The Song for Someone Who Will Never Hear It

2026-10-26

Songs written for people who cannot hear them — what changes, whether they matter, and what families do with them later.

Some songs are not for a birthday, a wedding, or a farewell. They are for a grandmother with dementia who will not recognise your voice on the recording. For a father who died in 2019. For a friend you stopped speaking to after a small argument neither of you can now explain. You open jhoom.baby, type a few lines, and get back a finished song. The person it is about will never hear it. So what is it for?

What changes when there is no event and no listener

A song written for a real occasion has a job: it must fit the room, the length of the speech, the mood of the guests. A song written for an absent person has none of those constraints, and that changes the lyrics in a few predictable ways.

First, you stop explaining. When you write for a listener, you include the details they need — where you were, who else was there, why it mattered. When the listener already knows, those details drop out and something more private takes their place. A line like “you kept the receipts in a tin above the fridge” stays, because it is yours. A line like “we met in the second year of college” goes, because it was never for them.

Second, the tense gets complicated. A song for someone with dementia has to hold two versions of the same person at once — the one who remembers you and the one sitting in front of you. A song for someone who has died has to speak in the present without pretending. The lines that survive this are usually the plainest ones. “I hope you are somewhere warm” does more work than three verses of imagery.

Third, and most usefully: your chorus loses its audience. There is no one to be impressed. That is a gift. Write the chorus as if you are the only one who will hear it, because you probably are.

Is it worth making? An honest answer

Yes, if you go in knowing what it is. A jhoom.baby song for an absent person is not a message. It is not a delivery. It is a way of finishing a thought you have been carrying around for years, and there is real value in hearing that thought come back to you as music instead of as a loop in your head at 2 a.m.

Here is a concrete example you can copy. Take one object, one place, and one sentence you never said. For a grandfather with dementia that might be: his old transistor radio, the balcony in Kozhikode, and “I learned to shave by watching you.” Type those into jhoom.baby as the idea. Let it produce a first draft. Listen once without judgement. Then change one line that does not sound like you, and leave the rest. The whole thing takes about ten minutes, and what you end up with is a small, accurate record of a specific person — not a general tribute.

What you should not expect is a reaction. If the person could respond, you would not be writing this song.

What families actually do with these songs

In practice, people do a few things. Some play it for the person anyway. A woman in Pune played a song for her mother with dementia every evening for a month; her mother did not know who had made it, but she hummed along by the fourth night. Some save it. A song for a father who has died often sits in a phone for years and gets played on his birthday, quietly, by one person. Some send it. A song for an estranged friend sometimes gets forwarded with no message attached, and sometimes nothing comes back, and that is a result too.

What almost nobody does is post it publicly. These songs tend to stay small. That is the point.

So we will say the limit plainly: this is for you. jhoom.baby does not deliver the song to anyone, does not know whether the person is alive, and cannot make an absent person present. It turns what you type into a song you can play, share and download in a few minutes. The audience of one is you, sitting with your phone, hearing something you already knew.

Songs like these — quiet, specific, written for one person — are at the bottom of this page. “Wave, Little One”, “Invisible String of Love”, “Invisible String”. Play one before you write your own. It will show you the register: low, plain, unhurried. Nothing performed. Nothing promised.