Songs for baby’s first birthday video

For Oliver’s first birthday, I put together a 15-minute video. It’s too long for YouTube, plus I used a lot of songs that I wouldn’t be allowed to post. The video features “B-roll” footage and photos from March 6, 2008, to March 5, 2009. Coming up with great photos and video was easy. Coming up with good songs to include? Very difficult.

I had to do a ton of research to find just the perfect songs. While I can’t post the video here (but would be happy to show it to people in private), I’ll post the songs that I used so as to hopefully help out some other ambitious parent.

Here’s the list:
1.) “Memo to My Son” by Randy Newman. You know this guy. He’s the voice for a lot of Disney tracks (“You Got a Friend in Me,” for example). This song is great, with lines like, “I know you don’t think much of me, But someday you’ll understand, Wait’ll you learn how to talk baby, I’ll show you how smart I am.” Plus, it starts with a nice, banging piano, which was perfect for the first clip I used.

2.) “My Darling” by Wilco. One of my favorite bands, one of the sweetest songs. I believe this Beatles-esque tune was written Jeff Tweedy’s son. Between the music (soft piano, melodic tune), lyrics (lines like “Because we made you, My darlin, With love in each of our hearts, We were a family, My darlin’ right from the start”) and the fact that this is an awesome band made this song an easy choice.

3.) “Little Sack of Sugar” by Woodie Guthrie. For this segment of my video, I inserted some goofy pictures for laughs. This was a great selection. It’s a cute, fun little song by an American legend. What a classic sound.

4.) “Godspeed (Sweet Dreams)” by the Dixie Chicks. This was a tough song for me to include, because I’m not a country music fan by any means. However, it’s a pleasant little tune with lyrics that matched up well with the images I inserted of our boy sleeping in various places (in his cradle, in his crib, on a shoulder, on my chest, etc.). Plus it fit the hole vacated by the deletion of a Loudin Wainwright III (Rufus’ dad, for my younger readers) song that my wife didn’t care for.

5.) “Who’s My Pretty Baby” by Elizabeth Mitchell. When Oliver cries in the car or just plain-old needs to be settled down, we pop in a CD (or mp3) by his favorite musician, Elizabeth Mitchell. We’ve listened to tons of kiddie music, and she’s more than tolerable. I find myself humming her tunes all the time. This is an update of a song that I believe was either first sung by or made popular by Woodie Guthrie. Peppy and upbeat and just a lot of fun.

6.) “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” by John Lennon. Written about Lennon’s son, this is a real classic that fit in nicely with the other songs I selected. And who can forget the chorus of “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful … beautiful boy?”

7.) “My Boy” by Neil Young. I only had time for about the first 30 seconds of this track, but it worked out great. You see, this song was written about Young’s child when the boy was a little older (the song mentions school being out). But the first two sections are ambiguous enough to work. Here’s a sample line: “Why are you growin’ up so fast, my boy? Oh, you’d better take your time.”

Anyway, I hope this helps somebody out there in cyberspace. I could have used a resource like this when putting our son’s video together. I spent hours and hours listening to songs and dissecting lyrics.

Let me know what you think. Do you like my selections? Any other songs that you can think of that would have been nice for this project?

37 thoughts on “Songs for baby’s first birthday video”

Great selections. Looks like you went the sentimental route. I made a 1st year video for each of my sons (now they are 5 and 3) recapping their photos of their first year. But I decided to go more of a fun route, and used all silly/funny pictures of them in it. I used the “Can’t wait to be King” song from the Lion King. With boys, it works out great, and can be applied to other years too if you want to do it on other birthdays. But good choices with your route too, I am sure it turned out very good as well

Thanks for the comment, Drew. I did get pretty senimental, you could say, in Oliver’s video. If I go through the process again for a future birthday, I could definitely see myself going the fun route. Will have to check out the song you mentioned – been years since I’ve seen “The Lion King.” I’m sure it’s great.

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