I Told Myself I Would Never Play “Kids Music” for My Children. How Little I Knew About Motherhood.

Music Our No-Raffi Household Grows Up When my husband and I became parents, we thought we had a rule that would keep us ourselves. How wrong we were. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Ian Gavan/Getty Images and Getty Images Plus. Editor’s note: Rebecca Knight is the editor of Notes to New Mothers, a collection of 65 writers and artists riffing on parenthood, out today from W.W. Norton. 1. No Raffi My husband made a rule when we had kids that there would be no Raffi in our household. To him it was sonic Barney, Laffy Taffy, a capitulation to infancy and the end of his own adulthood. 2. Dignity We live in a rural area where the nearest grocery store is a 25-minute drive; 25 minutes of music is a golden nugget. Our nuggets include Leonard Bernstein narrating The Carnival of the Animals, Leonard Bernstein narrating Peter and the Wolf, the Band’s album where they sing “The Weight,” Aretha Franklin’s album where she sings “The Weight,” a playlist of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez duets, Stop Making Sense, the entire Beatles catalog (this consumed two years of grocery runs), Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill (how young is too young?). And, most recently, Peppa Pig’s My First Album. Our entire family, at our younger child’s request, has been mired in Peppa’s muddy puddles, morning, noon, and night, for five months solid. I hear distant mental snorts in my dreams, snorting up from the depths of my psyche, snort-snort when I close my eyes and snort when I open them. Dine-saw. Snort, snort. I remember when my stereo played adult voices. I remember Laura Marling’s voice. “I have a personal philosophy of parenting where I refuse to do undignified things,” Laura Marling says. Marling, 36, released her first solo album at age 18 and has put out eight albums since. She has also had two kids in the past four years. 3. Sticky The Laura Sings Raffi album is 29 minutes long. The kids and I were going to the grocery store and the dump. Neither child had heard the album, and both were skeptical. (They know that Laura is one of my adult voices.) But the song list begins with “Peanut Butter Sandwich,” which sticks an IV directly into everyone’s nervous systems: carbs, jam, plucking, fingers. Nobody can exactly argue. It’s sweet, but unsweetened. It’s good. In Track 2, we’re confronted by the majesty of Raffi’s No. 1 jam: “Baby Beluga.” Have you ever experienced the biological bliss of hearing a toddler wail out the uuuga at the end of beluga? This sensation—the slaphappy-ness of children singing along—must have contributed to Raffi’s commercial success in the ’80s (10 million albums sold despite his turning down every TV, film, and endorsement offer). I hadn’t remembered it because I was one of those children, not listening, just singing along. My children can’t stop singing now either, so it’s my turn to listen. My son couldn’t believe it: He’d just performed Track 5, “Five Little Frogs,” a few days earlier as a puppet show in his kindergarten class (but they’d sung “Six Little Frogs” because there are six rural kindergartners). My daughter claimed Track 13, “Willoughby Wallaby,” from her daycare’s singing circle. They sat in the car, rapt, while I took the trash to our local transfer station. By the time I’d separated the No. 1 plastics from the 2s and 5s, they had finished the 29 minutes, circled back to a repeat performance of “Down by the Bay,” and my son was saying, “I LOVE this one.” At home, the kids asked my husband to listen to Laura Sings Raffi. He listened quietly. When we got up to “Down by the Bay,” he admitted, “I loved this one.” 4. Harmonies The kids had never heard Laura Marling before, but I’d spent a decade after school following Laura’s scent across Northern Europe as if she were the caribou. I’d spent a year alone in the Arctic listening only to her Alas I Cannot Swim. When asked to talk to a northern Norwegian high school about writing books, I lectured them on Marling’s vocal stylings and also, for some reason, the composer Rachmaninoff. Lowering latitude from 68 to 51 degrees north, I saw her face-to-face for the first time in London, on Halloween of 2009, when she was 19 and I was 22. “Her features are small and made of the kind of lines and corners you find in illustrations for children’s books,” I wrote in my travel blog; why was I thinking of children’s books, 22 and childless. “She is pale in the glow way and all around her eyes, nose and mouth is room, and the room of her face is well lit.” Rebecca Knight I took this picture. I must have been standing so, so close to her feet. I wrote, “Her singing voice is clear, graced, risky, unaffected and able.” When her 2010 album I Speak Because I Can came out, I bought the CD from a Dublin HMV and listened to it with my summer-dorm door closed, as if someone might come in and tell me how it ended. In 2011, back in the States, I saw her play Manhattan at Webster Hall on 11th Street, the street where I’d grown up attending the Third Street Music School, which is somehow on 11th Street. She was moving more now, less of a deer in the headlights, rather something wilder in the woods, harder to capture, brighter. Rebecca Knight When I saw her in Brooklyn in 2013, my birth control reminder alarm went off during the show, and she stopped singing because of it. My phone lay at the bottom of one of those subway-commute shoulder bags that contained half my apartment, and my wrist, frantically trawling the bottom, couldn’t find the fucking rectangle, and she actually stopped singing. Emma Watson was in the audience that night. She sat only a few seats to my left, where I could see her powerful eyebrows. The entire audience scowled. Emma frowned, others booed, Laura said, “I don’t know why I stopped singing, it doesn’t usually bother me, but.” I’d made my pilgrimage, offered up incense to my idol, and my offering had beeped. Blasphemy! I loathed myself. I took my birth control that night. I did not get pregnant for another six years. Then I turned off that alarm, stopped taking the pills, and started going on musical grocery runs to buy granola bars. I hope maybe