Once I knew we were going to have a baby, I knew the first place we’d start would be Heartbeat Love Songs. For reasons previously discussed, but quite literally applied to this situation, replicating the heartbeat of the womb environment just seemed like a no brainer. 

I should probably have consulted my original post for music ideas, but even without doing so my mind went first to Alabama and George Strait. I thought maybe in the future we’d branch out with “radio” but in the first instance we went with pre-created playlists on Spotify so we’d just get the one specific artist. My initial use case was calming (more on that in a later post) and songs by those artists have been pretty successful in that regard. Just to mention a few examples:

Strait: Carrying Your Love With Me; Give It Away; Love Without End, Amen; Ocean Front Property; All My Ex’s Live In Texas; I Got A Car; Fool Hearted Memory; Amarillo By Morning; The Seashores of Old Mexico; She Let Herself Go

Alabama: Angels Among Us; Down Home; Take Me Down; High Cotton; Born Country; Hometown Honeymoon; Love In The First Degree; Close Enough To Perfect; God Must Have Spent A Little More Time On You; My Home’s In Alabama

Probably not all of those fall into the strict realm of Heartbeat Love Songs – some are really Heartbeat Love Song-adjacent, but that’s close enough to perfect for these purposes.

Two other artists to mention here. The first is Randy Travis – a tremendous amount of Heartbeat Love Song gold in his catalog. The other, sort of as a segue to a future post on use cases, is Jimmy Buffett. We discovered Jimmy after a couple difficult bath experiences. I’m not for sure if this is what generated the idea, but in retrospect JB seems like perfect baby music, almost like a hybrid of Alabama and Raffi. Maybe this is a subset of the calming function or maybe it’s a separate category all together – I haven’t quite made up my mind – but the use case here was really calming by way of distraction. For this purpose, the fun instruments in Jimmy Buffett songs, irreverent lyrics, sing/humability and island and/or children’s vibe make a lot of Jimmy songs a good fit for the distraction category.