Snail's Pace and a Bloggy Birthday

I'm happy to announce the release of Snail's Pace, my fourth CD of cool tunes for kids. I was about to say "my new CD", but it's actually somewhat of a compilation of the more laid-back tunes from my three previous albums, with six new tracks, so it's only partially "new".

The new tracks include a new recording of "The Elephant Song", featuring my girls, Becca and Evee; "Scat Cat", which I've mentioned and previewed here before, featuring the amazing scat vocals of Sam Payne (and the "Scat cat!" yelling of some of you!); "Nightlight", a new version of a pre-kids' music song of mine (which was in the top 10 for quite a while on the old MP3.com charts); "For the Beauty of the Earth", a classic hymn; and my version of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", with some original lyrics and music. There is also a bonus download track included, called "The Cruelest Lullaby". (That was originally going to be the final track on Monkey Business, but we thought there was a chance that it might be too scary for some younger kids who wouldn't get that it's meant to be very tongue-in-cheek, so we rewrote it as "Rest Easy Now".)

Snail's Pace can be ordered at this page, and if you already have my first three CDs, there is a special deal available to only get the new tracks as a ZIP file or as individual downloads. Snail's Pace includes a bona fide lullaby or two, but it's really more of a "quiet-time" or "chill out" kind of album, and also has some spiritual undertones here and there. It was a lot of fun to put together and work on the new tracks, and I was able to do a few minor edits and mixing tweaks to some of the previously released tracks (which is always nice to do if you can find the time and reason to do so). I hope y'all enjoy it a lot.

I wanted to mention, also, that the cover of Snail's Pace was designed by my daughter, Becca, who was three at the time. Roseann and I were talking about what the title of the album should be, when Becca walked up with a picture of a snail that she had drawn on her magnetic drawing board. We quickly took a picture of it (those things aren't really the most permanent mediums of art!) and the snail on the cover of the album was taken directly from that original picture, though Roseann colored it and added some shading and did the background (with Becca's help).



--------------------------------------------------------------

I'm also happy to announce that the one year birthday of this blog was last week. I checked the stats recently and it has grown almost exponentially in readers since the beginning, so I'm really glad to see that. But although I know that a lot of people are reading the posts and articles here, I would love to see more commentary, so please feel free to add your thoughts.

It turns out that I've been averaging just over a post a week this past year. A post a week was my target goal, so that's cool, although it's probably seemed to be less than that with periods of inactivity here and there. I expect the average to go down a little bit again over the busy summer months, but I'll try to make up for it over the fall and winter. I do have a few new artist features and articles ready to go, so I'll be posting those every so often and adding whatever else I can when I have some free time.

Thanks so much for stopping by here and welcoming me to the kids' music blogging community. I look forward to sharing a lot more with you in the coming year!

Very best,
Eric Herman