In the months before my daughter Nora was born, I didn’t really think about much else, and I didn’t play much music. I remember, however, sitting with my acoustic guitar tiredly strumming an Fmaj7 chord, letting the fingers move only very little. And the song just came to me, at least the first part: a lullaby to Nora. From what I remember I had the first lines formed, but the rest took more time, coming a couple of days later when I sat down to work on it.
It quickly became clear to me that I did not want many verses. I did not really want to tell a story, just tell my daughter that I love her before she went to sleep. I also wanted to retain the drone-like sound created particularly by the G chord in the verse. I ended up accentuating that in the chorus by resting on a Dm chord (which goes to Dm7) and returning to the G chord. I am still really happy with the result, even if it proved quite difficult to sing to.
The recording itself was limited by time, space, equipment and, to be honest, my lacking skills. I was torn because part of me wanted a clean recording without much fuss, just guitar and song. Another part wanted instrumentation, classical strings and woodwinds, and choir. I also had the idea of looping the song for hours, to allow Nora to fall asleep. In the end I found a middle-ground that I still cannot quite find out whether I am happy with. But that’s the nature of home-recording with a full-time job and a baby…