I'm excited to announce that my mother and I will be collaborating together on a Lullabies album.While I will be hard at work for the next year composing and recording my own 2nd album (to be released Fall of 2009), this "lullaby" album will be a smaller seperate project involving both the work of myself and my mother, and will be released digitally this Fall/Winter 2008.
We've talked about doing a project like this together for a while, but it hasn't been until the birth of my own baby that the idea came together.The album will be bedtime songs for babies; something you can put in the cd player in the nursury and just let play. Songs like Brahm's Lullaby, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, as well as some original songs by each of us.
With the recent birth of Preston, it has been really interesting to watch and observe which kinds of music he is drawn to. I've noticed that he doesn't have the ability to concentrate on multi-instrumental music. It is too busy for him and actually makes him fussy. I've also tried Classical music, and it I've seen that he requires extremely simple melodies. Mozart is fantastic because his music is very light and mathmatical.
I've also observed that he responds really well to music where there is one-lined melodies with an instrument that his ear can pick out well - like a piano, or other bright instruments like the Illean Pipes (a Celtic instrument in the bagpipe family), or the flute.
In one of the many baby books I've been reading, I recently learned that babies at his age cannot really concentrate on more than one or two things at a time. Thus, the reason why if a baby is crying it is good to "shush" and "pat" them. Because that is three things. They can no longer concentrate on crying if they are tuning into the sound of the shushing and the patting on their back. It is too much.
So as a musician, it is super duper neat to observe how my baby responds to music. It is the reason why we decided to put together an album of lullabies - specifically for babies. And doing it together as a Mother-Daughter team will make it even more special since we are both mothers now.
We plan to get working on it right away and have it done within the next couple of months. We plan to do a "Digital" release at first (iTunes, Amazon, Cdbaby) and later on release hard copies. And best of all it will be "Kid tested, Mother approved". :)
