Top 50 Baby Music Albums
Humans are hardwired to love music. It holds a place in us that almost nothing else can reach. As anyone who has seen a grin of delight spread across a listening baby's face knows, there's just something simple and profound about our relationship with sound. And while it's true that the littlest babies don't much care what's playing, as time goes on, they start to listen, move, and sing along (suddenly making half our old music collection off limits for the next 16 years). Luckily we live in a fertile time for kids' music, with rereleases of classic recordings, scores of talented newcomers making charming records, and seemingly every third rocker from the '90s inspired to settle down and create great children's music of their own. Read More ↓
For Babble's first Top 50 Baby Music Albums, we chose recordings that could grow up with babies rather than becoming obsolete as soon as the babies are old enough to crawl away from the stereo. This also meant we stretched the definition of "baby" into the toddler years. Since you may be hearing some of these songs fifty, a hundred, a thousand times, we chose with parental sanity in mind and included a category for the best albums for adults that also work for babies. With music so intimately wrapped up with our emotional lives, we're sure to have made choices you'll disagree with, so feel free to nominate any gems we missed. -Colin Murphy
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Lullaby Renditions of Bob Marley | Rockabye Baby!
The formula is simple: Take the favorite songs of popular rock acts (the heavier the better), slow them way down and mellow them way out through gentle instruments like vibraphones and glockenspiels, then slap them in a sleeve that has teddy bears acting out scenes from the original bands’ famous album covers. Repeat until you’ve hit the entire classic rock canon. Depending on your point of view, the results are either a wonderful way to give your baby an early appreciation of good music, or a musical purgatory that forces you to endlessly contemplate how in the world you ended up responsible for this tiny helpless human, all that once was, all that never will be.
That said, the Rockabye Baby albums are nothing if not soothing, and if you’re going to have to listen to glockenspiels anyway while easing your dear one into dreamland, they might as well be chiming out something you like. With some three dozen albums to choose from, pretty much the entire post-’60s period of popular, guitar-based rock is represented, plus foundational figures like Elvis and The Beatles and not-strictly-rock acts like Bob Marley, Bjork, and Kanye West. Also Coldplay.
Some bands respond better to the Rockabye treatment than others; generally the more happening in the originals in terms of harmony or instrumental interplay, the better it translates. Hopefully nobody will kick too hard if we suggest, for instance, that AC/DC or the Ramones were not brimming with musical complexity, and that lullaby renditions of their work might suffer as a result. Artists with larger ensembles or more operatic bents, like Bob Marley, Queen, and Radiohead, give Rockabye’s evil alchemists more material to work their magic on. But it is what it is. Try the bands you like, get the baby to sleep, marvel at how you got here.
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