Interview: Ryan Bauer-Walsh Discusses THE RAINBOW LULLABY

In memory of his late mother, Ryan Bauer-Walsh has conceived a new 25-track album of lullabies for LGTBQIA+ families. Featuring 33 Broadway artists, the album was released today by Broadway Records.

With writers including Bauer-Walsh, Marc Shaiman (Hairspray) and Debra Barsha (Radiant Baby), the star-studded album includes vocals from Matt Doyle, Jenn Collela, Jay Armstrong Johnson, Chilina Kennedy, Caitlin Kinnunen, Susie Mosher, Michael Longoria, Kyle Dean Massey, Lauren Patten, Jelani Remy, Chris & Clay Rice-Thomson, Marissa Rosen, and more.

Purchase the new album here.

BroadwayWorld spoke with Ryan Bauer-Walsh about the inspiration behind the album, its creation, and more!

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What was the inspiration behind creating this album?

That's a little but of a story, but here we are. We were all in quarantine last year from March on, I got a phone call from my mother in June saying it was time to come home. She several types of cancer and they had all kind of come back at once. So I sold most of my paintings, my friends basically bought everything I ever painted, so I could afford to go home and take care of her and I took care of her for the next four months and she passed on October 28. It's rough. So I'm in my childhood home, surrounded by all of my childhood things, like memories of my mother and trying to find any available coping mechanism during a plague. So I kind of pictured constructive ways to grieve.

I had written some songs like 14 years ago, a couple like seven years ago. I pulled them out and I thought about lullabies and my mother holding me and singing to me and how sweet that would be to kind of pass on that love to other people I always thought about my own family, especially since mine had lost all gravity with the loss of the matriarch. I thought maybe lullabies would be a good place to start thinking about my family and memorializing my mothers love. So I rewrote the lyrics to be songs these songs that I had, I called my friend Fred Sauter, who wrote Bed Bugs Off-Broadway, and we figured, lets just write some lullabies. Lullabies for our kids. If we had kids and we're gay people and we googled and there were none. I found one song that was written by somebody in India, a lesbian, and there was another song in part of a program, I think it was either a prison inmate program or something, and it was two women who had written a lullaby for their child, I think. Those would be the only LGBT lullabies I had ever found and there were certainly no compilation or album, yet lullabies and gay people have both been around for thousands of years.

So I would lay in bed and just write lullabies. I would come up with little songs, my phone was full of a minute-thirty second to two minute videos of me just kind of singing little random songs to myself. It was just honestly the most constructive coping mechanism; I was in such a state. I mean my anxiety, we were all in such a weird place and the only thing available was empathy because everybody was in it together. We were first just going to do a grassroots album of queer lullabies, me and Fred, but then we asked more people if they wanted to write it with us to make it more inclusive because representation is really important, especially these days with how vehemently people are against us. Like minority communities, I don't know why people, in this country especially are still having problems with us trying to have equal footing. I made a sound studio under the staircase of the basement in my childhood home, just tacked blankets up. I bought the last microphone at Guitar Center in Maple Grove, Minnesota. I recorded an 11 song demo of lullabies of just mine and Fred's, I pitched it to Broadway Records and they loved it and now we're a team of over 50 with multiple Tony Award-winning performers and composers on it.

How did you begin to assemble the lineup of different artists on this album?

The thing that I told Fred was that I wanted to work with the nicest people in the entire industry. I really wanted to make sure that it was a team of queer composers and that they had different perspectives. But, secondly, I've been in the city since 2006 and I've been working as an actor since I was 13 so I had all of these people that I had either wanted to work with or that I loved working with and so those were the people that I had called first. I was like, "Would you be in any way interested, do you have any time?" This was back when people still had time! [Laughs] As soon as they were lifting restrictions everyone was like, "I'm in 16 projects!" So, I made a couple calls and then through my friend Andrew Gerle, he had done "Artists in Residence" which was a wonderful album of people all in quarantine making some new musical theatre songs together, he had worked with Marc Shaiman, so I got a connection to Marc Shaiman through Andrew.

Fred was really good at getting me some connections to some edgier people, Broadway Records helped fill in a few places were I couldn't find a connect other than trying to get to them on Instagram, or something. Everybody was so excited about this as an idea and I think it's because, after the last five years, we've all been suffering from this sort of hostile energy that has been really diving the country and micro-populations and I think that this was a really good chance to give something back in a positive way. So everyone was really excited to write for it. Now we have 25 tracks and I keep getting messages from people saying, "Hey, I'd love to write a lullaby. Is another one gonna come out?" So, we'll see.

Marc Shaiman is such an incredible writer. What was it like working with him on this project?

It was Susie Mosher and Marc Shaiman. They wrote it together. Susie just had a child, her son is now almost two or is two and when I approached Marc Shaiman about writing the song he was like, "Of course, I have to call Susie!" So they wrote it together and they just shot lyrics back and forth, I guess, for a couple of days and they came up with this song that Marc had had a melody for a long time ago. Now this melody is a beautiful lullaby that closes the album. The first song is sort of like a thesis statement and Marc really wraps it all together at the very end of the album. It's beautiful. He's been such an open and warm person to work with. I'm so grateful that he was willing to participate. Of course having Marc on the album raises its profile a thousand percent. It's a really beautiful song about family being made out of people who love you and who you love. Especially in the queer community, we have chosen family, especially all of us in New York who have moved here to fulfill some kind of dream of creating. I think that song really speaks to it.

Do any other the other tracks stand out to you as one of your favorites?

Andrew Gerle's song is really beautiful, it's called "Hide and Seek" and its about the process of becoming a parent as two fathers. It's this really beautiful, a bit theatrical song about that search to try any become a parent and find where your child is. Lauren Patten is on it with Jo Lampert and they've sung this beautiful contemporary lullaby for two moms that I love. Then we have Chris and Clay Rice-Thompson who are a beautiful Broadway gay couple and they sing a simple song by Fred Sauter about animals going to sleep and it's one of the cutest things ever. It's full of little animal noises and they also have this dream of becoming dads so those kind of stick out to me in really significant ways.

Do you have any plans to create a follow up album after The Rainbow Lullaby is released?

There's a couple things that I really wanna see come out of this. First of all, it's really important that we know that this is all for charity. This is for the Ali Forney Center. My mother's legacy of charity was what her life revolved around so it's really important that this becomes a legacy, not just for queer generations creating new cultural traditions but also to help support the queer community, especially queer youth. Beyond that, I'm hoping that we can, at some point, either get Broadway Records on board to do another 25 tracks so that we can even further up the profile of this project by including people of higher standing that I am in. I think that this does significant good as far as outreach and representation in broadening the identity of queer people. For a long time, we've just kind of lived as stereotypes in the minds of a lot of people. I'd really like us to move beyond that. Not to become hetero-normative, but to become individuals with identities and to allow our love as parents to become accepted as beautiful and something that matters. I'd also like to see this become a children's songbook, that's fully illustrated. So, if we know any publishers that would be great! And to do a printing to the CDs and some vinyl to do keepsakes and some signed copies that we could, once again, auction off to help raise some more money.

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Purchase the new album from Broadway Records here.

Listen to the new album on streaming here:

Photo credit: Krys Fox