Fontanelle - Clem Snide
It’s no easy feat to write a song for or around the birth of your child, as I figured out when I sat down last night to make a playlist in honor of the upcoming birth of our second child. (What can I say, I tend to organize my life in playlists. I can’t help it.) So many songs written around this extremely emotional time in one’s life have a tendency to, well, stink. It’s a difficult thing to capture in a song, something so tremendously important and powerful and overwhelming, a surge all at once of Happiness, Joy, and I-Must-Protect-This-New-Thing-at-All-Costs. I’d venture to say it’s one of the hardest things in the world to write a (good) song or poem about your new baby or young child. The failure rate, even among artists I admire, is painfully high.
That being said, I think I’ve doing a good job putting this mix together, finding the songs that get it right, at least in my mind. Once the little one is born, I’ll try and remember to post it here, because I think some of you might really like it, too.
A quick teaser though, because I think this is about as simple and perfect as a song about a new baby will ever get. It’s called “Fontanelle” - a word which means, literally, the soft spots on a baby’s head which enable the plates of the skull to flex, thus allowing the baby’s head to pass through the birth canal - and it was written by Eef Barzelay, lead singer of Clem Snide, after the birth of his own son. Well, the music was written at that time - the lyrics themselves are actually a bit of a re-working of an old Irish blessing. This song is precious and fragile - there are simply so many ways it could have failed - but it doesn’t, not once.
