Rockabye Baby Is All Grown Up & Ready For More First Steps

Twenty years ago, Lisa Roth was just trying to find a baby gift for a friend who loves music. What seemed like a simple task kept coming up empty after she’d sort through countless piles of CDs with babies on the cover and a million different renditions of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Everything felt, well, babyish.

“I had wished there was something I’d be proud to give, that would make my friend happy, and could be something the adult could enjoy in this baby-parent relationship,” Roth recalls. So, she created it. At the time, Roth had just begun working at CMH Label Group and called a meeting with president David Haerle and collaborator Valerie Aiello to pitch the idea. “I said, ‘We have to get into the baby business. We need to do something like Baby’s First Punk Album or Baby’s First Sex Pistols,” Roth remembers.

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The team settled on “lullaby renditions” of famous rock catalogs and quickly got to work. In three months, they had packaged the first three albums—Coldplay, Radiohead, and Metallica—and with that, Rockabye Baby was born. Today, the L.A.-based company is the world’s leading lullaby brand, with more than 130 releases and more than 4.5 billion streams and a portfolio that has expanded beyond rock. One of their latest releases is a take on Beyonce’s Lemonade and coming soon is Post Malone and Paramore.

And to think, Roth never even dreamed of getting into the music business. Her brother, the one and only David Lee Roth, had already laid his stake and she didn’t see herself taking on the same career path. “I didn’t think there was any place for me in the industry. And I can’t carry a tune to save my life!” she jokes, remembering how she tried to play trumpet in her school’s marching band and knew it wasn’t for her. But Roth has long been a talented dancer and always loved the music that accompanies her practice. “That’s what dance is. It’s like showing music within your body,” she says.

All of the Roth kids were creatively gifted (another sibling Allison, is a Jill of all trades who works as an actor, voiceover talent, stylist, makeup artist, and designer/decorator). Lisa says they got the creative itch from their parents, father Nathan and mother Sibyl. While Sibyl was a painter and decorator who studied set design at Northwestern University, Nathan was an ophthalmologist who took up acting later in life and started an equity waiver theater in downtown Pasadena, where he produced plays and would sometimes direct or act in them as well.

Still, Nathan Roth hoped one of his children would follow his footsteps and go into the medical field, and for a time, Lisa sort of did. For two decades, she ran a health and wellness practice that, in the process, introduced her to two unique opportunities.

One was contributing as a segment producer for a health show on the Discovery Channel, and the other was meeting one of the business partners at CMH Label Group who wanted help with nutrition. Soon, it led to a more formal job with the record company, which has spent 50 years fostering American roots music through recordings by Merle Travis, Wanda Jackson, The Osborne Brothers, Pine Mountain Railroad, and others. The label also established similar tribute series, including Pickin’ On, which offers bluegrass takes on popular artists, and Vitamin String Quartet, featuring classical musicians reinterpreting Top 40 hits.

At the time the job had no title, and Roth admittedly didn’t think she was qualified.

“The first week I was there, the office manager said to me, ‘You have no discernible skills to work here,’” Roth divulges, showing the Post-It Note where she wrote down those exact words, a memento that she has kept on her office wall all these years as a testament to the hard work that got her to where she is today; namely, vice President of the label and a creative force behind Rockabye Baby—even if it was all just happenstance as a result of not being able to find that perfect baby gift.

“Never in a million years did I think I would be making lullabies for a living,” Roth admits. “But it turns out it’s not a bad way to do so and it’s fun, too.” Below, she shares more about how the team chooses the albums to recreate, what genres are the most challenging, the one album she made with her brother, and Rockabye Baby’s latest idea: bringing lullabies to the stage.

Rockabye Baby has such a massive catalog, from Backstreet Boys to Billie Eilish and the Beatles to BTS and Bad Bunny. How do you end up choosing the albums?

In the beginning, the origins were rock. We released Coldplay, Radiohead, and Metallica as our first three because they had the most irony. Since then, we’ve been releasing three to six albums a year. We have an internal team of myself and my production partner, as well as our head of marketing and an A&R person, and together we brainstorm the release schedule a year in advance, sometimes two years in advance. We look at what’s hot and happening, what our customers are asking for, and throw out ideas that we have a gut instinct that our demographic, which is quite broad, will enjoy. Then, we pick six releases each year from that list. It’s a very long list that keeps getting added to over time, and what we choose sometimes changes—something big might happen in the music industry or there have been artists, I won’t say who, where things kind of went south and we figured it probably wouldn’t be so great to release them right now. But, overall, we pretty much stick to the schedule that we put out a year in advance.

