When the pandemic hit, Jeremy’s work as a full-time musician came to a sudden stop. Like many performers, his gigs disappeared overnight. While he continued to do remote recording work from the studio in our attic—something he regularly does for musicians across Canada—there was a moment of collective uncertainty. People weren’t ready to move forward with projects. So, Jeremy turned inward, and began creating something tender, personal, and lasting: a lullaby album.

When Jeremy and I met, my kids were 6 and 10. Since the day my oldest was born, I’d sung to them every night—not traditional lullabies, necessarily, but songs I loved: Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, a few jazz standards. I thought of it as a kind of gentle music education, and also an expression of our family values—music as comfort, music as love.

By the time Jeremy first came to visit us from Manitoba, my oldest had outgrown bedtime songs, but I was still singing to my youngest every night. Jeremy—being Jeremy—immediately joined in. He played his Roland FR-8X digital accordion, programmed with a whole “lullaby bank” of lush, dreamy orchestral sounds…but turned way down for sleepytime, of course. Bedtime suddenly got very fancy.

It was also the first time Jeremy heard me sing. As you might know, Jeremy is blind, so he doesn’t know what I look like—but he often says one of the things that first drew him to me was my voice. I think that’s a beautiful way to be seen.

As the nightly lullabies continued, Jeremy started dreaming up a full album of these songs, arranged in cinematic detail. Each night, our daughter picked three favorites, and we performed them live in her room. And each day, Jeremy worked on transforming those songs into recordings—composing, orchestrating, and layering tracks.

He recorded all 17 tracks from scratch, playing every instrument himself except the strings. For those, he composed original arrangements and sent them to me as MIDI piano mockups. I’d import them into MuseScore, clean them up, and then record violin, viola, and cello parts—even on my poorly set-up cello, which, thankfully, has since been made glorious by Dennis Alexander. Cello’s my least fluent instrument, but Jeremy somehow coaxed out solid takes every time.

The result was our album, Songs About Rainbows—a quiet pandemic project turned family treasure. It’s a musical time capsule that our kids can return to someday, maybe even sing to their own children. My mother listens to it on her Alexa almost every day. It really is the sweetest thing.

As a side note (and maybe the seed for another post): my mom is a singer and bassist who performed with my dad and brother in a band called Mountain Dew for over 30 years. They played dances, weddings, bar gigs—multiple shows every weekend. Musical family members abound, and I feel lucky every day that music has always been at the heart of our home.

🎧 Listen to the full album on your favorite platform:
🌈 https://linktr.ee/songsaboutrainbows