Cool Tunes for Kids

Sugar Free Allstars - New CD, DVD and interview

2010-04-29T09:27:00.000-07:00

So the funkiest kids' music act known to man (well, at least known to this man), Sugar Free Allstars, has been busy of late... Last fall they put out a live DVD, Gettin' Funky with the Sugar Free Allstars, which really shows off the live energy and musical talent of the dynamic duo. And just the other day they officially released their second CD, funky fresh and sugar free, which picks up where Dos Ninos left off and includes soon to be SFA classics like "6th Grade Band", "In My Pocket" and "Little Red Wagon", as well as a funkified cover of The Beatles' "Ob-la-di". Check out the video for "Rock Awesome" below and click here to order the DVD and the new CD.

It continues to amaze me how only two guys can get such a big and funky sound, but when one of those guys is the powerfully drum-slammin' Dr. Rock and the other is the incredibly talented vocalist and keys player, Chris Wiser, then it becomes more understandable. Here's an interview I did with Chris back in 2008 while I was passing through Oklahoma: Chris Wiser Interview

Interview: The Imagination Movers

2009-12-21T07:59:00.000-08:00

I had mentioned in my previous post about the Imagination Movers that although I knew of them for several years and enjoyed the few song clips I'd heard of theirs, it wasn't until watching their TV show on Playhouse Disney that they I could really appreciate how great they were. The Monkees style humor and charm of the show and their characters was immediately endearing, but their music in particular became infectious and memorable with every new show. The Movers songs have a terrific mix of accessible and kid-focused original pop-rock, with influences and styles that include driving Cajun rhythms, Red Hot Chili Pepper style funk rap, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, BNL, and various 80's rock staples. It's a great sound, with the four of them taking turns on vocals, and the songwriting and production is sharp and focused and always serves the song and the audience.

But as much as I've come to love the band, that couldn't begin to compare to how much my girls love them. New episodes of their show are eagerly awaited, recorded, watched and rewatched several times, with particularly funny moments giving my 7 year-old Becca practice with the rewind function of the DVR remote so she and her sister Evee can watch them over and over and laugh like crazy. So when I noticed that the Imagination Movers were embarking on a tour and would be coming to the Northwest in December, and knowing I was taking the month of December off, it was a no-brainer that we'd have to catch one of their shows.

We actually kept it a secret from our girls the whole time, describing our four-hour drive to Seattle as being a trip to pick up a new engine for Mommy's car (which turned out to be a secondary reason we went there that day). Now, we travel enough to where our girls can have a fun experience with any time that we're on the road, and we're happy to play games and listen to music and talk about various things while driving for hours... but still, a trip to Seattle to get an engine just wasn't all that thrilling of a notion for them. So you can imagine their reaction when, after picking up the engine, we drove slowly past a theater where Becca noticed big letters on the marquee that read "IMAGINATION MOVERS - DEC 12". We played dumb at first... "Hmmm, what day is that? Oh hey, that's today. Whaddya know? Ah, but we would need tickets for that..." And then both girls sighed in a softly sad way... But then, well... let's just say that I'm still hearing echoes from the shrieks of joy that ensued when I pulled out the tickets and showed them.

And as if the show itself wasn't incredibly fun enough, they got to meet Rich, Smitty, Scott, Dave and Drummer Kyle afterward. They were able to discuss important things like Webkinz with the guys (apparently, Dave has 12 Webkinz at home... I'm not sure how many are his, though) and even sang a verse of the Plants vs. Zombies theme song for Mover Dave. Needless to say, it was a very memorable day, and the guys were tremendously generous with their time and super-nice and friendly, as you would only expect from watching their show.

Before the show I was able to interview them and talk a little about their experiences and challenges in developing their music and the TV show. I was told by their stage manager that I would only have 3 minutes to talk with them, so if I sound a little hurried at first, it's because I kept expecting to get yanked at any moment and wanted to make sure I got a question or two in. But we ended up talking for 15 minutes, so that was really nice of them to share that much time right before their show. As it turned out, their show started almost exactly 12 minutes late, but I'm sure that was just a coincidence. (I'm just kidding... they started on time.)

Here's the interview: Interview with the Imagination Movers

The Imagination Movers' website

Interview: Tito Uquillas of the Hipwaders

2009-11-28T13:26:00.000-08:00

The Hipwaders are definitely one of the coolest "kindie rock" bands to emerge in the last several years. This was an interesting year for the band in that they had two releases, both a little different than the norm; the first was Goodie Bag, which is a Hipwaders record through and through, but only with an EP's worth of songs, and the second is Kindie Christmas, an album of all original Christmas songs with the Hipwaders' sound and style. Check out the videos below for "Field Trip" from Goodie Bag and "Santa's Train" and "Wake Up" from Kindie Christmas.

Though their three-piece lineup has morphed a bit during that time, singer-guitarist-songwriter Tito Uquillas has always remained at the helm. I'm thankful to call Tito my good friend, and our families have been able to meet up a few times now when we've been traveling through the area. We always have a great time talking at length and jamming a little and this last time we visited I did the following interview with Tito... Enjoy!

Interview with Tito Uquillas

Buy the Hipwaders' CDs on CDBaby

What a Ride!

2009-10-02T15:46:00.000-07:00

What a Ride!, my fifth CD of music for kids/families, was released back in June (man, I'm so behind on this blog...). The album includes 11 tracks and some guest appearances and performances by several awesome kids' music artists, many of whom I've featured here; Gwendolyn Sanford of Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang, Tito Uquillas of The Hipwaders, Eric Ode, Robbi K, Chris Wiser of Sugar Free Allstars, Jim Dague of Scribblemonster, David Tobocman, Devon Thagard of Super Simple Songs, Glenn Colton and Mr. Billy.

