The Perfect Graduation Gift: A Custom-Made Song

You are not the parents, and you do not want your gift read as a smaller version of theirs. By the time yours gets handed over there have already been four cards with cash in them, and every one of them said proud of you in the same font.

The advantage you have is that you know something those cards do not. The aunt remembers the summer he slept on her couch and went through every box of cereal in the house. The godparent remembers the drive to the audition, an hour each way, twice. The grandmother remembers the nine year old who reorganized her spice rack without being asked and has been exactly like that ever since. A song built on one of those does not have to sum up a childhood. It tells one true thing well, which is the whole reason it hits differently than a check.

If you are not a writer, do not write. Tell us the memory in three sentences the way you would tell it across a table, add what they are heading into next, and we build the song around it. No rhyming, no music vocabulary, no second draft from you.

You get an original studio-quality song written from your details, $19.99, in your inbox within 24 hours, which means it still lands inside graduation week.

Pick the memory you always bring up when their name comes up. That is your first verse. Start the order form with it.