How it all began...

A infant and 365 days of music!

It all began with a song… Well actually it began with a crying baby. Ella, our now (almost) six month old was having a moment. That moment basically was her crying, overly tired, and simply aggravated with everything. In the background my computer was playing iTunes, and was set to mix. Just when I was about to pick her up and move her upstairs to her crib a new song came on the computer. All of a sudden Ella became completely composed. She turned her head towards the computer, and the music. For the next 3 minutes she just looked at the computer. I honestly thought she must have just noticed the music playing, but as soon as the next song came on she started to stir and move around. So, I thought to myself, let’s see what happens if I were to play the same song again. Once again, Ella was this quiet, composed baby looking at the computer. It was the weirdest thing. The song is “Rebel Side of Heaven”, a little obscure song by a musician named Langhorne Slim. Over the course of the next few days I experimented with Ella when she was having other “moments” by seeing if the same song would elicit the same reaction. In the car, at night when she was having a terrible fit, you name it we tried it. My wife Christine ended up putting it on her iPhone and playing it. We had it queued up with YouTube on the iPad. Every single time it had this magical reaction. It seemed to just calm her down.

We thought to ourselves, well if Langhorne (who we now call Ella’s boyfriend) can have this reaction, what other songs are out there that also get the same response. It honestly was a game of “how about this one, or this one, or this one…” More often than not the song would grab Ella’s attention for a few seconds, and then she would move on. But, a few stuck. One interestingly enough was Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”. She particularly loves the stripped down version that we found on YouTube of the group at Abbey Road studios (just pull up Crazy hq and you will find it).

This leads us to the Ella Music Project. For the next year we plan on experimenting with a song a day to see what music Ella is in to; sort of a mash up of Ella meets American Idol. Clearly Langhorne is at the top of the mountain. That song will pull her back from the brink of insanity (i.e. face the color of a tomato, real tears flowing, and screams loud enough that they can be heard a block away…). So, that is one end of the spectrum. Our goal is to not only find the ones she loves, but the ones she clearly hates too. The trick is, what we found from prior experimentation is that sometimes she likes the group (or singer), but is not crazy about the song. Which leads to the rule – if it seems she might like the group, we can experiment with a few other songs by that group on the same day to completely rule out our first thought that she might like the group. We will give this at least three songs, but no more than 5 rule. Other than that, we will make the rest of the rules up as we go along.