My wife, Roseann, and I produced this album together over the past two years, and though there is certainly no objectivity here, we think it's my best album yet and we're really happy with how it turned out. Well, the final master for the first run was a little different than for subsequent runs, since I noticed some things I wanted to adjust, sound-wise... We were pressed for time to get it to the manufacturer to have copies in hand by the release date and I believe I would have chosen a different mix/master to send in for that if I'd had more time to review everything. But that's all fixed for future runs. The album as it was sounded good, just the perfectionist in me wanted a few tonal changes here and there... Regardless, I've always been very happy with the music that's on the album.

I would say that What a Ride! is less comedy oriented than albums like Snow Day! or Monkey Business, and it probably skews a little older in general than my previous albums, but it has a really nice variety to it, and thematically it loosely depicts the journey and growth of childhood and the exploration and illumination involved with that. The album also includes some of my very favorite songs from among my catalogue, specifically "Stink Bug", "What a Ride" and "How Big". "How Big", in particular, came out better than I could have hoped, especially with the soaring outro vocals by Robbi K and the chorus of friends and family on the outro refrain... I don't know if any song could really begin to describe or depict the unimaginable immensity of life and the universe, but "How Big" does give me a little bit of the feeling of that, which is what I was aiming for. We're currently working on a video for that, which will be fun to put together.

You can listen to samples of all 11 songs at this page. There are also full songs to hear, including "Heartbeat (The Stethoscope Song)", "What a Ride" and "How Big", at my Facebook page. The video for "Ants in Your Pants #99" is below, as well as the compilation video from a video dance contest we held on YouTube back in July. What a Ride! is available through my website, as well as at CDBaby, Amazon.com, iTunes and other major digital sites.

Didi Pop

2009-08-21T08:48:00.001-07:00

Didi Pop has been embarrassing me. Her tunes are so catchy that I find myself singing them in public places, not even realizing I'm doing it. Normally, that wouldn't be so bad, even with a 40 year-old guy singing kids' tunes, but there's something particularly disturbing about singing a line like "when my diaper's drippy, it hardens up my poo" and realizing by the look on the grocery clerk's face that yes, I did sing that out loud.

I'm referring to a line from the song, "B-R-A-T-Y", the video of which (watch it below) was my first introduction to Didi Pop, a children's artist from Los Angeles. For me, the song was an instant classic; amazingly catchy and upbeat, and so up front about its dietary/digestive message. I think we in the kids' music world sometimes shy away from songs that could be considered "preachy" or "messagey" (I don't think that's even a word... and my spell checker agrees... but I've heard it used a lot in this genre), or we try to be so subtle about it that any message that is there is going to be too vague for a lot of kids to even appreciate. But Didi has nothing to hide on "B-R-A-T-Y"; if you eat certain foods, your bowel movements will be more solid. Pure information, sung so matter-of-factly and confidently with a bouncy "11 o'clock number" showtune melody that it becomes ingrained almost instantly. Now, if the message in "B-R-A-T-Y" was bad information, it could be dangerous propaganda... you wouldn't want kids going around singing "when my diaper's drippy, I should hitchhike to Reykjavik"... but as it is, the song is a perfect vehicle for its message.

Didi came to a show of mine in L.A. earlier this year and we exchanged CDs. She gave me her debut Didi Pop CD and I gave her a scratched copy of Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer in Twelve Different Languages (which was hidden inside one of my CD cases). I think I got the better deal from that as we have since listened to her CD over and over and over, with my girls requesting it over and over and over and me not minding to play it over and over and over. So what makes Didi's CD so great? Well, I'll tell you...

Didi has one of the best voices I've ever heard in the kids' genre; great range and tone and polished yet down-to-earth. At times she sounds a bit like other favorites of mine like Frances England and Gwendolyn from Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang, so there's a familiarity about the general sound which is nice for what she's singing, but she also has very much of her own voice and style. If anything, Didi's singing approach and aura as a performer reminds me most of Mary Poppins; at times soft and sweet but often in-your-face brassy with a sly charm and wit that belies the messages she is planting.

Her singing is one thing, but Didi is also a top-notch songwriter, giving a great vehicle to her voice and singing approach. "The Cool Alphabet Song" (see video below) at first seems like yet another attempt to supplant that famous alphabet song (which is not likely to happen in our lifetime), but it takes some really interesting turns musically and uses some clever letter devices (not unlike Ralph's World's recent "Abby's Alphabet Soup"). "Feed the Pet" is a cute calypso style tune and "Max the Wonderdog" a terrific Tin Pan Alley style tale. "Yellow Car" is an example of the depth and breadth of this album, as it was not an early favorite of mine and yet it's the tune I find myself singing in public places most often lately (which is much less embarrassing than "B-R-A-T-Y"). "Look at Yourself in the Mirror" is a super cool pop tune with yet another incredibly catchy hook; "Neferdidi" is a fun genie-in-the-lamp story with a great Silk Road sound; and "Monday" is a neat a cappela trip through the days of the week and other time-related measurements.

The closing song on Didi Pop is called "Dream". "Dream" is not just one of the best lullabies I've ever heard, it's one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard, period. This song has actually made me cry while driving down the road listening to it and thinking of how magnificent life really is (yes, more embarrassment if a trucker happens to drive by and see me bawling while listening to a lullaby!). The lyrics are fairly standard lullaby fare about rainbows and clouds and such, but there is something so deeply moving about the way everything comes together for me with the words and music and Didi's elegant singing, that I don't know if I can even express it adequately. When our Becca was a baby, we had a mix CD of different mellow songs (James Taylor, etc.) to play for her at bedtime, and it was nice for us to hear those songs coming through the baby monitor in our room. I'll never forget how one night, as I was drifting away into sleep, I barely heard "Canon in D" playing through the monitor, and with my eyes closed I could see this gloriously colorful world of music far away among the darkness of the room and of the night and of the world. It was a wonderful feeling and this song is one of the few things I've heard since then that has touched into that same kind of spirit.

