My Little Singer, or, "If Music Be the Food of Love, Play On!"

When my wife was pregnant with our first child, we had one of those baby journals where we noted everything from Braxton Hicks contractions to strange cravings at impossible hours. One of the
things I remember we had to fill in was what we wanted our child to be when she grew up. I wrote “folk singer” imagining a poetic soul like Joni Mitchell’s, but with not much of a voice, like Bob Dylan.

You see, neither my wife nor I sing. I’m not sure whether it’s because we can’t sing, or whether we can sing but our standards are too high, but we sure choose not to sing, and I must say we don’t
enjoy the sound of each other’s singing voice much. They say that a child loves its parents’ singing voice no matter how bad, and both of us having sung our child to sleep many a night, we can confirm that happily, this is indeed true. But as we predicted, our daughter seemed to take after us in the vocal aesthetics department.

She would sing loudly and boisterously all over the house, always off-key, always off-beat. But she loved to sing, and we praised her unequivocally. And quietly, we worried. She was even worse than us! we thought. At least we could keep a beat and sing in tune! She must be tone deaf, we thought. We even considered some kind of musical therapy.

Then as fate would have it, I became involved in a project composing children’s songs. These songs would be sung from the point of view of characters from Shakespeare, but simply and innocently. You know, Cordelia would sing about how hard it was to express in words how much she loved her father. Hamlet would sing about this man named Yorick who used to play with him when he was a child, and how he missed this man. It was a lovely idea, and we were getting a lot of interest.

So I had to put together a presentation. I hired musicians, technicians, engineers, booked a recording studio, called on professional singers, all to record a couple of samples for this presentation for publishers, app developers, and even investors.

And my daughter, who had always been a part of the songwriting process (I field ideas to her on the walk to and from school every day) suddenly piped up and said that she wanted to sing one of the songs. Cue sideways glances.

Oh well, we thought, just a few extra minutes of studio time so that we could indulge her, and let her stand inside the glass-walled booth with headphones on, and emulate some of the singers she idolized. So we let her try.

And that’s when something happened. She heard herself for the first time. She compared herself to professional singers, suddenly. In a split second she had developed a self-critical faculty. And she began to self-correct. By the end of the first take, she was singing the song beautifully.

Then she paged us. “Can I go again? I messed up at the beginning.”

She had become a professional!

We included her recording as part of the presentation, and it had the same effect each time. Everyone who heard it said that yes, the songs were great, and the singers were marvellous, but we should consider having our daughter sing all the songs.

And the rest is history. (You can see the video here.)

Our daughter turned five yesterday. When we asked what she wanted for her birthday, she said she wanted a guitar. And yesterday, she was so happy to finally have one. And I was happy too. Maybe my dream of her becoming a folk singer would come true after all.


DAESHIN KIM is the father of SHERMAN KIM, and together they are creating and recording songs for children sung by characters from Shakespeare. You can find out more about their project, support them, and pre-order their work here.
Their crowdfunding campaign ends on June 21, after which they will have to turn to Plan B (none of the transactions will be processed and they will receive nothing if they do not reach their goal by the end of the campaign period).