When my brother and I were little we had a tape of Chinese children’s songs – that is, American children’s songs, sung in Chinese – and since we don’t actually speak Chinese it drove my parents absolutely crazy! Keeping that in mind I’ve been looking for some (non-obnoxious) baby music.
First up I found Rockabye Baby which offers lullaby renditions of rock songs.
The covers of the CD’s are awesome renditions of the originals with cartoon bears replacing the original images (seriously, how cute are these?!)
Journey, Guns N’ Roses, Aerosmith & Weezer
Unfortunately, most of the songs only feature one instrument (a xylophone) and some have a random cricket in them (which I think is super distracting). Some are nearly indiscernible which is too bad because I really really wanted to like these.
My advice? Listen to the previews and only buy the songs that actually work because not all of them do, definitely think money would be wasted on buying any entire CD.
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Next up I found something called “Full Metal Diaper“.
While the cover isn’t nearly as cute there are definitely better renditions of songs and it includes “Rock You Like a Hurricane” so I adomatically love it. Unfortunately, there’s only one disk so if you don’t like any of the songs there’s not much to choose from.
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The problem with the “Lullabye” versions is they’re all very stripped down and tinny sounding rather than just being softer or acoustic versions of the songs. Vitamin String Quartet provides string versions of rock and pop songs and might also be a good alternative to blasting baby’s eardrums.
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Lastly, my husband recently found this article which states that Phil Collen & Vivian Campbell will be performing on an album called “Dreamin with Def Leppard” featuring 12 of their songs.
It’s suppose to have full production so it should be a major step up from the xylophones. It’s not due out till June but you can pre-order here. Fingers crossed that this one lives up to expectations.
1 Comment
Jon
February 22, 2015 at 4:22 pm100% agreed! I saw the Rockabye Baby series of CDs while setting up a registry at Buy Buy Baby and fell in love with the idea. I’m glad I decided to give them a listen on the Internet before buying though. Very disappointing – they are all xylophone and percussion instruments – they sound like a music box, not like a lullaby at all! I was expecting something more like keyboards and strings – something lower in the register, not all those high pitched, piercing tones. Maybe I will try a few with the baby to see what he thinks, but they do not sound very soothing to me at all – they are abrasive and harsh. If you or anyone else comes up with true lullaby versions of popular songs, please leave a comment to share with the rest of us!