I couldn't talk about Didi Pop's album without mentioning what is perhaps its greatest weapon of all... Delilah. Delilah is Didi's daughter, three years-old at the time of the recording, and she may be the cutest sounding little kid I've heard on any children's CD (and I've heard some cute ones!). She interacts wonderfully on songs like "Feed the Pet" ("feed a Dinah Shore!") and "Merci" and pops up in a few spots here and there, and I would have liked to hear more of her on the album. My advice to Didi is to take Delilah into a studio and record her for several hours saying various different things, so she'll have a backlog of cute Delilah recordings to use for albums to come, though I'm sure she'll still be very cute sounding for at least a few more years.

But you don't have to take my word for any of this... Didi has generously offerred her entire album to listen to for free on her website at this link: http://www.didipop.com By all means, go there and listen, but be forewarned, you may find yourself belting out her tunes in public, and if so, well, I hope you don't get embarrassed too easily.

Didi Pop's website

Gunnar Madsen

2009-04-29T12:31:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how with all of the kids' music I've heard since starting this blog (and before that), I am still often blown away by new things I hear... And every so often, I'm blown away even beyond any normal standards of what constitutes being "blown away". Gunnar Madsen's I'm Growing album is a perfect example of that, and is without a doubt one of the most entertaining kids' music albums I've ever heard.

I'm Growing may not be to everyone's taste (not that anything is)... it is at once adventurous, over-the-top, complex, goofy, challenging and diverse, and it might be a little too much for anyone looking for a more straightforward sing-a-long kind of CD for their kids. But if you can just let it play and be open to discovering its creativity and uniqueness, then a real musical treat awaits, to be sure.

The opening title track builds up to arrive and envelope you. Instantly, Gunnar's vocal and arranging virtuosity is evident (he might be considered the kids' music equivalent of Bobby McFerrin) and you know you're in for something really special, and the rest of the album delivers a tasty smorgasbord of musical and lyrical ideas. "Pumpkin Hair" takes a simple, folksy kind of barn dance rhythm (think the New Main Street Singers from A Mighty Wind) and spices it up with some unexpected chord changes. "Walkin' Back to Texas" seems to channel 70's laid-back folk-rock tunes like Mungo Jerry's "In the Summertime". "Sun Comes Up" bounces along with some clever odd-timing and fun vocal play. "Mozart's at the Window" is a tour-de-force of vocal harmonies and layering. "Always on the Bottom" is a catchy and funny Elvis-style tune that scores extra credit for rhyming "bottom" with "Hillary Rodham". "Simple" belies its name by including some sophisticated lyrics and chord changes in a cool tongue-in-cheek way. "Library Closing Time" is a party rock anthem with a great rhythm pickup and the classic line: "Dewey Decimal? Yes, we do." The album ends with the beautiful original track "Tonight" and a stunning rendition of the traditional standard "Shenandoah".

Much of I'm Growing sounds familiar, musically speaking, and yet it's so fresh and original that it is always unmistakably "Gunnar Madsen". I'm reminded of the quote I used to describe Frances England's first CD, where Leonard Bernstein referenced good art as being "fresh, but inevitable." Gunnar's other children's music CDs, Old Mr. Mackle Hackle and Ants in My Pants, and his composing efforts involving waltzes and synthesized dramatic works all have the same sense of unique brilliance and variety. But I'm Growing reaches musical heights even farther reaching than his previous children's albums, and stands out as a groundbreaking recording in the genre.

Click here for song samples, lyrics and ordering information for I'm Growing.

I was happy to be able to meet up with Gunnar at his home last year and interview him about I'm Growing and the rest of his work, but I've had some trouble getting the interview transcribed... It's almost complete now, though, so I will try to get that posted sometime after I'm home again in May.

Kids' Rock by Tim Hawkins

2009-01-15T12:30:00.000-08:00

More new stuff coming soon, I promise, but in the meantime, check out this video... and don't drink any milk while you watch it...

CD Short Takes

2008-12-20T14:12:00.001-08:00

In an attempt to catch up on the enormous backlog of CDs I have received for this blog over the past year, here's the first batch of several "short take" CD reviews... with more such batches to come over the winter. Though I like to include sound samples and video clips with my feature posts, they can take a good amount of time to get together, so I'm going to skip those for these short takes and just post the artist's website links. In most cases, the websites should have sound samples available, or links to sites that do...

That Baby CD

I think the producers of this CD did themselves a disservice by naming it what they did... Presumably, it was meant to be a CD of mellowish classic rock covers for babies to chill out to, but the songs are sophisticated (the Pretenders' "Brass in Pocket" as an "I need some attention!" kids' song was a particularly brilliant choice) and the singing and arrangements are beautiful and contemporary, and my girls (aged 6 and nearly 4) play this album repeatedly in their bedroom while loudly singing along. So by all means, ignore the title, as this is just a great record for any age, really.

That Baby CD website

ScribbleMonster - Songs With No Character

According to the press release this is supposed to be a CD for parents, moreso than kids, which is presumably why they left ScribbleBunny and even ScribbleMonster himself off of the album in favor of the human voices of Jim and Jayne and Joyce. But I think most of the songs still work very well as kids' songs, so regardless, it's a really great ScribbleMonster album. Highlights include the Motown rocker, "Doing the Right Thing Isn't Always Easy, Doing the Easy Thing Isn't Always Right"; the hilariously awesome "I'm a Utility Pole (The World's Worst Dance Song)"; the incredibly touching board game metaphor, "The Game of Life"; and the great "look for the silver lining" message of "It Could Have Been Worse" (co-written with Monty Harper). I do miss the ScribbleMonster "fill-in-the-blank songs" from their previous CDs, but still, this a very entertaining album, through and through.

