This is ‘organizing an accident’ — a weekly newsletter where I share new song demos every Wednesday + dispatches from music life in Paris.
Listen to “Oh Boy” (demo):
This song was written on April 6, 2023
We’re having a baby! Oh s%@#!!!
Now that we've gotten that out of the way, today's demo entry is aptly called "Oh Boy," a song I wrote at my piano the afternoon my wife and I found out the sex of our baby. We had our important end-of-the-first-trimester ultrasound early that morning, and it profoundly impacted the rest of my day and, well, life. Find the lyrics at the end of the post and a letter to my wife, Janis, here below.
Ciao Janis,
I’m sorry that we had to cancel our trip to Sicily this weekend. You deserved it — we deserved it — after this never-ending winter and the inevitable hibernation we entered throughout your first months of pregnancy, but, as you know by now, nature has a way of humbling us with its timing. On Thursday, May 4th, we lost a patriarch of the family: your grandfather André Adamsbaum. On the afternoon of his 67th wedding anniversary, he finished lunch and took a nap beside his beloved wife Edith, and quietly entered infinity.
Your grandfather was a gentleman, a romantic; a Jewish immigrant from Poland, who survived multiple years of his youth in Nazi-occupied France. He was also, as he self-described in his Instagram bio, an "ingénieur, collectionneur, photographe amateur"— his acute eye for art a defining quality inherited by your mother and later by yourself. Not to mention, those adorable cheekbones you all share.
One month ago, we discovered that — despite all previous theories and premonitions — we will be having a baby boy at the end of October. After the doctor privately told me the news, I was supposed to keep the secret from you for 24 hours, a window that quickly shrank to about five minutes as we erupted in tears and laughter together on Boulevard Saint-Germain. It took me hours to cool down, but all this time later, I’m still shook.
I’m new to this business, but I sense that the great equalizer among many expectant fathers, besides panic, is an utter admiration for their partner who is carrying the unborn child — a physical reality impossible for us to comprehend. Four months in, I’ve watched a transformation take place that you’ve handled with such poise, set against the backdrop of all of life’s usual demands — a combined pressure that would flatten me on a good day. Then, set against the backdrop of your grandfather’s death, during which you’ve been a pillar of stability for four generations of your family, including our future son.
I’m shook up. I’m also falling dreadfully in love. I suspect that as your body transforms — your internal organs literally rearranging to make room for our young prince to grow comfortably — so does a more subtle metamorphosis take place within me, a change in which some dormant part of my Neanderthal self is awoken, reviving a capacity for love both innate and untapped. An image comes to mind of some science-fiction jungle laboratory, overgrown with moss and vine, where an unnamed hero frantically flips every available switch, illuminating the long inoperative system. I guess I’ve hacked into the mainframe now.
The world today is a much different place from the one André grew up in. Our generation faces its own unique challenges and there is no telling what lies ahead for our children. With that in mind, I believe that by bringing our baby into the world, we’re picking a side. Ours is the side of optimism: a staunchly hopeful position from which we’re betting it all on a brighter future for everyone involved. What could be a more clear statement of faith in humanity and our planet than to bring a new life into it?
I’m writing this on the 78th anniversary of France’s liberation and the end of the Second World War in Europe. I’m full of hope and I can’t wait to continue writing our combined family’s history together. I’m also encouraged by these words spoken by your late grandfather:
La vie est dure, mais pas tous les jours.
“Life is hard, but not every day”. - André Adamsbaum (1931-2023)
Read Janis’s own words on her grandfather here. It’s in French but you can just drop it into your AI translator of choice.
You can always pay a visit to my previous demos and writing via the Substack archive or find my official music releases on your platform of choice. Find me across socials at @thisryanegan.
With love,
Ryan
Check out the previous post.
On the News of Our Son
Ryan: Dad and I love you, Janis, and our expected grandson so much. I love that you felt comfortable sharing such beautiful, poetic, and heartfelt words with the world. You will not believe what you will experience the moment your newborn baby enters your life. Ask your brother and sister how much their hearts expanded with their emotions or better yet, re-read some of the things they have posted. Chris recently mentioned that he had never realized that he could love someone in that way; my comment back was: "Now you know how much I have loved the three of you for the past several decades."
Ryan - we love you as much as all the stars in the skies and to the endless expanse of the universe.
Mom and Dad
Great song and story, and it resonates. The week me and my wife got the news, I thought the same thing... I need to write a song for this one (didn't know the sex yet, but now we do... Oh boy!). Which got me back into music that I had neglected for a long time.