Art & Creativity Quote by Stephan Jenkins

There is something quietly disarming about calling your own songs a lullaby, because lullabies aren’t really for babies. They’re for the anxious adult hovering over the crib, whisper-singing a story where everything stays put. When Stephan Jenkins frames his music that way, he’s admitting the real job of the work: not self-expression as performance, but self-soothing as survival.

The line moves in a telling sequence: “things I can’t tie together” comes first, the present-tense mess of living. Then “things I’ve lost,” the ache of memory. Finally “things I’ll never have,” the hardest category, because it’s grief without an object you can point to. Jenkins isn’t romanticizing sadness; he’s cataloging the kinds of unresolved material that keep you awake. The lullaby is a method for lowering the noise floor just enough to function.

Subtextually, it’s also an argument for pop music’s seriousness without dragging in lofty rhetoric. A lullaby is repetitive, melodic, designed to be returned to. That’s basically the structure of radio-ready songwriting: hooks as coping mechanisms, choruses as rituals. For a frontman whose band lived in the alt-rock era’s sweet spot of confession and sheen, the quote reads like a small corrective to the myth of the tortured genius. The intent isn’t to flaunt pain; it’s to domesticate it. Music becomes a private room inside a public career, a place where the unfixable can at least be held to a tune.