Broadway Records' The Rainbow Lullaby, released October 28, is conceived by Ryan Bauer-Walsh and featuring songs from such LGBTQ+ writers as Bauer-Walsh, March Shaiman, Dionne McClain-Freeney, Debra Barsha, and more. Performing the songs are more than 30 LGBTQ+ Broadway favorites, including Matt Doyle, Jenn Collela, Jay Armstrong Johnson, Chillina Kennedy, Caitlin Kinnunen, Michael Longoria, Kyle Dean Massey, Lauren Patten, Jelani Remy, Chris and Clay Rice-Thomson, Marissa Rosen, and Marty Thomas.
Proceeds from the album, which is billed as the world's first album of LGBTQ+ lullabies, supports the Ali Forney Center and its efforts to protect and support homeless LGBTQ+ youth.
Find out the inspirations and stories behind this groundbreaking new album's 25 tracks with the songs' writers in this exclusive track-by-track breakdown:
1. "The Rainbow Lullaby"
Lyrics and Music: Ryan Bauer-Walsh
Vocals: Madge Dietrich
Violin: Aryan Nocdemo
Cello: Joe Zeitlin
"The Rainbow Lullaby" was written in the basement bedroom of my childhood home in Minnesota shortly after my mother passed away. I was writing every night in my bed because I couldn’t fall asleep. I was in the deepest of my grief, and I felt like I was living between worlds. I felt grounded when I wrote. I had created a few other songs already—a few lullabies I’d written a decade ago—but I wrote a lot just before bed, which consisted of me singing tunes to the camera on my smart phone or rewriting lyrics to old love songs I had written. But I had been brainstorming names for the album with Fred Sauter earlier in the day. The New American Songbook of LGBTQIA+ Lullabies seemed a bit long, but The Rainbow Lullaby felt like a more artful version that still encapsulated all of that. With the album name picked out, I was inspired to write a song that could be a thesis statement for the entire album, something lush and beautiful that felt like a folk song that had been around for generations. Sometimes for scan I’ll write a melody while I mumble words and stories. I had "The Ash Grove" stuck in my head while I was writing, but the original plan was to see if anyone wanted to compose music for the lyrics, so I focused on those. The song is about traversing the darkness on a path towards light, but the only way there is to all go together. After I painted the artwork for the album cover, I knew I needed the title song to have the same feeling as the painting, its rolling hills with a rainbow through the night, crossing a great valley on its journey towards dawn. Once I felt the tune, I wrote it in about 20 minutes on my little keyboard in my new apartment in Hamilton Heights. Yasuhiko Fukuoka is arranging and orchestrating it, and I told him “it needs to feel like the painting!” He immediately understood, and the song is this lush, rolling stretch of song that reaches towards dawn. The incredible Madge Dietrich performs the song. I had stumbled across her work online and was obsessed with her ability to shine hope into the lyrics of all the music she sang. I'm so grateful she contributed her talents to this album!
-Ryan Bauer-Walsh
2. "Family Means"
Lyrics and Music: Paul Loesel
Vocals: Kyle Dean Massey, Taylor Frey, Jenn Colella, Chilina Kennedy
Cello: Bobbie L Crow III
I’ve been accused before of writing with "too many notes." Well, when I received the call from Ryan to contribute a lullaby, I figured this was the perfect time for restraint, for simplicity, and for a very hummable tune. What is more beautiful than parents and their child singing a nighttime lullaby together in quiet and loving simplicity? Possibly more importantly, I wanted the lyrics to express that any queer family is as loving and "normal" as any non-queer family. That "family" means… us.
-Paul Loesel
3. "The Ferris Wheel"
Lyrics and Music: Ryan Bauer-Walsh
Music, Arrangement: Mark Hartman
Vocals: Klea Blackhurst
When my little brother, Jason, was born, my mom had a CD of lullabies she would play for him. One was Tanya Goodman’s song "Tomorrow We’ll Go To The Fair" from Aaron Brown’s A Child’s Gift of Lullabyes. I loved that it was such an upbeat lullaby. When I was really little, there used to be a tiny carnival that would arrive a few blocks from my house in the parking lot of the Four Seasons Mall, an itty-bitty mostly empty strip mall. But at night the lights transformed that barren lot into this dreamscape of colors soaring through the air. I wanted to see if I could continue that carnival dream in a new way. Originally the song was to be sung by Beth Malone, who I knew from a sublet situation years ago, but due to scheduling Beth was unable to join us on the album. She recommended Klea Blackhurst, who I knew and loved since I met her at Goodspeed when she was playing Dolly Levi and I was in LMNOP. She does an amazing job with the song, and it turned out to be a really fantastic turn in casting!
