Radical Lullabies

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Christa was out, the house, and I was home alone with this brand-new human who didn’t know what a day was yet.

Charlotte was still in that newborn phase where time feels like someone has shaken the snow globe of your life and just left it swirling. Days, nights, naps, feedings—it all smears together. She was just lying on a playmat, small and warm and impossibly light, her breathing that soft, hitching rhythm newborns have when their bodies are still figuring out how to be here.

I remember looking at the speakers.

It’s such a small decision, but it stands out more clearly in my memory than a lot of bigger moments. Christa was gone for a few hours. The house was mine, in theory. I could’ve put on something gentle and predictable—piano playlists, ambient, the kind of calm music you picture when you imagine parenting done “right.”

Instead, I put on Radical by Every Time I Die.

I didn’t crank it. I’ve made it far enough into adulthood to know volume and baby eardrums matter. But still, I hit play, and that first wave of sound came out—riffs, drums, Keith Buckley’s voice like someone yelling through a storm—and I just sat there with Charlotte in the room, waiting to see what she did.

She did absolutely nothing.

No flinch. No squirming. No tiny hands shooting up in protest. Her breathing didn’t even change. She just stayed draped against me, asleep or close to it, like this was the most normal soundtrack in the world.

There was something almost funny about it. Here’s this fragile, bird-boned little person who still looks vaguely surprised to be outside the womb, and I’m playing her one of the loudest, most chaotic records I know. Part of me wondered if this 

how you accidentally raise a hardcore kid. Another part of me, the quieter one underneath the joke, just felt this weird surge of relief.

Because the truth is, I don’t know who she’s going to be.

I don’t know if she’ll ever scream like Keith Buckley or roar like Julie Christmas (she’s not on the album but definitely deserved a mention here)—though, let’s be honest, aiming your child toward Julie Christmas territory is like saying, “Maybe one day my kid will casually become a minor deity.” I don’t know if she’ll ever love this kind of music at all. She might grow up and tell me this album sounds like a dumpster full of metal chairs being pushed down a hill (she’d be wrong, but that’s not the point).

She might decide she’s a pop girl who wants Disney soundtracks on repeat. She might be drawn to choral music, or jazz, or hyperpop, or a genre that doesn’t exist yet, or silence. She might not care about singing and instead want to dance like mom, or get into sports, or coding, or baking, or something none of us have a name for yet.

Maybe the most realistic outcome is that she cycles through all of it. Screaming along to something heavy when she’s fourteen and furious at the world, then crying to sad pop at nineteen, then discovering some obscure genre at twenty-six that makes everything else I’ve played her sound ancient and embarrassing.

From that little afternoon, though, what I remember isn’t “Ah yes, step one in crafting a future hardcore fan.” It’s that feeling of pressing play on something that means a lot to me and realizing how little control I have over what it will someday mean to her.

That’s the strange thing about sharing music with your kids. The songs that held you together in your twenties, the albums that helped you survive breakups or long drives or bad jobs—you want to pass them on like heirlooms. But they don’t stay the same when they land in someone else’s life. They warp and bend around the listener. If Charlotte loves Radical someday, it won’t be for the same reasons I do. If she hates it, it will still have done its job. It will have given her something to push against.

I think that’s why that memory feels like a small hinge in time.

We talk about big “firsts” for kids—first word, first steps, first day of school. This was a different kind of first. A quiet, domestic, slightly ridiculous moment where I introduced her to a tiny piece of the world that formed me. Not a moral lesson. Not a carefully curated playlist of age-appropriate songs (definitely not this one, bur she couldn’t understand the language anyway) Just an album I love, because I am who I am, and on that day, being who I am meant listening to Every Time I Die with a sleeping newborn.

If I’m honest, there is a selfish thread running through it. A part of me really does hope she ends up loving some of the music I love. Not just hardcore—though, yes, one can only hope—but the whole range of stuff I carry around. The messy, loud, sincere parts of it. The songs that sound like you’re being broken down and rebuilt at the same time. The kind of vocals where someone is screaming so hard you can hear the life they’ve lived behind it.

I want her to know that intensity is allowed. That there’s nothing wrong with having feelings so big they need distortion and drums just to fit into a single track.

But I also want her to know that my hopes are just that—hopes, not blueprints. She doesn’t owe me a particular taste, or a genre, or a future where we stand side by side at some reunion tour yelling the bridge of our favorite song. She doesn’t owe me anything except her own weird, honest trajectory.

Maybe she’ll outgrow my music. Maybe she’ll mock it. Maybe she’ll go through a phase where she thinks I’m impossibly uncool and then another where she realizes I was slightly less uncool than I looked. Maybe music won’t be her thing at all and instead she’ll light up when she’s on a stage, or a field, or alone in a studio doing something with her hands.

I don’t know. That’s the point. That’s what makes the memory so alive.

It’s this tiny snapshot of a time when her whole life was still unwritten, but also already happening. She was already herself, even then—sleepy, trusting, willing to rest while the guitars roared around us. I was already myself too: a person who copes by putting on records, who wants to share the things he loves with the people he loves, who sits in living rooms and thinks way too much.

Now, when I think back on that afternoon, it doesn’t feel like the beginning of her musical education. It feels like a promise I made without realizing it.

Not a promise about what she’d listen to, or who she’d become, but a promise that I’d keep pressing play on life in front of her. That I’d keep showing her the things that move me—songs, stories, ideas, people—and then step back and let her decide what lands.

Maybe she’ll never listen to Radical again in her life. Maybe that one sleepy afternoon is the only time those songs will ever brush up against her existence.

But, I’m still glad I hit play. I’m still glad the first time we really shared a room with music, it was something loud and unruly and full of life. It feels right that one of my earliest memories as her dad is sitting there, holding her, not knowing who she’d be yet, only that I was already wildly excited to find out.