ScribbleMonster website

Eric Ode - When You Smile

This is, I think, Eric's strongest collection of songs yet, with a lot of fun tunes including the opener "Poor Planet Pluto", a poignant and topical story about the former planet's status reduction from "planet" to "giant rock floating in space"; "Legendary Larry", a clever lounge jazz number about an incredibly average person; "Let a Little Light Shine", a rhythmically interesting and very catchy spiritual anthem; and the classic "This Song Has No Elephants", which may be the best Eric Ode song EVAR. The recorded poem tracks are kind of hit and miss for me, but musically speaking, this is a very solid and engaging album. (Kudos to Eric for the several poems of his included on Buck Howdy's Grammy-nominated CD, Around the Fire... and kudos to Buck, too, of course!)

Eric Ode website

Justin Roberts - Pop Fly

After five listens through, Pop Fly hasn't attached itself to me the way Justin's previous Meltdown album did after the first or second listen, but the fact that I've listened to it five times through should be indication enough that by any reasonable standard for kids' music, it's a really great album (and another favorite of my girls'). The opening title track is quintessential Justin Roberts; adventurous, melodic, memorable, wonderful... and though the rest of the album doesn't quite reach the same heights as that song does, there are several other gems, including the funny and folksy "Henrietta's Hair", "Field Trip" (complete with Roberts' signature v-v-v-vocal lines and "whoa-oh"s) and the ultra-smooth "Kickboard, Baby, Yeah".

Justin Roberts website

Ralph's World - Rhyming Circus

Though similar to Pop Fly in that it doesn't live up to the expectation created by its enormously awesome predecessor (Green Gorilla, Monster and Me), Rhyming Circus is still a solid entry in the genre. Ralph seems to use quite a few "hey, look at my Beatles reference!" references on this album, but the songs are very original and fresh, nonetheless. The rock anthem "Gotta Be Good" is my new favorite Ralph tune, and would probably be a hit for John Mellencamp, and other favorites are "Abby's Alphabet Soup", which nicely demonstrates the different sounds of each letter; "Do the Math"; "Finger is the Singer"; and "Edward, the Tap-Dancing Elephant".

Ralph's World website

Video for "The Tale of the Sun and the Moon"

2008-12-17T10:10:00.001-08:00

More new features and interviews are coming soon (Gunnar Madsen, Harmonica Pocket, Dog on Fleas and others), as well as some catching up on CDs released this year by favorites of mine (ScribbleMonster, Eric Ode, Justin Roberts, etc.). But right now, I have to pay the bills, so to speak, by doing some advertising for the main sponsor of this blog (me)...

My latest video, for "The Tale of the Sun and the Moon", has been uploaded to YouTube. You can check it out below, though I recommend clicking through to YouTube to click on the "watch in high quality" link, where the video quality will be better and the audio will be in stereo. Enjoy!

Interview with Ezra of Trout Fishing in America

2008-12-03T18:51:00.000-08:00

This fall, Trout Fishing in America released their 15th CD (yes 15th!), Big Round World, and as a big fan of the duo for the last several years I was happy to discover that it is my favorite of all their albums so far. When a band or artist has released that many albums, you always look forward to the new release, and oftentimes you really like it because it's a group whose musical language you can identify with and appreciate, but it becomes harder after so many albums to really define things like "favorite" or "best". If anything, you might often be into the current album the most because it's the newest one and it's fresh. But in this case, I really think this is Trout Fishing's strongest album yet, which is saying a lot, considering how much I like their previous albums. And it was just announced last night that they have received their fourth Grammy nomination in the Best Children's Album category for Big Round World.

The opening title track is immediately identifiable as "the Trout Fishing sound", with chugging acoustic guitars, bouncy rhythms and Ezra's big, round voice singing a memorable song about our big, round world. "My Favorite Jeans" covers more of a rock sound with Keith belting a funny ode to his favorite jeans, which leads nicely into "When You Get Dressed", a reggae/ska flavored track which may be the catchiest Trout tune I've heard yet. Ezra dispenses important advice such as "You don't wear a ski mask to the bank, or an evening gown to drive a tank". Other highlights (among many) include "Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks", a terrific inspirational anthem; "Too Good to Be True", a funny story with cool saxophone and upright bass accompaniment; "Curse of the Spinach", which cleverly describes the downfall of that formerly revered vegetable; and "Five", the album closer which beautifully describes how we all were once (or will soon be) five years old.

Earlier this year, my family and I were grateful to be able to spend some time with Ezra and his wife, Karen, and I took the opportunity to interview him about the new album and about Trout Fishing's music over the years...

Interview with Ezra Idlet

Samples from Big Round World:
"When You Get Dressed"
"Too Good to Be True"
"Five"

Order Trout Fishing in America CDs here:
http://www.troutmusic.com/store/catalog.asp

Our family with Ezra in front of the "Dreaming" treehouse...

Submissions are CLOSED

2008-11-25T10:44:00.000-08:00

I probably should have done this a few months ago, but at this point I really need to officially close submissions for this blog. I already have way too big of a backlog as it is, and very limited time to devote to catching up on it. It used to be that I could at least listen to every CD that was sent me, and then feature what I could from them, but I've actually had quite a hard time keeping up with even listening to everything that I've been sent over the last several months. I feel terrible about that, and apologize if your CD happens to get missed when I finally get more caught up on things. I know that I've never promised that I could cover everything, anyway, but I really hate to have anybody send me CDs without even an expectation of them being listened to. So I need to draw the line and request that no new CDs be sent. If there is something in particular that I want to check out, I'll specifically make contact and ask for a promo copy, at which point I will promise to definitely cover that CD. And with that in mind, please don't ask me to listen to something to see if I would want to request a promo copy... I really need to be fair to the people who have already sent actual CDs and make sure I've covered what I can from them first.

