‘I love you twenty-sixty times’: how lyrics written by a three-year-old became tear-inducing viral hits

When Stephen Spencer began setting his daughter’s surreal stories to music, he had 36 followers. Now his banging pop miniatures have been streamed nearly 30m times – and are making parents cry

I

’m listening to the latest Stephen Spencer song when suddenly I burst into tears. Was it the falsetto vocals? The swirling harmonies? No, it was the lyrics: “What did Apple-the-Stoola say? He said ‘I love you’ twenty-sixty times.”

Spencer, you see, has a unique lyrical collaborator: his three-year-old daughter. Over the last four months, he has been posting short songs online based on her stream-of-consciousness stories. There’s a smooth soul number about “a regular rabbit, who has regular ponytails just like me”. A song called Funchy the Snow-woman that could fit easily on to a 1975 album, but for its lyrical message about using a litter tray in the forest. And a festive tune about a Christmas cat called Harda Tarda, who hopes that Taja (“a funny way to say Santa”) will bring her “a doggy, a puppy and a ninja-bread man”.

When he started posting his songs, Spencer had 36 followers. “They were really just for my mom and her book club.” He now has more than 250,000 and his songs have been listened to an astonishing 23m times on Instagram and 5m times on TikTok. There have been demands to turn these minute-long mini-masterpieces into full-length versions for an album. “I’m hesitant to try to stretch them in a way that might spoil the magic of those captured moments,” he says. But there are plans to release something in longer form. A Spotify release of Regular Rabbit is set for this week.