So it was a tossup whether I’d share this on my own Substack, the Upside Downs, or my husband Ian’s, The Producer. Pretty sure this is going to show up on both, so either way you’ll get to see it.
About two weeks ago, we had a whole lot going on at our house, a much busier week than usual, and about Thursday evening I had to finally admit that yeah, I think Betsy’s sick. She had seemed a little congested and wasn’t quite as happy and bubbly as she normally is, and sleeping a little more than usual, too. Then Thursday night/Friday morning she wakes up screaming in the middle of the night and is definitely running a fever. Not like a scary fever, but just high enough that I knew her body was fighting something for sure. There have been one or two times in the past that I would say she was “under the weather,” but not full-on sick. This was the first time for that. Since she is now nineteen months old and this was her first actual illness, I feel like that’s a pretty good thing. From what I’ve gathered from other Down Syndrome parents, a lot of them do get sick fairly often. Not Betsy, though, I guess. I’d say she has a pretty excellent immune system which I chalk up to mainly two factors: a) healthy, organic foods and b) having been breastfed. Anyway, here we were with her first actual sickness, and given how stressful the week had been, it wasn’t too surprising that someone in the house had come down with something. As Betsy is typically pretty happy anyway (a lot of other kids like her are, too), it wasn’t exactly easy to be sure at first. But that one night, a very rough, quite sleepless night, settled it.
So I was taking care of a sickly baby and trying to keep my own sanity as well. If you’re a parent, you know exactly what I mean. It’s quite exhausting in itself, but watching your little one being uncomfortable or even straight up suffering is just heartbreaking. I was probably crying as much as Betsy was because she seemed so helpless, and I felt that way, too.
So that night after dinner, Ian and I sat down in the studio for a songwriting session. He played me a beat loop he had created, and I listened, trying to get a feel for it. I felt completely worn out, so my brain didn’t really want to cooperate, and nothing was really coming to me. Then Ian prompted me to just sing what I was feeling: about having a sick baby. Oh man. That did it. The floodgates opened in terms of both tears and lyrics. A four-line stanza emerged immediately, although it didn’t rhyme, so we figured we’d come back and fix that later and just kept going. I had a chorus line going through my head that I had to tweak internally for a few minutes, then I sang it for Ian and his eyes got huge.
“I wish I could be like you, happy when I wake up.
I might feel more worthy of the space that I take up.”
I was really feeling this. My emotions were working overtime as it was, and they poured out into this song. Just for funsies, here’s a pic of my lyric notebook with the original lyrics from that first night (complete with water damage!).
We spent a few sessions working on this, changing some lyrics, making everything rhyme, etc. I came up with a similar chorus for the second verse (although since they were different, I guess they can’t really be called choruses) with the same style of phrasing but different words. We came up with three verses and matched choruses to them. We got everything recorded probably within twenty-four hours, and I was all up in the feels when we did, so it sounded raw and really great. Betsy was still sick and pitiful, but of course still her sweet, happy self. She could be crying and crying with absolutely nothing making her feel better (with me at my wits’ end), and then ten minutes later be grooving and giggling, happy as could be. And that was the one of the basic themes of the song. We gave it the working title “Crybaby.” (When Ian was typing in the title at one point, he accidentally typed Crybabby, which we loved cos Babby is one of our little nicknames for her.) The question at hand is, which one of us is the Crybaby?
So that was the first night or two in the life of our song. In the meantime, while I was doing my everyday normal stuff and taking care of our sick girl, Ian was working his production magic, and also, wait for it—making creepy AI images of me as a baby. And they were hilaaaarious.
Over the next week or so, we tinkered with things and had a few revelations. We chose one of the hilarious Kristen Baby pics for the track’s art, and at my request Ian found an alphabet block font to use for the title. As you’ve probably already figured out, we did decide on Crybaby as the official title. Pondering the lyrics myself, I realized that we had some of them in the “wrong” order; I rearranged them in my mind and suddenly they made perfect sense. I told Ian this, he quickly agreed, and shifted things around in his software to make it so. Meanwhile, we wanted to make a few changes in verb tenses in the lyrics, so we kept attempting to re-record my vocals. I say “attempting” because by this time, Betsy was mostly well again, I was considerably less stressed and concerned, and so the original moment had passed. No matter how many times we recorded more vocals, they just did not sound anywhere near as good as our first takes. The emotions had expired. We eventually just accepted this and Ian put all the finishing touches on the song.
One of the perks of being married to a guy who does these things, is that he pretty quickly made cool stuff to go along with it. Not even a week after we started writing the song, he had a good working demo finished, so we debuted it at our regular Thursday karaoke gig. The following week I was able to actually perform it there, because he had already made two lyric videos, one with vocals and one without. So I got to karaoke my own song! The regular lyric video is on my YouTube channel, and you can watch it here:
As of now, the song has been officially released on almost all major platforms. (One or two of them take a little longer to make tracks available.) It might not sound like a big deal to say this, given that the number of songs I’ve written is in the single digits, but I am so proud of this song I could explode. I’ve never been prouder of anything I’ve written, ever. I put so much of my heart and soul into it, and it means the world to me. I imagine any parent who’s ever had to take care of a sick kid can probably relate, and I hope you will love it. You can use this link to stream or download Crybaby on your platform of choice, so please do! Stream it like crazy! I’ll even put a little button with the link so you don’t miss it. Overkill? Maybe. Just do me a solid and check it out!
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Wonderful song. And your voice is beautiful. I hope your sweet girl is feeling better ❤️