The good news is that I have started working on some articles again recently, and have several things coming up, including interviews that I've mentioned before with Gunnar Madsen, Ezra from Trout Fishing and several others. And also, though I'll certainly be well behind with some of the newer things coming out (which I've always been, anyway), I've got quite a lot of great stuff to cover from the CDs I already have that will keep me busy enough for quite a while.

I will take my hat off to others who have been more consistent in keeping up with posting about kids' music (see my links below). Speaking both as a kids' music artist and as a fan of the genre, I really appreciate that. Unfortunately, I haven't even been able to read a lot of the kids' music blogs this year (I had to shut down my Google Reader during a particularly busy stretch, and I've only recently started adding back some things...), so I definitely feel out of the loop a bit. But you don't have to feel out of the loop like me, with others staying on top of things.

Imagination Movers

2008-09-16T07:39:00.000-07:00

So it's been over three months since I've posted here, and I'm really sorry about that. I'm sure Brady Rymer hasn't minded having three months of "first post" coverage, but for the rest of you, I apologize for the lack of updates. I've just been super busy with recording and traveling and other stuff and I found it really hard to find the time to write up anything when traveling. On many days it was hard to keep up with the travelblogue, even.

But anyway, I am going to do my best to get caught up here, and the cool thing is that I have a nice list of things to add, including several interviews and many new CDs to cover, but that will mean that I'm going to have to keep it brief and mostly stick to capsule posts. There's probably a collective cheer going out, as my posts are probably too long as it is, but the thing is, in many cases I just prefer to write "articles" as opposed to writing something more succinct. If I'm going to write about something, then by golly I'm gonna write about it.

The Imagination Movers are a four-piece band from New Orleans, and they make an ideal subject for a transition into doing more "capsule" sized posts, because I'm not all that familiar with them or their music, so there can't really be all that much for me to write about. I had been aware of them vaguely for a few years and liked the few song clips of theirs that I had come across online here and there, but I didn't really have a lot to go on until seeing their new show on Playhouse Disney. We decided to check it out when it debuted and it's quickly becoming a favorite of my girls and I think it's a really fun show, too.

The Mover guys have a lot of charm and do a great job acting and performing on the show, and the show itself exudes the light comic feel of The Monkees. There's not an abundance of humor, but there definitely are some comic moments throughout every show, which automatically jumps it ahead of The Wiggles TV shows and videos. I've always been a fan of The Wiggles' music, but the content of their shows and videos have seemed lacking to me in terms of comedy. Sure, they're geared toward very young kids, but other shows like Sesame Street always found ways to appeal to that same age group with a lot more comedy included (meaning both kids comedy and adult comedy). The Imagination Movers have a similar appeal as The Wiggles, though they are probably aimed more toward preschool and lower elementary aged kids, as opposed to the toddlers that The Wiggles are probably a better target for.

The show depicts the Movers (Scott, Smitty, Rich and Dave), their puppet friend, Warehouse Mouse, and their (well characterized) boring neighbor Knit Knots and his niece, Nina, as they try to solve various problems using basic problem solving and imagination (a subject I've always been very interested in). And though I've only seen a few episodes, I've already been hooked on their music from the show. It's very straightforward pop and rock, with a little funk and not-too-terribly-bad-for-kind-of-dorky-white-guys rapping thrown in, and the hooks are quite strong and memorable. There's a vibrancy and fun to their sound that reminds me of bands like BNL and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, as well as some funk-rap akin to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. My favorite songs so far include the opening "Imagination Movers" theme song (don't you miss theme songs on TV shows??), the rockabilly-esque "Brainstorm" anthem, the super catchy and bouncy "Jump Up" and the upbeat countrified "7 Days a Week".

Now that I've been introduced to the Imagination Movers through their TV show, I look forward to hearing more of their great music. I hope the show is a big success for them!

You can hear several Imagination Movers songs and see some videos through this link on their website.

Brady Rymer

2008-06-02T05:23:00.000-07:00

I hadn't heard too much of Brady Rymer prior to hearing a preview song ("Road Trip") from his newest album, but once I heard that, I knew I had to hear more. I was about to request a copy of Here Comes Brady Rymer and the Little Band That Could when it showed up in my mailbox. I like when that happens... I've listened to the whole album a few times now and each time it's put a really big smile on my face and always inspired me to want to sing and dance along. Of course, my dancing is dangerous enough, but especially dangerous when I'm driving, which is usually when I'm listening to music... so I've just opted for the singing along part, and reduced the dancing along to some head bobbing and such.

Here Comes... is nothing but gems. Of all 13 tracks, there's only one that I don't really love ("Get Back Home"), and even that one I still kind of like alright. The album starts with a self-referential "here we are, kids" kind of track plugging Brady's Little Band That Could. There are a lot of tracks of this type that I've heard on kids' albums over the years where the band or artist introduces themselves with the first song (the Hipwaders' first album leadoff track comes quickly to mind as one of my favorites), but sometimes they can wear out their welcome if they're any longer than the average TV theme song. This is one of the few ones I can think of that works very well as a full three and a half minute song, with a catchy hook and some nice chord changes in the bridge that keep it all chugging along nicely.

The aforementioned "Road Trip" is next and it's just a flat out showstopper. In my interview with Ralph Covert, he talked about the "vocabulary of rock and roll", and this whole album and the "Road Trip" song in particular shows that Brady is obviously very fluent in that language. He may not be charting any new territory... you can hear him going where Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger and others have gone before... but he's not merely retreading it, either. It all sounds very fresh and he definitely embodies the music completely.