In terms of the broad demographic you mentioned, who is the audience for Rockabye Baby, beyond parents and babies?

A lot of people listen to the albums. It’s not just parents and their babies, but it did create something for parents to share with their children. I like to say it’s a little bridge between who you were and who you’re becoming when you’re a parent. It’s funny because, when we started, none of us had children, which I think has informed a bit of what we’ve done. A notable person in the music industry called me one day and said, “I put this on at dinner parties in the background and people love it.” That’s one of my favorite ideas. People play it for their dogs when they’re leaving the house. Or for yoga classes or studying. It makes me very happy because, honestly, I was more interested in the adult from the very beginning than I was the baby.

Do the artists know when their work is being adapted for Rockabye Baby and support it, or have you found any challenges in trying to get the licenses?

Most of our albums are a compilation taken from the artist or the band’s catalog over time. We have biggest hits, deep cuts, and an assortment of tracks from their entire career. And every once in a while, we do one album cover to cover. The most recent is Beyonce’s Lemonade and we’ve also done Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Once we pick the artist, we put the track list together and then we approach the publisher or owner of each song and get a mechanical license. Sometimes there are many, many splits; these days, there could be six, eight, 10, 12 people who contributed to one song. I can’t really think of a time that there’s been a problem. There are so many opportunities now for an artist’s music to show up in unusual or creative ways that you don’t hear too often about an artist who doesn’t want to license their music. We’ve been supported or mentioned by a lot of people. Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler wrote liner notes. Elton John, Rivers Cuomo, Chrissy Teigen, and Kate Hudson have been fans. Questlove did a whole carousel on his socials where he put together a bunch of our album covers. That made me feel valid; his mark of approval meant the world to me.

Who is behind the arrangements and the recording of each album?

We have a handful of producers we work with. We assign a producer an album, and they take each track, deconstruct it, and put it back together using our palette of instruments, which have a lot of clunk and tinkle. There’s a lot of wood blocks, xylophones, and bells. Over time, the sound has evolved, too. Then they send it to myself and James Curtis, my production partner, and we listen to each and every note and send ideas back to the producer. We go back and forth like that until we have not only the perfect clunk and tinkle, but also know it’s recognizable and quiet enough that, if you have a baby sitting on your lap, it can be soothing or entertaining. It’s quite a process and quite an art form. People always say, “You just slow it down, right?” But no, not always. We have some Rockabye Baby albums where we slowed them down and we will never do that again. Trying to come up with a minor chord guitar solo using a woodblock is an art form. I’ll leave it at that.

It seems like there’d be some styles of music that may be more difficult than others to adapt into lullabies. Have you ever had to abandon the project because it just didn’t work?

We have never abandoned a project. But there are some styles that are harder than others. Some artists are so melodic that it’s not that difficult. Heavy metal is a little hard because a lot of the instruments we use don’t have any sustain. When there’s a lot of heavy guitar, there’s a lot of sustain required. Rap albums can also be challenging because there’s no melody sometimes, so you have to fill in where there is no music, just the voice. But honestly, it’s a very interesting way to learn about how an artist puts their music together. When you deconstruct everything and you put it back together in a way where it’s recognizable, you learn some of the patterns and approaches that repeat themselves throughout the catalog.

Speaking of heavy metal, you did make an album with your brother, the Lullaby Renditions of Van Halen. What was that process like?

I waited a really long time to do it. I think I waited 12 years to do the Van Halen album. I was always told from the time I was very young, you never work with family. And I put it off because I wasn’t even sure he’d want to do it. And if we did it, I wanted to make sure we knew what we were doing. So it took a long time, but it happened.

Rockabye Baby has cornered the market on physical products and streaming. Have you ever thought about taking this live with concerts?

We’ve been approached a number of times to do many things, and one of them is a live show. But it’s been about figuring out, how do we do that? It is something we’re very interested in and that we’re talking about as we speak. I’d love to do it, and I think there are some fun, entertaining ways to accomplish it, so stay tuned.

After you celebrate the 20th anniversary of Rockabye Baby this year, what do you hope is in store for the future?

I think what has to be answered first is what’s going to be happening in the music industry in the next 20 years. There is so much change going on, and Rockabye Baby has already been through so many changes, from filing CDs in record store bins to iTunes to streaming services and now LPs are back again. It’s actually one of the intellectual challenges of this job, keeping an eye on developments and trying to make the right decisions in the face of enormous changes, as well as dealing with the fallout of some of those changes and rising above it. But in the end, I hope Rockabye Baby survives and continues to fulfill the need and the niche for this music.

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