-Ryan Bauer-Walsh
4. "Don't You Cry"
Lyrics and Music: Fred Auter
Vocals: Ernie Pruneda, Richie Leone
Cello, Cello Arrangement: Bobbie L. Crow III
I composed this ballad on the guitar beginning with the chorus. The melody and hook came all at once and the verse melody came directly out of that. The track has a sort of indie rock- folk feel to it. The acoustic guitar accompanies with a gentle driving finger pattern while the cello part I wrote is a quiet stand-in for what would normally be an electric guitar solo in a rock song.
Lyrically I wanted to tell the story of adoption through the experience of a gay male couple who have struggled through the long, tedious process to finally find their baby or young child. For queer families in some states and in many countries, this is not even a possibility. Yet, here we have this wonderful couple who have the means and all of the love in the world to give and all they want is a child to raise and care for. Meanwhile, the baby or child has gone through a whirlwind of changes in their short time on earth and is in dire need of a family. This song is about the moment they meet.
The first time I sang it, it made me tear up, so I knew I was doing something right. I hope it strikes a chord with anyone who's tried for years at something and truly appreciates the gift that life can be when your dream finally comes true. The song is performed by two wonderful singers: Ernie Pruneda and Richie Leone.
-Fred Sauter
5. "Two Mama Flamingos"
Lyrics and Music: Michelle Chamuel and David Dabbon
Vocals: Christine Dwyer
"Two Mama Flamingos" is a song about different kinds of families that all have something in common: love. It was important that the song use repetition as a metaphor for how the families are the same yet each have different combinations of family members. A simple accompaniment keeps the song sweet and perfect for a lullaby. When Ryan asked if we would write a lullaby for LGBTQIA+ families, I was so excited to contribute to this cultural step forward in representation. Something as sweet as a lullaby can have big impact on children of queer families who will look for validation—even though their family is different it is still perfect and filled with love.
-David Dabbon and Michelle Chamuel
6. "Go To Sleep"
Lyrics and Music: Fred Sauter
Vocals: Chris and Clay Rice-Thomson
This song is a fun little bop of a lullaby. The melody is very playful, climbing up and reversing back down and up and down again to a lovely resolve. It has an old-timey feel that’s quite catchy. The melody and hook came first as an idea that I recorded into my phone while at work and then I went home and figured out the accompanying chords on the guitar.
Lyrically, the verses go through all of the major animal groups, giving the child examples of how all the creatures in the animal kingdom go to sleep—pets in a lap, farm animals in the hay, forest critters hibernate, etc. They all go to sleep and now it’s time for you too, sweet baby.
There are no specific LGBTQ+ references in this song, but rather it’s an example of a universal lullaby sung by gay-queer parents that happens to also be composed by a guncle ("gay uncle") who certainly has plenty of experience entertaining his nieces and nephews over the years! The song is for babies and kids of all ages. We wanted a fun duo to take it on and provide animal sounds too, and we were so happy to have real life husbands Clay and Christopher Rice-Thomson lend their vocal talents and personalities to the track.
