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This one started with my eight-year-old daughter singing capybara stuff into Suno. The thing she gave me was less lyrics than a manifesto:

Capybara, capybara, the cute and fluffy rodent The largest one in the world Because I love capybaras, do you? Because it's a capybara time What is a capybara? Capybaras are large rodents They're thought super cute, but some people don't like them So I need to change their opinion to make capybaras rule the world King Capybara

What got released shortly after, on the 30th of November under the name Clemster, doesn't contain a single one of those lines. No rule-the-world, no King Capybara. The bit where she explains what a capybara is, in case you didn't know, also didn't make it. The song that exists wouldn't exist without her inspiration.

The reference was Parry Gripp. Raining Tacos specifically but others as well. I genuinely love that song and I love good novelty songs generally, and one of the things you only really notice when you sit down to write one is that they are not nearly as easy as they sound. There are real craft rules under the silliness, and breaking them is what makes most novelty songs not work. I might write about that properly at some point. For now: I went in thinking "Parry Gripp does this all the time, how hard can it be," and got humbled.

The song begins like this:

Who's the chillest guy alive? (KAPY!) Who don't care at all? (KAPY!) KAPY KAPY KAPY KAPY!

And the chorus is just the title four times:

KAP-E-BAR-AH! Merry Christmas! KAP-E-BAR-AH! Merry Christmas! KAP-E-BAR-AH! Merry Christmas! KAP-E-BAR-AH... CHILL!

That chorus took about fifteen drafts to find, and most of those drafts were trying to do something more elaborate than that. Capybara hosts an animal Christmas. Animals arrive at his Christmas. Capybara saves Christmas because Santa's reindeer broke down. There were verses where ducks knocked over the Christmas tree and otters made it snow inside. The first two or three "final" versions had a chorus about animals sitting on a capybara, which is a perfectly cute concept and is also the song writing itself in the wrong key.

What got me out of it was making the capybara passive. Christmas happens around him; he doesn't run it or host it, doesn't save it from anything. He ignores it.

Under the tree, won't move an inch Snow on his head, he don't even flinch Presents everywhere, he don't even peek Only wants a carrot all week

Two things start working at once when you do that. The Christmas imagery comes for free, because tree, snow and presents are all just stuff he's not looking at. You don't have to describe a Christmas scene because you only have to mention the things he's refusing to engage with, and the listener does the rest. And the joke gets funnier the more the song around him insists on Christmas. Santa says "Ho!" KAPY just yawns. He's the still point in a frantic season. That's the actual idea. The song almost died as "everybody's invited to a capybara Christmas" because there was no still point - just animals doing things with no centre to bounce off.

The earlier drafts were doing the equivalent of writing the song's joke twice. If the bit is "this guy ignores everything," then the verse can't also be "and look at all this fun chaos!" The chaos goes in the other instruments. The vocal stays calm. The lyric points at one carrot.

It's not a perfect song. It's 1:38, it leans hard on nom nom nom and splash splash splash in a way I'd want to revisit if I went near this kind of thing again, and the whole thing lives or dies on whether you find the chorus repetition funny rather than annoying. That means it has a low ceiling for some listeners and a very high one for others. That's the nature of the form. Raining Tacos has the same problem.

A note on the artist name: songs like Avalanche and Sticky Carpets are doing serious things, or trying to, and I didn't want a chill capybara meme song landing next to them in anyone's recommendations. So this went out as Clemster, which sounds slightly more memey, and is meant to. The video on YouTube is made in Veo with some CapCut on top of it. There's a steep learning curve there and it's not as slick as I'd want. I'll write about the AI video stuff separately at some point, because most of what I've made on that front is good in one very specific way but otherwise rough.

The track went out at Christmas and got a few hundred listens. That isn't nothing and it isn't a lot. With proper promotion I genuinely think this kind of song could do real numbers; without it, it just sits there being a song.

The bit I keep coming back to though is that my daughter loves it. She's incredibly proud of it. The day I put it on Spotify and showed her the YouTube video, I was, briefly, the coolest dad in the world. None of her actual words made it into the song. But she's the reason there's a song.