Baby’s first New Age music
When your children are very young, you want them to sleep so that you too can sleep. Then they get a bit older, and you want them to sleep so that you can stay up. But when my two sons were 5 and 6 — reliable sleepers once they nodded off, though the trip there could be loooong — my wife and I reverted to that earlier state. Suddenly, thanks to an album we’d discovered about “four little people” named Eeny, Meeny, Miney and Mo, we’d be arguing over who got to put the boys to bed one minute, then promptly falling asleep on their bedroom floor the next.
The album is one in a series of “Guided Meditations for Children” collections by Michelle Roberton-Jones, about whom I knew nothing before a streaming service offered up her work in response to a search for some of those terms. Today, half a decade later, I still don’t know much about Roberton-Jones, beyond the fact that she’s based in the U.K., as her website says, and “received an Angel visitation” (!) in December 2000 “while severely ill in hospital.” Apparently that event inspired her to make these records, which set her recitations of stories about those four tiny creatures — their tea parties and their midnight dances and their magic paintbrushes — against tinkly slow-motion synthscapes that feel like baby’s first New Age music.
Does this sound awful? I’d have thought so had I been told about it. Yet with its gentle textures and almost imperceptible chord changes, Roberton-Jones’ stuff is amazingly soothing; her nanny-ish accent works to put you at such ease that you can feel your body relaxing with every firm but sympathetic syllable. There’s a distinct unhurriedness to “Guided Meditations for Children” that made my wife and I each want to be the one to savor that unwinding experience (as opposed to an episode of “House of Cards”) after another busy day.
As a critic, I’m usually trying to listen as actively as I can — to figure out what’s going on in a song and why I’m responding to it as I am. Yet success for Roberton-Jones is to have her listener stop paying attention, at least as we commonly understand that act. Indeed, who knows what my or my sons’ brains were doing after we powered down, but before Eeny and Co. finished their adventures? — Mikael Wood