PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — Devoted fans everywhere now have a new song they can listen to as they view the wildly popular webcam stream of April the giraffe, who has been due to deliver her calf any moment for weeks.
Ricky Reilly, a 30-year-old Farmington resident who works at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, wrote and sang the song, “I’m Going Crazy Waiting (For a Giraffe)” after an online fan suggested he write about the online sensation giraffe. Little did he know he would become an online sensation of sorts himself.
In the video he posted on YouTube, he can be seen playing the guitar and singing about the frustrations many people can relate to about the waiting game that is watching the pregnant April. In the ode, he pleads with the “little, tiny baby giraffe” to leave his mother’s womb because he is going crazy waiting.
“A woman named Nancy Perry who started following along with my music told me I should write a song about the giraffe, and of course I immediately knew what she was talking about,” Reilly said.
Reilly knew about April’s video because his fiancée had been watching it for the past month, as have countless people around the world. Night after night, he witnessed her frustration at the endless wait for the calf’s birth.
April the giraffe has continued to capture global attention since February. That’s when Animal Adventure Park in Harpursville, New York, where April resides, decided to post a YouTube live stream of the pregnant giraffe. The zoo gives daily updates, too.
At first, Reilly was skeptical at the idea of writing a song about the soon-to-be mother and told his fiancée he thought it might be too silly. But he took the challenge seriously nonetheless. Reilly said inspiration struck him in the shower, and, before he knew it, the first verse and chorus were written by the time he washed the conditioner out of his hair.
“As soon as I wrote the first line, everything that followed just flowed,” Reilly said. “I wrote the song within 15 minutes and the video I posted on YouTube was my first time performing it.”
The process of writing and recording the song all took place within a day. Reilly posted the recording April 1 and the reaction that has followed has been exciting, he said. The video quickly gained thousands of views on Facebook and YouTube.
“This is definitely my most popular video and song to date, and I’m just hoping people stick around to listen to more of what I’ve got to offer,” Reilly said.
Reilly is a multi-instrumentalist and produces original music as often as he can. He has been writing and recording music since he was 15. He graduated Berklee College of Music in Boston in 2010 and moved to New York to work in the music industry. However, Reilly was no longer writing and singing as much as he wanted to and moved back to Farmington.
When the singer-songwriter is not penning or singing any of his original work, he works as a mechanic at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.
“I’m going to keep working on music to create new content so I can take people’s feedback and criticism and hopefully become better,” Reilly says. “It would also be really awesome to actually get to meet the baby giraffe too.”
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