1. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star Old French tune, English words by Jane Taylor, 1806 This is the lullaby that everybody knows. It is the safest song in the world; even people who say that they can’t carry a tune are usually willing to hum it. I wanted to begin Sleep Like a Baby with a magic so familiar that everyone would feel at home. 2. Return of Desire Eve Kodiak/David Darling, words by Eve Kodiak I wrote this song in the spring of 2008 in preparation for a recording session for David Darling. I gave him the changes, and we improvised on it – and that night at dinner, he told me that I had unconsciously used changes that almost exactly mirrored his song, Cycles. So The Return of Desire was sort of telepathically co-written. 3. Rock Me Deep Eve Kodiak This song arrived a few days before The Return of Desire. I had been preoccupied with creating melodic filigree over a repeating bass (Chopin’s Berceuse was a model). The melody grew organically out of the bassline, like frost on a windowpane.. 4. Fertile Crescent Eve Kodiak The simple major arpeggios of Rock Me Deep morph into the more complicated minor melismas of Fertile Crescent. I wrote this song as a bridge between Europe and the Middle East, into the Yiddish lullaby with a klezmer break to come. 5. Raisins and Almonds (Rozhinkes Mit Mandlen) Abraham Goldfaden, Yiddish theatre song For my grandparents and great-grandparents, Rozhinkes mit Mandlen is a hit number like Over the Rainbow or Summertime – a tune that suddenly everyone on the street is humming. There is something special about it. As a teenager, I used to take my guitar and visit a family friend in her 90’s, and when I sang this song, she would come alive, brokenly sing some words, cry a little. 6. Dance to your Daddy Traditional Scottish This song is played over a pedal point, smoothing the melody into a kind of drone. When my son was one, at naptimes, I would put him in the car with the cassette tape of Sally Rogers lullaby album, At Quiet O’ Clock (which includes Dance to your Daddy) and drive until he fell asleep. Until one day, when he stuck his finger in the little hole and pulled, and the album became mylar spaghetti. But I still remember the song. 7. Rocky Road Impressions Traditional European and African-American melodies In 1963, the Beatles played the Ed Sullivan show, Martin Luther King called out “I have a dream” to 250,00 people from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and Peter Paul and Mary released their album In the Wind. I was eight years old, and the collective melodies that thread through Rocky Road Impressions are my cellular memories – with bits of spirituals that recall the Civil Rights Movement. 8. Hush Medley: All the Pretty Little Horses/Mockingbird American, African-American These lullabies are polar opposites. The first voice seems to be a slave woman, comforting her master’s child while her own poor little baby lies neglected. The second voice is a parent who is able to tell the baby that whatever happens can be fixed, because all that really matters is love and sweetness. The beat that creeps into this song must be the influence of Harry Belafonte, whose Calypso album topped the charts the year after I was born. 9. Light and Shadow Eve Kodiak This piece began as a mistake – in 2006 I was improvising in the studio to warm up for the “real” album (Meditations for a New Year’s Day), and I inadvertently switched the theme from major to minor. When I later heard the recording, I was struck by the beauty and ambiguity of the melody, the play of light and shadow. 10. Morning in the Mountains Eve Kodiak I attended a TaKeTiNa workshop, where a big drum kept this wonderful uneven beat of 7+5/12, and we walked and clapped different divisions of 12 beats over it. It was so difficult, and then suddenly it wasn’t – and everything changed, the way it does when you cross a pass in the mountains and the world falls away below you. 11. Fragment Eve Kodiak Just bits of color, memory, light and shadow and twinkling stars, in a refreshingly different key. 12. Grief and Relief Eve Kodiak Sometimes, in my concerts, I invite the audience to make up titles based upon experiences from their lives. Then I improvise a piece for them. A man I knew, whose wife had recently died after a long illness, asked for a piece about “Relief – and Grief.” 13. Shaker Medley: I Will Bow and Be Simple/ ‘Tis the Gift (Simple Gifts) Traditional American/ Elder Joseph Brackett These songs, from the mid 19th century, are about stripping away to the essentials through the rigors of Shaker life, and releasing into joy through ecstatic dancing. The first song uses the surprising chords of an arrangement by Marleen Montgomery. The second was popularized by Aaron Copland in the Pulitzer Prize winning ballet Appalachian Spring 14. Beautiful Dreamer Stephen Foster The movie of mid-19th century America was scored to the music of Stephen Foster. Miners rushed off to California humming “Oh Susannah,” the plight of slavery was experienced through “My Old Kentucky Home,” folks entertained themselves at “De Camptown Races,” and turned sadness into beauty in dozens of songs about women whose lives faded away like flowers. 15. My Love is Like a Red, Red, Rose Traditional Scottish tune, lyrics by Robert Burns Whenever I play this "simple old Scots song which I [Burns] had picked up in the country," it feels like the most beautiful melody in the world. There is such incredible spaciousness in the wide leaps, and the words fit it so perfectly. 16. Over the Rainbow Harold Arlen/Yip Harburg I remember when I watched The Wizard of Oz once a year when it was shown on TV– although I didn’t see Oz in color for years. I still remember Judy Garland’s starry eyes as she sang this song. This is one of those iconic songs that seems to straight to the heart of everyone who listens, awakening us to our dreams of a better place. 17. Summertime George Gershwin The moment I hear the first strains of Summertime, I can feel the damp heat of the August night, hear the frogs croaking, sense the mysterious “mammy and pappy standing by” as the child begins his every-night flight away from the womb. Gershwin wrote it after hearing a Ukrainian orchestra play, and my fantasy is that that first unusual chord change comes straight out of the Balkans, into the East Side of New York and travels down South. 18. Moon River Henry Mancini/Johnny Mercer Audrey Hepburn sits on a fire escape in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Moon River sparkles into the collective unconscious . . . another one of those perfect iconic American songs that has a different deeply personal meaning to everyone. 19. Imagining You Eve Kodiak/David Darling This melody appeared between us during the first recording session of the album The Return of Desire: Improvisations. We were in separate rooms, with headphones on, with no charts, no preconceived notions, nothing but our listening to the space between us. 20. Cycles of Desire David Darling/ Eve Kodiak A reprise of track 2 . . . but with a twist. The changes are a repeating series of seven chords that sketch out the circle of fifths . . . and if we re-synchronize the harmony and melody, without changing a note, suddenly we are in a major key. It’s not 100% happy – but it’s definitely happier. 21. Brahms’ Lullaby “Lullaby, and goodnight . . . “ this tune tinkles in thousands of music boxes placed in children’s toys . . . when I used to make up musical narratives for children’s movement classes, this was the tune I always played at the end. It meant, time to stop, lie down, close your eyes. And that is what it means here. I hope tonight, and every night, you sleep like a baby.