KINSHIP SNACKS: How to Burst Into Song

Plus: Yo-Yo Ma can play whale songs on the cello; an uncling ceremony; a poem in which you make yourself proud; cute kid sings while furious.

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How to Burst Into Song

I’m a prolific burster-into-song, but I have a friend who’s even more so. He’s always been a super creative person, always doing projects, and his partner and kids are the same. Whenever I visit, they’re always in the midst of a bunch of different crafts and creations, and they’re always singing. Sometimes they sing kids’ songs from a favorite children’s album, but often they just make stuff up. Someone starts riffing some line of song, another person joins in with their own made-up contribution, and then everyone’s just working on cutting out their puppets or melting their chocolate or whatever, and singing. There is no expectation that anybody be actually good at singing – good is irrelevant. Nobody is performing for anyone. Any song is just an impromptu collaboration that arises, lasts as long as it lasts, and ends whenever it ends.

One song that’s permanently wired into my memory was woven around a simple line thought up by a 2 year old: “Chicken BAWK! Chicken BAWK! Chicken BAWK BAWK BAWK!” Our song had little to offer the discerning listener but everything to offer our intergenerational crew of friends. For a few minutes, we made something silly and lovely together; the song didn’t persist but the “we” sure did.

I was lucky to be raised in a household where bursting into song was the norm. Tapes and records of kids’ music were often playing in our home, everyone singing along as we went about our work and play. Both my mom and my grandmother (her mother) were early childhood educators, so they had big repertoires of children’s songs to hand. My grandmother taught us songs from her childhood in the 1930s – silly onomatopoeic songs like Mairzy Dotes or Three Little Fishes. She also bought us old musicals on VHS for every birthday and Christmas, so we knew all the songs not just from kids’ classics like Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but also from musicals for adults like Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, and the weird and wonderful anti-racist leprechaun story, Finian’s Rainbow.¹

Being someone who frequently bursts into song has been a huge resource in my life. Most often when I sing, it’s an expression of good cheer and of camaraderie (if anyone joins me), but I’ve also sung as a means of self-care in times of distress. Singing sad songs has helped me through hard breakups, and through the grief of losing loved ones. Scientists have found that singing helps our bodies process emotion by forcing us to breathe more deeply, feel our feelings, and release stress – and this certainly matches my lived experience.

In hard times, singing has always been a strategy for human survival. Here’s a health care worker singing “Amazing Grace” for her colleagues at the height of the COVID pandemic. Look how exhausted they all look.

Imagine being there in that room with them, or even being a patient down the hall hearing this song. How buoying it must have been, if only for a minute, to hear this woman singing. What a refuge, and how beautifully shared.

Bursting into song helped my co-housing community get through lockdown, for sure. We had impromptu singalongs at our community dinners all the time. Kid faves “Down By the Bay” and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” were in heavy rotation, such that they now immediately invoke lockdown whenever we hear them. One day, maybe the kids who belted out those songs during community dinners will share them with the kids in their own lives, and tell the story of the lockdown they experienced when they were very young.

Singing is a joyful means to pass on our history to the kids we love. If music was part of your childhood, then teaching those songs to kids can be a fun and meaningful way to bring the past into the present. But if music wasn’t a part of your childhood, you sure do have a wonderful opportunity now. By getting comfortable with bursting into song, and by modeling this habit for the kids in your life, you could restore a human birthright that was temporarily lost from your line. In a practical, accessible, everyday way, you could teach the kids you love to cultivate creativity, community, presence, resilience, and joy.

It’s never too late to become a burster-into-song. You don’t have to be good at singing; you don’t even have to be able to carry a tune. You don’t need to know all the words, or sing the whole song, or get anything whatsoever right. You needn’t ever perform anything for anyone. All you need is a little bit of courage and some willingness to be silly. A friend of mine put it this way:

Bursting into song is an expression of silliness, and it is 100% about entertaining ourselves. Kids need to be taught how to enjoy their lives, and bursting into song is a really awesome way to enjoy your life. Or rather, what they need is to not be forced to unlearn enjoying their lives.

If you want to find out how to teach kids to enjoy their lives by bursting regularly into song, and get some advice on choosing songs to burst into, upgrade to a paid subscription now! It’s $5 per month or $50 for the year.