Custom songs by occasion
A custom song for mum, made from what you actually remember
Mother's Day without the same bunch of carnations and the same card verse. From $24.99, ten minutes to brief.
Mums are difficult to buy for because they have spent thirty years saying they do not want anything, and mostly meaning it. So the shelf offers you a mug with a slogan, a candle that smells of nothing in particular, and flowers that will be in the bin by the following Sunday.
A song goes the other way. It uses her name, the thing she says when she answers the phone, the meal she made every Tuesday for a decade without ever being thanked for it. You write down what you remember in plain sentences, we turn it into original lyrics and record it with a real singer and a real arrangement. She plays it in the kitchen, on her own, about four times.
What to put in a Mother's Day brief
Skip the adjectives. Nobody has ever been moved by the word caring. Give us the objects, the routines and the specific things she did that you only understood later.
What her house sounds and smells like
Radio 2 on in the background at a volume nobody asked for. The gravy. The back door that has never once shut properly. This is the scene the first verse gets built in.
The rule she enforced
No shoes past the mat. Coat on before you even mention leaving. Ring me when you get there, and she means it, and you are forty one.
Something she gave up without mentioning it
The second job, the shifts nobody saw, the holiday she said she did not fancy. If you have worked out as an adult what that cost her, put it in. It is usually the bridge.
How she is with you now
The daily voice notes, the grandchildren, the way she still cuts your hair verbally over the phone. It stops the song being only about the past.
Which genre tends to work
Piano ballad
Nothing between the words and her. The one to choose if you want her to have to sit down.
Acoustic folk
Gentle and homemade sounding, which suits a mum who finds a fuss embarrassing.
Gospel
For a mother whose whole life had a church in it. Big voices, and a chorus the family can sing over her.
Soul
Warm, grown up and celebratory. Good when the day is a lunch with everyone round the table rather than a quiet moment.
Giving it in person or sending it
In person is stronger but harder to control. Put it on over lunch and expect her to talk through the first verse out of nervousness, go quiet in the second, and ask you to play it again from the start.
Sending it works if she lives an hour up the road and you cannot get there. The song arrives on its own page with the lyric sheet, so you can text her the link and let her read along while it plays. Several people send the link at 8am and then ring at nine, which is about right.
When siblings go in together
The best Mother's Day briefs are assembled in a group chat. One of you asks for a memory each, and within ten minutes you have four completely different versions of the same holiday and one detail nobody else remembered. Paste the lot in. More is fine, and contradictions are useful.
Tell us it is from all of you and the lyric is written in the plural, with room to name each of you. It also splits the cost of a gift that lands harder than four separate bunches of flowers.
When to order for Mother's Day
Order it two or three days before. Mother's Day is the one occasion where everyone reaches for a gift at the same time, and giving yourself a couple of days means you can play it once, decide the second verse should have mentioned the dog, and ask us to run it again.
If it is already Sunday morning and the restaurant is booked for one, Express delivery takes an hour and the form takes about ten minutes. That is comfortably enough time.
Questions
What if my mum is not a music person?
It matters less than you think, because she is not judging it as music. She is listening to her own life come back at her in someone else's voice. If she has a genre she genuinely dislikes, pick round it: acoustic folk and piano ballad are safe with almost everyone.
Can I write a song for a mum who has died?
Yes, and we get these often around Mother's Day. Write it in the past tense if that feels right, or address her directly, whichever way you actually think about her. Tell us in the brief and the lyric is handled with that in mind rather than as a celebration.
Can it be from the grandchildren?
It can. Tell us who is singing it and use their words where you can, because a five year old's description of her kitchen is better writing than anything an adult will produce.
What if I get a detail wrong?
Tell us and we run it again at no cost. Wrong name, wrong town, a memory that belongs to your aunt. It is fixed and re-recorded.
Ready when you are
About ten minutes of questions. A finished song in as little as an hour, from $24.99, yours to keep forever.
Start their song