The third track is "Jump Up (It's a Good Day)" and it's the catchiest tune of the set (which is saying a lot, as there are many good hooks throughout the album). If you're ever feeling grumpy, just put on this album, and if you're not feeling bouncier than a Tigger after the first two songs, you will be once this track hits. In Brady's previous life, he fronted the jam rock band, From Good Homes, who opened for Bob Dylan and Dave Mathews and other big name acts (I saw them open for Bob Weir's Ratdog band in Buffalo back in the mid-90's), and that kind of infectious rhythm and blues jam rock thing really shines through on this one.

Other standouts for me include "It Was a Saturday Night", which combines several different 70's rock styles into yet another great song; "One True You", a pretty anthem about why kids look and act the way they do in relation to their family (I really like how the song starts with "I see your Mom in you, I see your Dad in you, etc." and then goes to "I see faith in you, I see joy in you, etc."); "Again", another very catchy and upbeat tune that uses a false ending to great effect; and "Good Night, Daisy", as beautiful a lullaby as I've ever heard, and a song I've played several times in a row just to get lost in its magnificent elegance.

Brady's vocals are a little twangy and he sounds sort of like Lyle Lovett at times. It's a unique voice for the kids' music genre, and he certainly has the chops for pulling off these songs with the right phrasing and attitude. His "little band" is really great, too... always serving the song and coloring everything vibrantly throughout.

I'm going to have to remain noncommital about Brady Rymer's previous albums until I hear more of them, but there's no doubt that Here Comes Brady Rymer and the Little Band That Could is a real treat and worth hearing again and again. Just be careful dancing while you're driving, please.

Brady Rymer's website

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Loquat Rooftop (Randy Kaplan)

2008-05-22T06:39:00.001-07:00

Randy Kaplan's debut kids' album, Five Cent Piece, was one of the coolest totally out-of-left-field things I've discovered since doing this blog. In essence, Randy is the Arlo Guthrie of children's music, and while the obvious comparison to Arlo Guthrie makes Randy's general approach a little less than unique, Randy always adds much of his own originality and personality and style and humor into that approach, and I can't imagine anyone else doing that kind of thing as well as Randy does for a kids audience. In fact, hearing Randy spin more of his hilarious yarns on his terrific new CD, Loquat Rooftop, I can't help but think that perhaps time is running backwards and the references should be the other way around... Maybe Arlo Guthrie should really be called "the Randy Kaplan of storytelling songs for adults". The spirit and humor and style of that approach is always designed to tickle the fancy of the kid inside us... it's just a question of the subject matter involved as to what the audience's age range will be.

Like its predecessor, Loquat Rooftop includes some originals and some covers. The covers include similar Tin Pan Alley and classic rock 'n' roll fare as the covers on Five Cent Piece (and one particular gem, the Randy-fied "Clothes Dryer"), but a significant thing about this new album is that the originals are the real standouts this time around. With Five Cent Piece, I liked Randy's originals, especially "Shampoo Me", but they were all, well, a little weird. Likably weird, but weird, nonetheless. There's still some real strangeness to the originals on Loquat Rooftop like "No Nothing" (featuring a monkey named Kxchc, who was raised by ducks) and "The Ladybug Without Spots" (who solves that problem by having watermelon seeds glued to her back), but there's an effusive charm that shines through each of them. The feeling of enjoyment is always first and foremost with these originals, as opposed to the Five Cent Piece originals, where I enjoyed them, but only in spite of them all being a little strange. And some of the new originals are more straightforward sounding and are quite beautiful, like the title track (the melody of which reminds me a lot of a song that I'm not sure I've ever heard before), "(Don't Say) Anything At All" (I love how he demonstrates what he's talking about with his little kid voices between the verses) and "Gotta Get Gone", the bluesy closing number.

A great thing about Randy is that he is not afraid to be downright silly with his voices and jokes when he knows that will serve the material and the intended audience. And by the intended audience, I don't just mean kids... adults eat up well-crafted goofiness, too (Monty Python, Steve Martin during his standup career, the Airplane!/Naked Gun movies, etc.). Certainly, this adult and his wife have laughed out loud many times while listening to this album. Some things like "The Sour Song" are kind of one-time laughs, as brilliant as they are, but other things are funny again and again, and Randy's eloquently witty wordplay and vocal phrasing is always a joy to listen to. He has a real knack for comedy and entertaining through his music, and I can't wait to hear what he'll come up with next.

Buy Loquat Rooftop on CDBaby

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New releases and upcoming interviews...

2008-04-29T17:15:00.000-07:00

So this seems to be the season for new kids' music CD releases... Several of my favorite artists who I've already covered here have recently released new albums, or are about to release their new CDs. (I'm glad I'm not releasing my new album right now... Whew!)

I've been listening to a lot of these CDs on the road recently, and I hope to be able to cover each of them at some point, at least in capsule reviews if not something more in depth... But for now I'm going to just list them below and let you check them out from the links. Also, there are several other new CDs that I've received and will have to add to my ever-growing "hope to cover here at some point" list, including Brady Rymer, Gunnar Madsen, Mr. Eric, Recess Monkey and others.

Also, I have some cool interviews coming up with some people I've met up with on my recent travels, including Frances England, Gunnar Madsen, Tito of the Hipwaders and Gwendolyn and Brandon from Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang. I'll begin transcribing our conversations in May and will post those as soon as possible.

New CDs recently or soon-to-be released...

Randy Kaplan - Loquat Rooftop

Daddy a Go Go - Rock of All Ages

Ralph's World - The Rhyming Circus

Eric Ode - When You Smile

Justin Roberts - Pop Fly

Mr. Billy - Six Leg Songs

Frances England - Family Tree

They Might Be Giants - Here Come the 123s

Also, Ginger Hendrix had a major new release recently... a baby girl.