-Fred Sauter
7. "A Little Boat"
Lyrics and Music: Ryan Bauer-Walsh
Vocals: Katie Thompson, Natalie Joy Johnson, and The First Presbyterian Church of New York City Choir conducted by Michael Shake
Cello, Cello Arrangement: Bobbie L Crow III
This was written in 2008, I think. It was originally called "12 AM." The song started “It’s 12 AM, I’m tired again. This happens every day.” A really melancholy tune based on the ticking of the clock during a lonely spell I had while living in a studio at 42 Thayer Street in Inwood. I lived on the first floor on a one-way street and the super’s brother and friends would always play dominoes outside my window till late. On those nights I would stay up and write or watch movies. I ended up loving the song a lot but never really did anything with it—not till this last December when I rewrote it. It became “A Little Boat,” a song about drifting off to dreamland. I really wanted Katie Thompson to sing it and was so excited when she agreed to. Natalie Joy Johnson and I reconnected in my neighborhood in Harlem and I knew that they would be a good team of moms for the song. But there was one piece of the puzzle still missing, which was this tiny choral section I wanted in it. Luckily, I am a chorister and concert tenor for First Presbyterian Church of NYC. Director Michael Shake along with the entire chorus agreed to help, and we recorded their section in the main sanctuary of the church. I think it really adds a beautiful element of inclusivity to the album.
-Ryan Bauer-Walsh
8. "Rain, Rain, Rain"
Lyrics and Music: Fred Sauter
Vocals: Shakina Nayfack, Kyler O'Neal
Cello, Cello Arrangement: Bobbie L Crow III
Rain often has negative associations; we don’t like to get wet, we can’t go outside and play, plans get ruined, cakes get left out, and so on. So with this song I wanted to make a positive association with rain for babies and young children, teaching them that rain is what makes the plants grow and gives life to everything, including us, to live and grow. The lyric associates rain with dreams, suggesting that dreams also come from the clouds. Just as the plants absorb the water, we absorb dreams. As we grow, so does our dream of what we can create in this world, as signified by the rainbow that comes after. The rainbow is both an LGBTQ+ symbol and a universal symbol of hope, possibility, and beauty.
Musically, the style is a modern alt-indie pop ballad played with simple arpeggios on acoustic guitar with a cello adding raindrop-like pizzicato and soothing tones under the melody. The song is performed as a mommy duet, sung by Shakina Nayfack and Kyler O'Neal, both phenomenal singers who both add depth and grace to the song. I couldn't be happier with the result!
-Fred Sauter
9. "There's a Bunny on the Moon"
Lyrics and Music: Jason Ma
Vocals: Aury Krebs
Cello: Bobbie L Crow III
The song wrote itself very quickly, like a star sliding into a black hole, or perhaps, representation filling a void. What a gift to have the opportunity to write a lullaby for an interracial, multicultural, double minority family and to add a little visibility into the world for folks like us. Specificity creates universality and I hope this tale of a child flying to the moon to visit their bunny friend will touch everyone, even if they aren’t familiar with the East Asian legend of the Jade Hare and the Moon Goddess. Speaking of goddesses, Aury Krebs has a one-in-a-million voice. Listen and let her fill you up.
-Jason Ma
10. "As Bright as a Star"
Lyrics and Music: Bobby Cronin
Vocals: Jealni Remy
Cello, Cello Arrangement: Bobbie L Crow III
As LQBTQ+ people, we are often told to "tone it down," "stop being so flamboyant!" "quit dressing like a boy!," and the millions of other ways we've been told to dim our own light—sometimes by our own families. "As Bright as a Star" is a lullaby that I hope will instill positivity, encourage dreamers, foster empathy, and empower our ability to shine.
-Bobby Cronin
11. "Baby My Baby"
Lyrics and Music: Ryan Bauer-Walsh
Vocals: Ryan Bauer-Walsh, Jonathan Charles McLaughlin
I wrote this song on the guitar in 2009, I think, in the bathtub of my studio in Inwood—great accoustics! I only knew a few chords back then. It was a little love song I had written called "Jamie." I always thought it was one of the prettiest things I had written. I recorded it in garage band and added as much reverb as I could to cover up my poor guitar skills and sent it off to the recipient. Long story short, I’m still single—haha! But I didn’t want the melody of the song to fade away. I changed the lyric to "baby" and tweaked the rest, and now it’s a gorgeous lullaby that two men sing to their child. It’s exciting to give a song new life. I sing the song with my talented friend, John Charles McLaughlin. His Irish tenor is beautifully lyrical and I’ll always treasure singing with him.
