Songwriters get inspiration from many different sources. They can find it on a sunny day or in the rhythm of the rain.
Brayden Baird, a Brooklyn-based producer and singer-songwriter, recently was inspired when he was hit with “a perfect storm” of bad news. The result was his latest album, Lord, Why Do You Do These Things To Me.

Brayden explains, “My father was in Canada and he was dying of cancer. I’m getting off the phone with him and my mom calls me. She tells me, ‘I just got diagnosed with eye cancer.’ And in the same month my sister’s fiancé had his colon removed. Then, my dog got his teeth infected and had to lose all his teeth. And on top of that I was really struggling so hard financially.”
All of those things happening so close in proximity to each other would be a heavy burden for anyone to cope with. But there was more.
“Yeah, and I had a friend who took his own life,” Brayden added. “It was just the craziest two months of my life really.”
Working on the album was a way of coping with the various events happening around him. He also found it had an unexpected, positive consequence.
“It brought me much closer to a lot of friends,” Brayden found. “In this album I decided I really needed to talk about what was going on and not try to make these nice pop songs. I found that by making all these songs where I really directly address all these things my friends became closer to me. Especially with my male friends, it opened that door of dialogue.”
One song in particular struck a chord. “It Kills Me To See You Sick” is about his mother’s battle with cancer. It is a song exploring the anger and helplessness one feels when a cherished loved one is stricken. It starts out with a role reversal of sorts, tenderly saying “I sent you to the morgue the way that mothers do/ I dressed you out the door the way that mothers do.” The tenderness gives way to rage in the chorus when he observes people going about their lives and wishes “you all were dead instead of her!”
“Anger is one of the stages of grief,” Brayden told me, “and I was very much in that stage. You know, ‘My mom is an angel, always doing good things for everybody.’ And now she is going through this horrible trauma and experience. Meanwhile I was working with these CEOs and celebrities who were happy and thriving while my mother was suffering. I was so full of anger I was like, ‘I hate everybody!’ So I guess that is where the song came from.”
Brayden wasn’t sure he would ever share the song with anyone because it was so angry and aggressive. In essence it was and is a personal and cathartic song. But when he did share it, he found a lot of people have those kinds of feelings.
“Many people ask, ‘Why does it have to be my family member? Why can’t it be someone else,’” Brayden observed. “People have responded to this song more than any of the other ones (on the album).”
Fortunately, his mother’s real life story has had a happy ending, at least for now. She is in recovery and even danced on the video to the song. This, despite initially not liking the song.
“In my mind, I was already accepting this was the end,” he says. “I posted a clip of song from a live performance on Instagram and she saw it. She reached out to tell me how much she didn’t like it. She was like, ‘Oh, it’s so violent.’ Because the clip was of the chorus.”
Undaunted, Brayden told her he wanted to make a video with her dancing. “She had never heard the (full) song until the very first time she danced to it. When she realized what the song was about she got very invested.”
As for other songs on the album, “When You Were Castrated” is about the transformation his father endured. Where he was once physically a very big man and “a force of nature,” he was now reduced to a very small and infirm man. “When Will The Sun Rise Again” is about his friend who took his own life. The friend was an animator who worked in Claymation.
Brayden told me, “There is so much art in the world that is just meant to make money. And this friend of mine was just magical at what he did and nobody cared. And now his story is over.”
The friend’s work is still on YouTube and can be found by doing a search for his pseudonym “Spaghetti Jesus.” His work is magical.
Lord, Why Do You Do These Things To Me? was produced with assistance from Dan Rome (Big Lake Recording Company) and Mark Balderston. Brayden assembled an all-star cast of musicians from Brooklyn and Vermont to bring the songs to life. Called the Once in a Lifetime Band, they spent a week in Burlington, VT, which culminated in a single day of laying down tracks.
The album is efficiently short, only 23 minutes long and yet it communicates all it needs to. And part of what it communicates is hope. As Brayden put it, “I didn’t want it to be this big weep fest. I wanted the ultimate point to be that you can reclaim your joy. The world can take and take from you but it is up to you to go in and take back your happiness and peace.”
So having explored the grief and dark side of life, where do you go from there?
“I actually have written the next album,” Brayden said. “I haven’t started recording it yet. Instead of Lord, Why Do You Do These Things To Me? it is going to be called Thank You, Lord. It will address how all the horrible things that happened to me have completely changed my life for the better and in a way I never could have imagined.”