Travelblogue

2008-04-10T08:09:00.000-07:00

I've never really used my MySpace page for anything... the interface is very difficult to work with and it's not really the most "kid safe" environment. So I put up some very basic info there and kind of left it at that for a while. To my dismay at times, people tried to contact me through there and I didn't get the message for several months because I just never logged in very often. Whoops!

But I was looking for somewhere to post a little travelogue for my family's travels for this tour I'm doing... I like how Monty Harper posts a little about each of his shows on his blog, and I realized it would be nice to be able to better remember some details about the different places we go and where I perform. So rather than start some new thing on LiveJournal or wherever, or taking up too much space on this blog when what I'm posting doesn't always relate to kids' music, I figured, eh, I might as well use the blog on the MySpace site I have. So if you'd like to see what I'm up to, go to my main MySpace page and click the link in the middle right of the page that says "View All Blog Entries", or click the individual entry links if you'd like.

Edit 4/29/08: I've now mirrored the travelblogue over at this Blogger address: http://ericherman.blogspot.com for those of you who don't want to deal with MySpace. Also, Blogger allows video posting, so I'll probably add some video clips to those posts now and then.

David Tobocman

2008-04-07T11:21:00.000-07:00

If David Tobocman's I Count to Ten and other Very Helpful Songs album included the song, "Home", and several tracks of 80's hair-band B-sides performed by the TAO (Tuscalusah Armpit Orchestra), I would still have wanted to feature it here. "Home" is an incredibly touching song that makes me want to immediately run over and kiss my wife, hug my kids, pet my cat, not yell quite so much at my fish, and otherwise be extra grateful for the home and love that I feel blessed to have in my life. A piano ballad sounding something like Fastball singing "Desperado", the song alone is so heartwarming that it's almost heartburning, and the beautiful video created for it, with pictures by Valerie Walsh (see below), just takes it over the top into heartmelting territory. When listening to this song and watching the video, you may need to wear some protective shielding to prevent irreperable heat damage to your heart.

Thankfully, the rest of David's album is really great, too. I'm not sure that any of the other tracks are quite as earth-shatteringly awesome as "Home", but then again, the Stones never had a hit quite as big as "Satisfaction" and they still had a halfway decent career for a little while after that point, eh?

The album begins with "I Count to Ten", which sounds like a cross between "Stepping Out With My Baby" and "Hit the Road, Jack" and has a nice message about taking a break when you're feeling angry before acting out. "Jammies Song" is a folky pop song a la Jimmy Buffet, with some nice chord breaks. "Brush Your Teeth" is a funky soft shoe jazz with some slithery piano. "My Rainbow" is another beautiful ballad, more upbeat than "Home". The voice on "Favorite Son (Every Day)" doesn't quite match the music as I was hearing it... something more like Barry White or Marvin Gaye might have fit better for me... but it's pretty nice, regardless, and David does an admirable job rapping for a white guy with a beard. "Buttons and Bows" is a hilarious ditty directed at nudist toddlers who don't understand the importance of wearing clothes in public. "Gigi, My Pet Giraffe" has some sweet melody and reminds me a little of the phrasing choices that Ralph of Ralph's World sometimes uses. "Dreamin' the Dream" is a finger-snappin' jazz tune (there is no actual finger-snappin' on the recording, but you'll want to do that when listening... and maybe throw in some jazz hands, as well). The album closes with an exquisite acoustic guitar ballad called "To Love You", which provides more hugs for my girls, kisses for my wife and pets for my cat...

David has a pretty extensive list of credits of contributing music for TV shows (including That 70's Show, 3rd Rock from the Sun and Family Law), performing and engineering on a number of albums by artists including Adam Sandler, Liza Minelli, LL Cool J and Cher, and doing session work for the likes of Lou Reed, Diane Warren, the Beastie Boys, k.d. Lang and Luther Vandross. I Count to Ten is his first foray into creating music for children, but I hope he produces more kids' CDs because the world can always use more great music for kids and my wife and kids can always use more hugs and kisses. Not that I'm a slouch in that regard, by any means, as I'm sure they would attest to, but more is always better. :o)

David Tobocman's Very Helpful Songs website

For samples of all of the songs on I Count to Ten, go to this page on David's website.

Mr. Richard

2008-03-17T07:25:00.000-07:00

Mr. Richard is a very popular kids' music performer from Florida who has released three CDs of music for kids. Last year, I received Richard's 2nd CD, Tummy Talk, and I enjoyed that, especially the first track, the title track, which has an incredibly catchy funky-bluesy guitar riff, a kickin' pre-chorus ("when your tummy starts talkin' a mile a minute, that's the time you know you gotta put something in it"), and an utterly infectious groove to it. It's an all-around terrific anthem to the noises your stomach can make when it's hungry and was an instant classic for me in the kids' music realm. In fact, I think I may have liked the whole album even better if I didn't keep comparing the rest of it to that first track, which was so hard to measure up to.

Fast forward ahead to this year when Richard's 3rd album, Polka Dot Puzzle, arrives in the mail. I was looking forward to checking it out, having already seen the great video for one of the songs, "Cheese" (see the video below), and the album definitely lived up to my hopes and is a terrific volume of kids' music with a lot of humor and musical fun.

Richard has a tremendous ability for generating catchy guitar riffs, and the jumpy acoustic opening figure on Polka Dot Puzzle's second track, "Treehouse", is a nice example of that. The emphasis on "E" in the chorus ("tree-E-house") is a little strange, but it's a good hook, nonetheless. "The Woo Woo Truck" is a very cool tune in the vein of The Violent Femmes, describing what to do when you hear a fire engine coming by.