one day Laura will read this, remember the offense or have no idea, and, either way, forgive me. “I’m so, so honoured you brought your baby,” Marling recently told the Observer reporter who interviewed her about Laura Sings Raffi with an infant in tow. “I would so much rather live in a world where it’s perfectly possible to accommodate these things. And it is; it’s a small ask.” 5. Egos The novelists I toured with when we debuted, underage as Laura had been on her earliest tours, singing our songless words on stage after stage, we no longer wanted to write epics, we wanted to write Raffi. We had had children. We wanted to sublimate all our ego and humiliation and mandatory self-promotion as individual authors into something soft and shared that would lull us and our babies out of our minds and into someplace more melodious. Someplace full of belugas. But wasn’t Raffi Barney? Wasn’t it … not the real thing? Wasn’t it, well, immature? Hadn’t we matured? Past Raffi? Or does Raffi-level maturity in fact occur only after childbirth? “Your door is open,” Laura told that reporter. “To the other world.” Sixty-five of us writers got together to sing through that opening. We compared notes on laboring, feeding, hurting, and loving, on our own mothers and our partners and our fears. We compiled what we’d learned about how to heal. The differences between our experiences started to form harmonies—the space between our voices augmented and enriched and en-beautied each individual note. Our exchange became a book: Notes to New Mothers. I’m prouder of this work we did together than of anything I’ve written alone. Laura sings Raffi seriously, earnestly, without any cartoon orchestration, Nickelodeon drumbeats, oversized eyes, rainbows, glitter, or purple. Nor is it morose—there is plenty of whistling and mouth trumpeting. (“Daddy, she makes that sound with her mouth!” my son exclaimed, prompting my husband to try, and the grown man made us giddy with his gurgles.) Marling heralds with this trumpet a new tradition of artwork that is not asked to choose: that may sing in the studio what is sung in the nursery, that may give legs to the thoughts that fill a mind seated in the breastfeeding chair. “Who is she singing with?” my son asked during the next day’s playing of Track 3. The album instantly became our daily requirement, as the other nuggets had, in turn, before it. In “The More We Get Together,” Laura hums two harmony lines at once, but both hums are hers. My son and I have only ever practiced the duos: Paul and John, Bob and Joan, just the way my older brother had taught me the “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl” Beatles harmonies in the car 30 years earlier, on 57th Street, waiting for our mother to come down from work. “She’s singing with herself,” I said, but it’s truer to say she is singing with all her selves. We mature not once but many times. Consider the startling lucidity of a 2-year-old who has learned the nine words she needed; of an 18-year-old exiting the teenage labyrinth and squinting into her own daylight; the 29-year-old bride who is not marrying the first man she was engaged to; the 42-year-old mother of three; the 58-year-old empty nester reopening her watercolors. Each of these women is completely mature. Laura’s sandwiches are spread with selves, the stack is high in protein, vitamins, memory, and fiber, and bite after bite they taste better. I wonder how many other grown (maturity cycle No. 7?) women have been struggling to remember what it is that they “liked” back when it was theirs to choose, how many no longer have the energy or wherewithal to follow trends or to self-define by their acceptance or rejection of the contemporary culture they used to intelligently track. I wonder how many who can measure their wellness only by the portion of lunch box eaten per day and by occasionally fitting into old shoes—how many will choose to listen to this children’s album sung by a mother they used to listen to back when she and they were both mademoiselles? How many will mire in that continuity and come out, as I did, smoothed? 6. Vintage As with all upcycling, it is hard to say what Marling has done here: sewn a new elastic into the waistband of a skirt to replace the old one that had grown crackly and loose and ill-fitting? Or tailored a whole new garment? Whatever she has stitched, I’m wearing it, and it is some kind of luxury vintage. Its proportions have integrity, as did the original Beanie Babies from the ’90s whose small, beady eyes were not yet oversized. “Happy 50th anniversary to his classic album, Singable Songs for the Very Young,” Marling saluted Raffi. “I just loved [his] deadpan, sincere delivery. … It might be goofy, but it’s not clownish.” Ty introduced googly eyes to its stuffed animals in 2009; Marling added a mystical third eye to her drawing of a peanut butter sandwich for the album’s 2026 artwork. Laura Sings Raffi collapses the stigmatic distance between maturity levels, between children’s and adult art, the way timeless children’s books can, or Paul Klee’s paintings, or Leonard Bernstein’s lectures, or Tchaikovsky’s ballets. Marling will sometimes dip down to grab a note an octave lower than the rest of the line, then flip up to a ceilingless soprano: She is the sonic love child of Dylan and Baez in one set of lungs. Her breath strums an instrument of apparently infinite depth and capacity—one of those that makes you ask how it could be possible in the world of physics, like have you ever thought about how Paul McCartney actually hits those notes at the end of “Oh! Darling”? Incidentally, she is recording an album of McCartney songs, part of three more children’s albums she’s releasing that adults can enjoy. (I wish to write three more books about children for their parents.) Marling wanted to “see if we could pass off children’s music as sincere, normal adult music. And then I absolutely loved doing it.” I admire that she is choosing to sing Raffi during her Raffi period. She is not rushing back to the comfort of former genres, or ahead to creative innovations that the demands of early childcare overcrowd. She is singing a spade a spade. And, boy, are her mature listeners digging it. Motherhood Music Parenting