-Ryan Bauer-Walsh
12. "A Big Day"
Lyrics and Music: Ryan Bauer-Walsh
Music: Amanda D'Archangelis
Vocals: Caitlin Kinnunen
Cello: Bobbie L Crow III
I wrote this song based on my favorite place to sit growing up. It’s a willow tree in French Park in Plymouth, Minnesota. I used to eat lunches there with my friend, Neil. We would bike down this massive hill towards the lake and crawl up the enormous trunk to a giant branch that hung over Medicine Lake. After my mom passed away, I was doing a lot of grief eating. I tried to get myself to a healthier place by biking around the lake a few times a week. On one of my rides, I went back to my willow tree and saw that it had fallen into the lake and died. I took some photos with the tree and wrote this song about it as a way to resurrect my beautiful, old willow. Caitlin Kinnunen sings the song beautifully.
-Ryan Bauer-Walsh
Ryan sent me the beautiful and already-musical lyric, and the music simply fell out of my head. Truly, I didn’t have to think twice about it. There’s just enough excitement to make you want to go to sleep and get ready for the big day ahead. The imagery was so simply beautiful, and the landscape and colors all came together with ease!
13. "Best Friends"
Lyrics and Music: Ryan Bauer-Walsh
Vocals: Marty Thomas, Marissa Rosen
Arrangement: Mark Hartman
Cello, Cello Arrangement: Bobbie L Crow III
I was so excited to write a song like this. Growing up I didn’t have a lot of friends. I did have one really wonderful friend named Rachel Serber. We had similar brains and went on lots of adventures in the neighborhood together, finding ourselves inventing stories and eating too many raspberries whenever we stumbled upon a patch. She recently passed away, and I wanted a way to honor the friendship between young gay males and our 'gal pals.' The lyrics are about all the adventures and games Rachel and I would play. A silly song to start off bedtime on a positive note!
-Ryan Bauer-Walsh
14. "Hide and Seek"
Lyrics and Music: Andrew Gerle
Vocals: Matt Doyle
I wanted to write a lullaby that was full of joy and whimsy and fantastical story-telling, the best part of any bedtime! I also wanted to focus on a couple who had adopted, since that is the path of many LGBTQ parents, and since my mother was adopted. The idea came to me that finding your child this way is like the world's most beautiful game of hide and seek, and perhaps a child who was recently adopted and might be confused or frightened might like thinking of the experience like a game, a story they would ask to be told for years to come. I hope this song brings joy to any family who has found each other across the miles and against all odds.
-Andrew Gerle
15. "When We Dreamed of You"
Lyrics: Ryan Bauer-Walsh
Music: Yasuhiko Fukuoka
Vocals: Ryan Bauer-Walsh
Cello: Joe Zeitlin
I wrote part of this song back in 2009 with a simple melody on guitar. It always was somewhere between a lullaby and a love song. I never really sang it to anyone except for my mother. I rewrote it once as a song about a green hat as a joke for a friend. It was the final song to be written for the album, and I really wanted to use the original lyrics—but it wasn’t long enough and the melody never really knew where it was going. When I started working with Yasuhiko Fukuoka on this album and found out he was about to have his first child with his husband, I knew I wanted to write and dedicate the song to their baby. So, I dumped some of the lyrics and wrote a bunch more. I handed them off to Yaz to musically realize. He needed a few more lyrics for phrasing, which I was happy to create, and we ended up with this truly magical song. The song is about how as LGBTQ people we dream of our future children for years and years. It is so difficult to create families within our current system, despite there being so many children in need of good homes. This song is about that process and the joy of finally meeting your first child and then watching them grow up. It is specifically written from the perspective of a composer. "You are my sonata, you are my melody." Yaz asked me to sing it, and I think we created a really beautiful musical moment that his son Axel will always know as his song!
-Ryan Bauer-Walsh
16. "Stronger Together"
Lyrics: Ryan Bauer-Walsh
Music: Mark Hartman
Vocals: Michael Buchanan
"Stronger Together" is based on a short story I wrote for a long-distance crush I had years ago. It was about two sunflower farmers living on opposite sides of an impossibly fast-moving creek in an endless field of sunflowers. They had never been able to do anything but chat a bit here and there when the roar of the water would die down, but one day a storm blew one of the men’s houses down. Seeing this, the other man disassembled his home, removing the roof to make a bridge over the creek. With the remains from both houses, they create a new home together. It’s a song about chosen family and about how love is about sharing your strengths as well as your weaknesses.
