Price: $17.30

I mentioned before that I was planning a week of nightshifts in order to wean Heather off feeding at night. It didn’t go exactly as planned, as things were going crazy in my dayjob so I had to drag my spaced-out head in there each afternoon. It did, however, actually kinda work - before the week the latest she had arrived in our bed for the night was 2.45am, and now she’s getting to past 6am about half the time and she doesn’t look for milk if she does wake (which is usually because she’s teething - hurry up and grow, teeth!). Not exactly perfect, but a great leap forward nevertheless.

Anyway, in advance of the week, I stocked up on lullaby records and this is one of the best. The majority of the music on here is Japanese, but there’s also tunes from India, China, Tibet and Tatarstan (a republic in the Russian federation). One thing that really surprised me is how accessible the Japanese music is. The singing and the instrumentation can be pretty oriental-sounding, and perhaps it’s just the fact I’ve listened to this so often now, but if you changed the arrangements and had someone sing them in English I don’t know if you’d guess where the music is from.  The Chinese and Indian tunes, on the other hand, you can spot a mile off - the former in particular really evokes  the Chinese countryside, or rather my imaginary version of of it, complete with paddy fields and terraced hillsides and peasants in conical hats. Considering the closest I’ve been to China is watching “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” I suppose that might not correspond too closely to reality.

It’s hard to pick stand-out tracks. I love the Tatar Cradle Song, “Kokoro Ni Dakarete” from Japan and the Chinese one, but really it’s all pretty much perfect lullaby music - sparse arrangements, gentle singing and slow steady rhythms. I’ve given it some fairly extensive real-world testing during my nightshifts, and it’s performed well. It’s not a magic bullet - one night Heather didn’t close her eyes once from midnight to 3am, and slept only fitfully thereafter - but even so it got me some sleep that I wouldn’t otherwise have got, both helping to calm Heather down and keeping her asleep when she had finally drifted off, and it’s still one of my go-to albums on  teething nights.