—they can only see about thirty centimeters in front of their faces, which happens to be exactly the distance from your chest to your face when you're holding them. This is the era of singing directly into their unblinking, slightly cross-eyed faces.

You end up making wildly exaggerated mouth shapes while singing Old McDonald because apparently, that's how they figure out what lips are for. Of course, holding them this close while applying vocal pressure usually results in some sort of bodily fluid escaping from them. If you're going to hold them in the firing line while serenading them, you really want them wearing something like the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit. It survives the endless 40-degree washes without turning into cardboard, and more importantly, the envelope-style shoulders mean when a nappy situation goes catastrophic mid-lullaby, I can pull the whole thing downwards over their shoulders rather than dragging a soiled garment over their faces.

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The aggressive poking and grabbing phase

Somewhere around four months, they discover their hands, which they immediately use to grab a fistful of your hair or try to rip your nose off your face. This is when tactile music becomes your only defense mechanism. You have to incorporate their limbs into the performance to keep them occupied.

I started using Round and Round the Garden and This Little Piggy as a distraction tactic during nappy changes, tickling their stomachs and toes to prevent them from doing the dreaded alligator death-roll off the changing mat. The trick is to establish a routine where the song predicts the tickle, which supposedly builds anticipation and secure attachment, but practically just stops them from plunging a hand into a dirty nappy.

When they finally start demanding a performance

Approaching the one-year mark, they suddenly develop object permanence and motor skills, which is a terrifying combination. They expect you to do the hand gestures. If you sing The Itsy-Bitsy Spider without doing the finger wiggling, they'll look at you like you've just insulted their ancestors.

My absolute favorite tactic for this age—the thing that genuinely saves my sanity every afternoon—is laying them under the Wooden Baby Gym in the living room. It's brilliant because it's made of actual wood and doesn't look like a neon plastic factory exploded on my rug. I can sit just behind it, singing If You're Happy and You Know It, while they violently bat at the little wooden elephant instead of each other. It keeps them contained in one spot while I perform my sad little routine, giving me a solid ten minutes to drink a coffee that's only mildly lukewarm.

We also have the Gentle Baby Building Block Set scattered around the same area. They're fine. They do exactly what they claim to do, which is give the girls something soft to stack and subsequently throw at my head without denting the skirting boards or giving me a concussion, but it's the wooden gym that is the actual anchor for our musical theater sessions.

Ultimately, you just have to lean into the absurdity of it all. They don't care if you sing horribly off-key. They don't care if you occasionally forget the words and just hum the bridge to a Beatles song while bouncing them on your knee. The baby song isn't really about the music at all; it's just a bizarre, rhythmic way of telling them that you're there, you love them, and you're willing to completely abandon your dignity for their amusement.

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Questions I still ask myself in the middle of the night

Do I actually have to sing if I've a terrible voice?
Yes, unfortunately. I sound like a dying walrus when I try to hit high notes, but babies have absolutely zero critical taste. My pediatrician claimed they just want the vibration of your chest and the familiarity of your tone, so you could technically sing the instruction manual to your microwave to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle and they would be thrilled.

What if my baby absolutely hates the song I'm singing?
Twin B actively cries if I sing Row, Row, Row Your Boat. I've no idea why; she just finds it deeply offensive. If they hate a song, abandon it immediately and try something with a completely different tempo. Sometimes they want a slow, droning lullaby, and sometimes they want you to aggressively beatbox. It's entirely trial and error.

How do I stop the smart speaker from playing inappropriate music?
You have to be aggressively specific, or better yet, disconnect the thing from your streaming accounts and just use your phone to cast pre-made, heavily vetted playlists. If you leave it up to the voice assistant to interpret what a baby song is, you'll inevitably end up listening to explicit rap or terrifying alternative pop while your child tries to eat a shoe.

Are the classic nursery rhymes a bit outdated?
Some of them are incredibly grim if you genuinely listen to the lyrics (rock-a-bye baby involves a child plummeting from a tree branch, which is horrifying). But the melodies have survived for hundreds of years because they perfectly match a baby's resting heart rate. You don't have to stick to them, though—I frequently sing acoustic covers of 90s Britpop, I just slow the tempo down to a crawl so it sounds like a lullaby.