-Ryan Bauer-Walsh
17. "Dream Away"
Lyrics and Music: Adam Overett
Vocals: Jay Armstrong Johnson
Cello: Bobbie L Crow III
When I started thinking about creating a lullaby sung by queer parents, the first image that came to mind was of two young dads leaning over their beautiful new kid, and feeling overwhelmed—not just by the new responsibility, but by amazement that this moment ever came at all. So many people grow up dreaming of having a family one day, but for a queer person, I think, as you come to understand your identity, your dreams around having children get re-oriented too. You realize you’re going to undergo a different set of challenges to get there. And these guys in my mind had never quite allowed themselves to believe they would ever get there. So I imagined them singing to their beautiful new kid to "dream the world you want to see, dream the world you wish could be" because they did, and now they have their dream—a family.
-Adam Overett
18. "You’ll Have a New Day Tomorrow"
Lyrics and Music, Vocals: Ryan Bauer-Walsh
Cello, Cello Arrangement: Bobbie L Crow III
I wrote this song at the piano in my childhood home. There are a few reasons I wrote this song. One is that I wish someone had sung it to me as a child, a song about how things will get better and that nothing is permanent—and that’s okay. I also wrote it as a lullaby about the march towards equality for LGBTQIA+ and non-binary people. I recently affirmed my pronouns as “he/they” and wanted to have a gentle song about heading towards a new day—that we all get to try again and that every moment is an opportunity to decide to be happy. We just have to hang on to the light, and the darkness will pass if we just hold on through the bad times.
-Ryan Bauer-Walsh
19. "Mommy and Mama"
Lyrics and Music: Debra Barsha
Vocals: Jo Lampert
Cello: Bobbie L Crow III
When Ryan asked me to contribute a song for this revolutionary album, the first thing that came to my mind were all the kids who I taught music to over the years who had LGBTQIA+ parents. I remember that a lesbian parent once told me that their kids called one of them mommy and one of them mama, so that’s what I wanted to write about. It made me really happy to imagine one or both of those moms singing this lullaby to their kids. I wanted to keep it very simple, with no harmony—just a single, loving voice soothing a child to sleep. Jo Lampert was the perfect person to sing this track.
-Debra Barsha
20. "The Dream"
Lyrics and Music: Arri Simon and Janine McGuire
Vocals: L Morgan Lee
Cello: Bobbie L Crow III
Our initial impulse was to write something exploring the dream of having a child and how loved and wanted that child is when they come along. We wanted to acknowledge and honor how intentional queer families often have to be about family building, and the yearning that can come with that, especially if it’s a long journey to parenthood.
Musically, we thought about how the idea of a lullaby is to calm and relax and lull a child to sleep, so we wanted to compose something that was simple and undulating and repetitive, which is where the triple meter came from. Ryan also mentioned that, ideally, parents would be able to sing these songs themselves, so we knew we wanted a relatively simple melody, with harmonic underpinnings painting the story and emotions. We also wanted it to soar at some point, so we decided to use the vocalise in the middle for that, so the main body of the song could still be sung with ease by the parent.
L Morgan Lee was the first person Arri thought of to sing for us, before we even had a full sketch of the song. We'd adored L Morgan since we saw her in A Strange Loop and had been affectionately stalking her social media, hoping we’d get the chance to work with her someday. We reached out to her, and once we knew she was game, we wrote with her voice in mind, letting her gorgeous, complex, shimmering tone contribute to the development of the melodic line. We all had so much fun in the studio (just hours before the Hurricane-Ida flooding, strangely), and L Morgan’s vocal performance on this track is absolutely everything we hoped for.
-Janine McGuire & Arri Lawton Simon
21. "Tiny Cloud"
Lyrics: Ryan Bauer-Walsh
Music: Lucas Tahiruzzaman Syed
Vocals: Zachary James
Cello: Bobbie L Crow III
This is a poem I wrote about Father Fog, Daddy Ocean and their baby, Tiny Cloud. I picture them as Norse Gods or something ancient and mythical. I wanted it to feel like a folk song, something timeless and familiar. My friend Lucas writes gorgeous, flowing art songs, and we settled on this melody as the best representation of the lyrics musically. I am so fortunate to have Zachary James singing this song. Zachary is a true creative artist and creator. He really understood the gentleness the song needed while still providing a gorgeous masculine energy to narrate the vision of a cloud’s life as the child of fathers—foggy wind and rolling waves. It’s important to me that the artistry of this album is what creates moments of activism. A gentle, beautiful song that stands up to bigotry without ever raising its voice.
