Thursday night I woke up from a dead sleep to hear a voice in the darkness softly singing The Ants Go Marching In. It was terrifying.

My brain took a few seconds to process that this was actually a tender moment of my wife, Jenny, rocking our newborn baby to sleep. A very thin line separates the sounds of a soothing lullaby and the likely signature of a deranged serial killer.

This could be because I watched all of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies at least a dozen times before I turned ten.

When locking the doors at night, I still compulsively sing “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you. Three, four, better lock the door,” which irritates Jenny to no end.

Music has taken a significant role in my life lately. Participating in school musicals is the most on-point preparation I’ve had for parenting. They prepared me for the clunky emotional transitions that have me spontaneously bursting into song whenever it seems like the baby might cry.

I always found it peculiar when townspeople in musicals started bouncing up and down to ramp up a song from the leading man, but then I had a baby and started immediately bouncing her on my knee at the slightest sign of a furrowed brow. Oh, we’ve got trouble my friend, right here in infant city.

Music eases the transition points in my daughter’s day. And since talking with a six-week-old gets me nowhere, I’ve taken to singing to her on a fairly constant basis. I call it Daddy Karaoke.

The songs come from a playlist scraped together from my fondest childhood memories and from Amazon’s Rockabye Baby and Toddler Time stations.

It pains me not to have the soothing sounds of Rosenshontz or the bona fide street cred of Rockapella on the list, but not enough to pay the monthly upcharge for Amazon Unlimited.

The list skews modern with KIDZ BOP versions of Taylor Swift and Bruno Mars as well as the latest in Disney and Pixar songs.

I used to listen mostly to podcasts, but the baby doesn’t react as positively to the rhythms and beats of the NPR Politics podcast, Ron Elving’s sexy baritone notwithstanding.

Most of the songs on her playlist stand on their own, while others prompt discussions about the singers’ historical significance.

For example, every playing of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s song from Moana is followed by an in-depth discussion of his legendary I Quit Match against Mick Foley from the 1999 Royal Rumble.

Greatest hits range span a long arc of time from classics like the Hokey Pokey to Baby Shark, which has the distinction of being the first YouTube video to jump itself.

I’ve also got some Beatles songs mixed in. With lyrics like ob-la-di ob-la-da, and we all live in a yellow submarine they’ve really always been a children’s band.

Daddy Karaoke has awakened the songwriter-poet inside of me.

My original creations include a big-band number, ‘Swaddle-you-do When It’s Time for Bed,’ an 80’s-style rap song titled ‘I’ll Be Your Butt Paste Hookup (oh yeah),” and, of course, the Burp Cloth Polka.

Baby’s cries are my muse as I’ll often start singing about anything in front of me to try and quickly cheer her up.

The diaper changing table is my most inspired location, probably because it is the first stop between sleepy town and wakesville, which is how I now annoying differentiate between sleep and consciousness.

Some songs are worked into my routine tasks. Readers who have had the pleasure of checking a baby’s diaper know that many popular brands come with a wetness indicator which changes from yellow to blue, making looking under a baby’s pants the worst imaginable game of Let’s Make a Deal.

My wet diaper song is based on Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World and goes:

“I see blue. Blue, blue, blue. Blue, blue, blue. Blue, blue, blue. And I think to myself – that’s a whole lot of blue.”

This may not be the sort of songwriting that leads to a Grammy, but it certainly gets to the point, which if you missed it, is that I see blue.

I readily admit that I may be delusional in thinking that parenting has greatly increased my singing talent.

I’m pretty quick to concede points of delusion lately, which inspired the latest song in my growing catalog. I wrote it last Tuesday – or Thursday – or maybe it was earlier today, I’m not sure.

The song is titled: I Love You Every Single Day, But They All Blur Together.

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