On October 16, 2025, Stephen Spencer despatched his mom a fifty-three-second video that he had made. It was her birthday. Within the video, Spencer, a composer, performs keyboard and guitar and sings in a beautiful tenor that reaches effortlessly to falsetto. The track relays, phrase for phrase, a narrative by his three-year-old daughter a few lady who gained’t cease wiggling.
After sending the video to his mom, Spencer posted it on Instagram, to his thirty-six followers. “Most of them have been my mother’s associates,” he mentioned.
Immediately, about 4 months and fifteen movies later, Spencer has roughly 300 thousand followers. In that point, greater than thirty million folks have streamed his movies, the lyrics of that are written by his daughter. Songs akin to “Purple bear princess (she was a grown up canine),” “Apple The Stoola (he was an apple man),” and “I’m an essential mermaid.”
“Nobody is extra shocked than I’m,” Spencer mentioned in his condominium, in Queens, on a wet day. He sat at his dining-room desk, together with his spouse, Angela, a speech-language pathologist in New York Metropolis public faculties. She is pregnant with their second little one. They met at McGill College, the place she was finding out voice and he was finding out composition.
“I’m within the musicality of the world,” he mentioned.
“He’s all the time making up songs from sounds,” Angela added. “A cellphone beeping, a bus going by.”
Even when his daughter was first born, he mentioned, “I used to be all the time treating her babblings as music.” (He prefers to not disclose her title.)
Spencer is thirty-five and barrel-chested, with three-day scruff on his smiling face. He doesn’t, at a look, look like a person to sing in falsetto. After grad faculty at McGill, he obtained a Ph.D. in music concept and composition from the Metropolis College of New York. His dissertation was titled “A Multilevel Strategy to the Evaluation and Visualization of Timbral Brightness in Publish-Tonal Music.” (Clearly.) He’s now a lecturer at Hunter School.
“It’s known as a hamster wheel for a motive.”
Cartoon by Michael Maslin
“I’ve to credit score Angela,” he mentioned, “for bringing the tales out of our daughter, encouraging her improvement.”
After a modest demurral, Angela left to run errands. Spencer took out his cellphone and performed a recording of his daughter telling the wiggling story. He grinned, listening to the little mouse voice, noting its curious cadence. “The method is a bit fragile,” he mentioned. “Largely, it’s about listening with out judgment, with out interrupting, letting her go off and discover the phrases.” He mentioned it takes him a few week to compose a track. He writes on the piano after which provides guitar. He makes use of a software program program to incorporate drums, backing vocals, bass, echoes. He information his voice final. “It’s simply type of humorous to me that she’s seemingly forgotten what she mentioned nearly instantly,” he defined. “And I’m fastidiously engaged on these songs for days.”
He had began composing a brand new track that day. The story concerned “a tall, tall, tall, tall man who drived a rainbow automobile.” He sat on the piano, subsequent to a small toy range. His electrical guitar—an Epiphone ES-335, the reasonably priced various to a Gibson ES-335, he mentioned—sits across the nook, beside a plastic potty.