-Ryan Bauer-Walsh
22. "The Beautiful Son"
Lyrics and Music: Dionne McClain Freeney
Vocals: Jamie Cepero, Jonathan Burke
My first thought about "The Beautiful Son" was that the parents had to be Black men in love, because we don’t hear about that nearly enough, and the child had to be a Black boy being deeply loved by Black men who loved each other. And even though the song is a lullaby, I wanted it to have movement. I envisioned a child being danced around a room in a parent’s arms. Then, I wanted to write a golden and shimmering tale. So, I thought about some of the ancient African civilizations I had read about, like Kush, Mali, and Timbuktu, lands rich with treasures of art, science, and more. What if the leaders of two of these lands had loved each other and united their nations through love instead of war, as was often the case throughout all of history? What would these kings be like? Would they be beautiful, and what made them so? What would their child be like—would he be beautiful too? And what treasures would they pass on to their beautiful son?
-Dionne McClain-Freeney
23. "You Are Home"
Lyrics and Music: Ryan Bauer-Walsh
Vocals: Michael Longoria
Arrangement: Mark Hartman
Cello, Cello Arrangement: Bobbie L Crow III
I wrote this song one evening with Mark Hartman. I really wanted to create new songs that used classical music as their accompaniment. We picked up Schubert’s "Impromptu Op. 90 no. 2" and he played it through a few times while I scribbled lyrics to a melody over top that I unwound in my mind. The original song is called "Smoke." It’s a song about a break up that turned out to be a really gorgeous tune. I reinvented it while I was quarantined in my childhood home. Michael Longoria sings it and does a brilliant job at delivering the sweetness the song deserves.
-Ryan Bauer-Walsh
24. "Home of Three"
Lyrics and Music: Zoe Sarnak
Vocals: Lauren Patten, Jo Lampert
Coming from a family of immigrants, I've always deeply connected with the idea of home being people, home being family. When I started thinking about what kind of lullaby I would write for my child, I realized I wanted to create that sense of place, safety, and love with two female voices, two mothers. Nothing in the song specifically comments on their queerness, but it is baked into the melody and lyrics that they sing together. I am so moved by simple folk melodies that ache and grow with lush harmonies, so that was the direction I went with the sound. And of course, you can't ask for more beautiful vocalists than Jo Lampert and Lauren Patten. Both of their voices carry such an emotional depth and sense of connection to what they are singing. Also, getting to create this kind of song with my person and one of our closest friends was an incredible joy.
-Zoe Sarnak
25. "Own Sweet Family"
Lyrics and Music: Marc Shaiman
Vocals: Susie Mosher
I first wrote this melody many moons ago, around the time I was working with Bette Midler on Beaches. Her daughter Sophie was around two years old at the time, and when I realized the melody had a lullaby feeling to it, I started to write lyrics. "How can I describe my Sophie, Sophie / Have you tried describing a dream?" But that’s as far as I got.
Fast-forward a few decades later, Ryan Bauer-Walsh Emails me about his LGBTQ lullaby project and I immediately thought of "Sophie’s Song." At the time, I was enjoying watching my friend Susie Mosher’s daily posts on Facebook, as she and her wife Hope Royaltey (greatest name ever) had just had a baby boy named Hudson, and Susie was clearly loving motherhood. As I started writing new lyrics to my melody, it occurred to me that I should ask Susie to co-write the lyrics with me, since she was living it! And who else to sing it but Susie?
And that is the story of how "Our Sweet Family" was born.
-Marc Shaiman
The Rainbow Lullaby is produced by Ryan Bauer-Walsh, Fred Sauter, and Yasuhiko Fukoka, with audio engineering, mixing, and mastering by Fukuoka.
For more information or to order The Rainbow Lullaby, visit BroadwayRecords.com.
