Birthday Song Videos

The songs on this page were each written for one person's birthday — a mom turning seventy, a best friend turning thirty, a grandfather hearing his own life story set to music while the family sings along. A custom birthday song does what the traditional one can't: it names the person. Their nicknames, their obsessions, the way they burn the toast every single time, the year they drove across the country on a whim. Four minutes of music that could not be about anyone else on earth.

Milestone birthdays are the most common reason people commission one. A fortieth, a sixtieth, a ninetieth — the years when a card feels too small and a party needs a centerpiece. The song often becomes the moment of the celebration: the room goes quiet, the first verse lands, and the birthday person realizes the lyrics are their own memories coming back to them. Plenty of these songs are funny on purpose, packed with family jokes and gentle roasting; others are straightforwardly tender, especially the ones written for parents and grandparents by children who finally got to say everything out loud.

Listen to a few of the videos below and notice how specific the lyrics get — that specificity is the entire point. These aren't birthday songs; each one is somebody's birthday song. If someone you love has a birthday coming, especially one with a zero at the end of it, you can tell us about them and have a song written from those details. It takes a few minutes to share the story, and the result is a gift they will play for people for the rest of their life.

These songs work at any age — first birthdays get lullaby-tender tributes parents replay for years, and hundredth birthdays get century-spanning ballads with a room full of descendants singing along. At parties the song usually plays once for the tears and once more for the singalong, and families often set it against a photo slideshow. If the birthday person hates being the center of attention, fair warning: this gift makes that unavoidable for about four minutes.