Colm O'Regan: ‘I love you twenty-sixty times’ — lyrics by a three-year-old that became a viral hit
The end product is, of course, all levels of doteyness, but the father is a proper musician who treats the child’s words with as much seriousness as if he’d been handed something scribbled by Joni Mitchell or Paddy McAloon.
We all have our little tricks to get us through the heavy moments. We should probably face down our problems. But there’s no harm in taking a little break.
My weekly self-care holidays are watching Troy Parrott’s latest goals for AZ Alkmaar, David McGoldrick turning back time by making eejits out of whoever Barnsley are playing, and mini surreal pop masterpieces created by music lecturer Stephen Spencer, with the lyrics taken from stories made up by his toddler daughter.
If you haven’t heard of Funchy the Snow-woman, an Important Mermaid, a Christmas Cat, or a purple mom unicorn, then I urge you to Google “toddler dad viral music”. Your reward is about 10 tiny classics with lyrics that you will not be able to get out of your head.
I remember hearing the first line of the first one late last year: “There was a little woman who liked wigglin’ so MUCH.” Straight away, I was hooked.
There followed songs about a purple bear dog who couldn’t talk, the happy mouse who woke up and said he needed some ‘breaktist’, Rinse Tinse the Daddy ghost, Pasgetti the dinosaur who wasn’t allowed to go to Big Kid School because he was a dinosaur. And, of course, the smash hit about Apple the Stoola, an apple man who has lost his mother, and when he finds her, he tells her he loves her “twenty sixty times”.
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The end product is, of course, all levels of doteyness, but the father is a proper musician who treats the child’s words with as much seriousness as if he’d been handed something scribbled by Joni Mitchell or Paddy McAloon.
We never meet the lyricist. We likely never will. Yet, like the baby son of the Tayto founder who coined the word Tayto because he couldn’t say potato, or whichever baby first said “gugs” for eggs, she has created words that millions of adults will know forever.
While the stories are surreal, the structure is classic — set up, challenge, change, consequence. But the real bonus is from the sheer rich nonsense of the names. And I’m not dissing nonsense. It’s a real skill.
They’re a memory of being a child when you made up nonsense words and nonsense characters based on a misheard song lyric or a thing someone said once to you in a field or a Polish anti-communist dissident or a Lebanese civil war militia leader or former Belgian footballer Frankie Van Der Elst.
She uses verbs like goed, taked, buyed, flied and telled. It’s a reminder that whatever sense you might make of this little girl’s stories, nothing makes as little sense as the English language and its silly past tenses.
At the time of writing, a few have been released on streaming services. After the burst of fame, they’re still making new music, and the most recent is about a really ‘tall, tall, tall, tall, little man’. And there’s no drop-off in quality.
At some point, she will stop making up stories like this that are completely self-unaware. The beautiful nonsense phase is brief. But that’s absolutely fine. had two seasons, had three. had only six episodes. Sometimes greatness is fleeting.
There will no doubt be some AI-generated abomination, copy-cat rubbish, but we’ll know and ignore it. And play the originals, for the 20-60th time.
