A new album of children’s music for queer families and others covers a range of topics for tots and parents alike, including feelings, farts, social justice, potty training, and nipple confusion.
Aly Halpert’s new album, Nipple Confusion: For Queer Famlies and the Child in All of Us, is named for “the tendency of an infant to unsuccessfully adapt between drinking milk from a parent’s body and bottle-feeding.” In the song of the same name, Halpert offers a child’s perspective about the “nipple confusion” of having queer parents, singing, “Is it my mama’s, it my papa’s, is it my margot’s, is it my dogs?” Taken at face value, one of the lyrics of “Nipple Confusion” might seem to argue against queer families (“Wondering how, wondering why? All I can do is cry”), but if you hear Halpert sing them, you’ll hear that she’s just making gentle fun of the occasional confusion of having multiple parental figures in a big queer family, and not seeing it as a negative. On the album site, she writes, “Conceived on a random afternoon hanging out with lots of queer friends and a baby, Nipple Confusion is inspired by a little one and the joyful mish-mosh of bio and queer family spread out over the U.S. and Canada who love them.”
She tells me, “I’m a queer musician and I’m a part of a big bio and queer family of a fifteen-month old.” Her album is “inspired by all those relationships, and her.” It celebrates “queer families and love” with songs that “are goofy and political at the same time.”
Her social justice riff “The Wheels on the Bus of the World to Come” just might make me learn to like this song that in its original version haunted my dreams when my son was little. Songs like “No One Just Like You,” “Ease In,” and “You Can Still Cry” focus on internal feelings, while “Elimination Communication” will resonate with anyone going through toilet training with a young one. There are also bears, butterflies, and more (including a reference in one song to a child with five parents) to make this a varied and fun children’s album that both queer families and others should appreciate.
Halpert herself lives in New York, teaching middle schoolers, cultivating a queer Jewish chicken farm, and working as a camp music teacher. “I think it’s important to lift up and celebrate non-normative family structures” she told me.
Have a listen below! If you’re looking for additional queer-inclusive kids’ music, try these albums by other artists, too!
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