[The following blog post was adapted from my July 2025 newsletter. My monthly newsletters are jam-packed with encouragements, life stories, family photos, “you heard it here first” music news, recommendations, & more — plus an audio link each month for you to listen podcast-style rather than reading! I send only one email each month, so you can trust that I will never spam you or bulk up your inbox. If you haven’t already, click here to sign up.]
“Maybe Tomorrow” isn’t just my favorite song of 2025 — it’s also my daughter Vivian’s. And that’s no joke!
Halfway through 2024, I started exploring YouTube to find what type of content Vivian would enjoy having on in the background while she and I colored or played with blocks or whatnot. The Wiggles and Sesame Street proved dependably entertaining for a while, without being utterly annoying or intellectually disrespectful to us adults in the room; most of the time, though, Vivian would just as happily ignore the video and focus on her toys if I wanted to select videos based on my own preferences, such as music production tutorials. But when I tested out playing K-Pop music videos for her, we found something that we could mutually love: well-produced, high-quality pop songs for me plus fun beats and mimic-able dance moves for her.
I often allowed YouTube’s auto-play algorithm to take the wheel for us, and we’ve found many favorites this way — but nothing could compete with when YouTube showed us DAY6. Immediately, this group was different, most evidently because the members all played instruments instead of danced, with plenty of guitar-led songs that veered in a rock direction. But it soon became clear that Vivian was enjoying DAY6’s songs more consistently than songs from other artists; it was also notable that, when she danced to other songs, she was often trying to copy the dance moves onscreen, whereas when she bounced and danced to DAY6’s music, there wasn’t any dancing in the videos for her to imitate. Her dancing stemmed solely from her enjoyment of the songs, such as early standout “days gone by.”
The timing really couldn’t have been any better to discover DAY6. In the fall of 2024, just as they hit our radar, the band was releasing their second mini-album of the year, following a multi-year hiatus and a 3-year gap between releases. The band was seeing a massive explosion of unexpected success with those two newest albums (featuring the hits “Welcome to the Show,” “Happy,” and my personal favorite song from the band, “Melt Down”), and these albums were quickly followed in November 2024 with the release of bandleader Sungjin’s debut solo album, 30. Combining this cascade of new music with an extremely large back catalog to explore, Vivian and I spent many months finding new songs to love. Naturally, I was thrilled to discover that the new music train wouldn’t be slowing down anytime soon, as a new single was announced for May 2025. That song, obviously, was “Maybe Tomorrow.”
Now, I would be lying to suggest that Vivian doesn’t love any other songs; at this point, there are a handful which make her light up and start dancing whenever they come on. But with all those other songs, Vivian’s love for them developed over time as she gained a sense of familiarity with them. Not only is Vivian’s excitement for “Maybe Tomorrow” degrees higher than that of any other song, but what also makes this song unique is that she FREAKED OUT the very first time she heard it. The song was released on a Wednesday, so she and I listened to it together on our drive to daycare. Quite ironically, I wasn’t blown away by the song on that first listen; I’ve come to love DAY6 especially for their guitar-rock compositions, so this song’s mid-tempo, orchestral style wasn’t what I was hoping to hear from a new single. But what really stood out to me from that first listen was the way Vivi lit up and starting doing an intense jiggy from her carseat for the bulk of the song. And that reaction has never really gone away!
Between streaming the single on Spotify, watching the music video, or enjoying the band’s incredible live rendition, I’ve heard “Maybe Tomorrow” over one hundred times — and I would reckon that Vivian has been present for well over half of those listens. Sometimes, she’ll grab my phone from me and find the song on Spotify (yes, at 22 months old, she could search for and recognize the artwork); other times, she’ll see the music video’s thumbnail on the TV screen and point to it, gesturing her request to watch it yet again. (She especially loves the moment during the live video where the elaborate lighting looks like stars across the sky; fittingly, “stars” has been one of her favorite words to say recently.) Something that has surprised and amazed me on multiple occasions is that, when the song has gotten randomly stuck in my head, I’ll start singing it (albeit singing it with my embarrassing amalgamation of Korean-like gibberish), and from the melodies alone, she’ll recognize it and start dancing with me. How crazy is that?!
But let’s be clear here — setting aside my initial disappoint with the song, I truly believe it to be an utter masterclass in pop songwriting, filled to the brim with killer vocal performances, gorgeous string arrangements, jazzy drumming, chunky guitar power chords, and (based on translations I’ve read) deeply introspective and bittersweet lyrics. Some standout lines include: “The pain surrounding me doesn’t seem like it’s going away / It feels like this moment will last forever / Where’s the path I’m supposed to take in this blurry world? / I don’t know / When tomorrow comes, it might be better than today / This burning wound might hurt a little less / I wait for the day to get my smile back / Maybe tomorrow.”
The song has been part of our lives for nearly four months at this point, and Paige and I keep waiting for the point when we get tired of it, or the point where Vivian stops excitedly reacting and dancing to it, but it continues to evade us! It’s hard to know when Vivi will age out of it — maybe tomorrow (har har), or maybe she’ll continue loving the song all the way into her teenage years! Actually…take that back. I don’t want to talk about her becoming a teenager… it’s tough enough that she just turned 2 years old! But however long her enthusiastic love for this song lasts, we’ll be extremely thankful.
I’ll conclude with an anecdote from our recent road trip to Illinois. We decided to wait until the afternoon to commence our drive from Nashville to Chicago, with hopes that Vivian’s bedtime would come around and she’d sleep for the final leg of the trip. Alas, plans did not pan out as we’d hoped; instead, Vivian woke up from her sleep about 45 minutes in and started screaming: an aching yelp unlike anything we’d heard before, an anxious cry for help as if she was stuck and would never be let out of the car ever again. We didn’t know what to do, and I had resigned myself to enduring her screams for the remainder of the drive, as I navigated the stressful high-speed traffic of the Chicago highways. Then Paige had the idea of playing “Maybe Tomorrow” over the car speakers, and within the first few seconds of the song, Vivian calmed down and stopped crying. By the end of the song, she’d fallen back asleep, and the lovely sounds of random other DAY6 songs kept her asleep until we arrived at our destination.
(P.S. Keep an eye out on my blog and/or newsletter for an upcoming retrospective article about my experiences becoming a DAY6 fan over the past year and how their music has positively effected my own music-making. The upcoming article will also include my thoughts on the band’s brand new album The Decade, which will be released on September 5.)
