Meet the Dad Making Music from Toddler Twaddle
On October 16, 2025, Stephen Spencer sent his mother a fifty-three-second video that he had made. It was her birthday. In the video, Spencer, a composer, plays keyboard and guitar and sings in a gorgeous tenor that reaches effortlessly to falsetto. The song relays, word for word, a story by his three-year-old daughter about a girl who won’t stop wiggling.
There was a little woman
Who liked wigglin’ so much.
She liked wigglin’, she just really liked wigglin’.
Her mom said, her mommy said, You can’t . . .
You can’t keep wigglin’, honey, you gotta stop wigglin’. . . .
After sending the video to his mother, Spencer posted it on Instagram, to his thirty-six followers. “Most of them were my mom’s friends,” he said.
Today, about four months and fifteen videos later, Spencer has roughly three hundred thousand followers. In that time, more than thirty million people have streamed his videos, the lyrics of which are written by his daughter. Songs such as “Purple bear princess (she was a grown up dog),” “Apple The Stoola (he was an apple man),” and “I’m an important mermaid.”
“No one is more surprised than I am,” Spencer said in his apartment, in Queens, on a rainy day. He sat at his dining-room table, with his wife, Angela, a speech-language pathologist in New York City public schools. She is pregnant with their second child. They met at McGill University, where she was studying voice and he was studying composition.
“I’m interested in the musicality of the world,” he said.
“He’s always making up songs from sounds,” Angela added. “A phone beeping, a bus going by.”
Even when his daughter was first born, he said, “I was always treating her babblings as music.” (He prefers not to disclose her name.)
Spencer is thirty-five and barrel-chested, with three-day scruff on his smiling face. He does not, at a glance, appear to be a man to sing in falsetto. After grad school at McGill, he received a Ph.D. in music theory and composition from the City University of New York. His dissertation was titled “A Multilevel Approach to the Analysis and Visualization of Timbral Brightness in Post-Tonal Music.” (Obviously.) He’s now a lecturer at Hunter College.
“I have to credit Angela,” he said, “for bringing the stories out of our daughter, encouraging her development.”
After a modest demurral, Angela left to run errands. Spencer took out his phone and played a recording of his daughter telling the wiggling story. He grinned, listening to the little mouse voice, noting its curious cadence. “The process is a bit fragile,” he said. “Mostly, it’s about listening without judgment, without interrupting, letting her go off and find the words.” He said it takes him about a week to compose a song. He writes on the piano and then adds guitar. He uses a software program to include drums, backing vocals, bass, echoes. He records his voice last. “It’s just sort of funny to me that she’s likely forgotten what she said almost immediately,” he explained. “And I’m carefully working on these songs for days.”
He had started composing a new song that day. The story involved “a tall, tall, tall, tall man who drived a rainbow car.” He sat at the piano, next to a small toy stove. His electric guitar—an Epiphone ES-335, the affordable alternative to a Gibson ES-335, he said—sits around the corner, beside a plastic potty.
He played, his fingers forming the chords effortlessly. “I’m trying to find the melody,” he said, head bobbing to the upbeat groove. “I want a kind of, like, fifties vibe. But then it’s, like, Will this work?”
He changed key. “That was A-flat. Maybe E.” His hands moved left on the keyboard. “That feels interesting. Or maybe—maybe F.” He played, singing bits of the song. “I need a bold harmonic shift here, when we learn the man drived the rainbow car.” He looked at his phone, checking his daughter’s lyrics. “I mean, it’s all there.”
In his lectures at Hunter, Spencer said, he encourages his students to develop a creative innocence. “You’re in the sandbox playing,” he said. “Let’s postpone the judgment or appraisal and feel free to make music joyfully and in an unfiltered way. My students make fun of me, because they’ll say something like ‘How do I practice this?’ And I’ll be, like, ‘You have to love yourself.’ ”
He continued playing, trying to find the melody, trying to find the space for his daughter’s story. “There’s something about life and childhood that feels fleeting,” he said. “I felt an urgency to capture that. Music is a good way of making something impermanent permanent.”
Soon it would be time to pick up his daughter from preschool. It was still raining out. Maybe there was a song there. ♦