"Bubble Bath" has an amazing squirrely funk riff and some nice horn licks as Richard adds a laundry list of the things you can make with the bubbles in your bath; a bubble beard, a bubble wig, etc. "Straw Slot", about a kid with a missing tooth, sounds like John Mellencamp meets the Byrds and has yet another catchy guitar riff and funny lines like "I look like Alfred E. Neuman when I smile".

The "Pots n' Pans" track is one that is probably more "appreciated" than "enjoyed", what with its Stomp-y clinging and clanging of actual pots and pans throughout, but it's a nice testament to the rhythmic and musical possibilities available all around you.

The song "Pooch Smooch" is a real blues-rock gem with some wonderfully distorted harmonica, and there's a fun video for that which you can see below. One quibble about the production of the song... There's a point in each chorus when there are kids screaming in reaction to the dog kissing them, but the screaming is a really loud, blood-curdling kind of screech that seems to imply the terror of "I fell into a pool of sharks with a big gash on my leg" and not "my dog just slobbered all over me... ewww, gross!"

"Butterfly Day" is a jangly pop tune sung along with Molly Ledford that reminds me of the great pop songs for kids that Roger Day produces. The album also begins and ends with "Hello, everybody" and "goodbye, everybody" tracks, which is something you hear now and then on kids' albums, but these are done very well and do invite you into the album and leave you feeling good at the end.

It wouldn't be right for me to cover Mr. Richard and keep it real without mentioning that, well... if he was a contestant on a show like American Kids Idol, the celebrity judge equivalent of Randy Jackson would probably be using the term "pitchy" quite a lot. But Mr. Richard has a similar vocal vibe to Barry Louis Polisar, where okay, his vocals aren't the most polished, but his vocal delivery is still very cool and just right in a way that sort of represents the spirit or voice of a kid.

It's time to go off on one of my tangents here... it's been a while... Thinking of the impact of the song "Tummy Talk" as the first track on that album, it brings to mind the importance of the track order on CDs and what a difficult decision that often is. I recall many years ago making an observation that a lot of albums from my favorite bands and artists seemed to have the big hit song as the 3rd or 4th track. I'm sure there are a million exceptions to that, but remembering that observation now I think the reasoning for that may be that if you always put that big first single as the first track on the album, then it might create an expectation for the album that is difficult to live up to. Also, a lot of times the hit single song might be a little poppier than the rest of the tracks on a rock album, or it might be a ballad on an album of otherwise upbeat songs, so if you put it first then there is a false sense of what the album and/or the artist is really about.

So with that thinking, the best track to put first is probably something that is cool and inviting and memorable and representative of the artist and the album, and makes you want to listen further, but isn't really the knock-out song that the first single is intended to be. By the time you reach that knock-out track at the 3rd or 4th slot, you're already hooked big-time and though the rest of the album still may not match up to that hit song, initially, at least... you're likely to appreciate it for what it is and will probably grow to love some of the other songs more than that big hit, once they get under your skin.

I'm not necesarily saying that Mr. Richard should have put the song "Tummy Talk" 3rd or 4th on his Tummy Talk album instead of 1st... Maybe it would have been better, from my point of view, at least... But he did what he felt was right for his album for his taste and for his fans and so that's fine. And certainly an argument can be made that people are fickle with what they listen to and if something doesn't really grab them right away, there goes your chance to grab them at all... in which case maybe your very best track should be the first one on the album. I should also admit that I am absolutely not an expert in this regard, having second-guessed the track order on three of my four kids' CDs and even resequencing one of them when reordering more copies after its second run. I can say that my next album feels just right in its track sequencing in terms of the flow that it has, and I think that may be the most important consideration, as opposed to thinking about what songs are the standouts and where they fall in the mix.

Anyway, just thought I'd share a few thoughts about that, since it came up... It may even become moot before too long as musical buying and listening habits seem to gravitate more and more towards the downloadable single, as opposed to the album. I hope that the album never dies entirely, though, as it is always nice to share a lengthier slice of musical time with a talented artist who has created a group of songs that work really well together... like, for example, Mr. Richard's Polka Dot Puzzle!

Mr. Richard's website

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Buck Howdy

2008-02-16T18:57:00.001-08:00

Buck Howdy is unique in the children's music world. Yes, there have been some good country-music styled kids' acts coming out in recent years, including Little Nashville, Farmer Jason and the Bummkin Band, but there hasn't really been a notable old-fashioned cowboy personality like Buck... at least not that I'm aware of.

Buck is nothing if not personality, and his aw shucks friendly uncle from Tennesee kind of voice pulls you right in and holds you captive throughout his CDs. It's a delivery that seems effortless in its charm but also sounds like the genuine article of a man who has spent many years rustling, wrangling, roping and other such things that cowboys do. I get the impression that Buck could tell a story about sorting coupons that would keep kids totally enthralled around a crackling campfire.

Speaking of campfires, Buck pays homage to some classic campfire fare with two of the songs on his second kids' album, Giddyup!, released in 2005. The CD opens with "S'mores", a fine fiddle-y ditty (see the video below), and the fourth track is "Baked Beans", which may be the best flatulence-related song ever (I propose a championship fight between that song and John Hadfield's "I Like Beans"). In "Baked Beans" you can just about hear Buck smiling and holding back his own laughter as he sings, and it really conveys the feeling that he's having as much fun performing the song as we are hearing it.

On the bouncy title track, Buck sings some cleverly silly lines like "I was going to a dance and I had to practice. Why oh why did I do it with a cactus?" and he gives a fun lesson for chasing the blues away by singing like animals on "Baa, Neigh, Cock-a-Doodle Doo". Giddyup! also features some prominent guest performers including Trout Fishing in America's Keith and Ezra providing backing vocals on "S'mores" and "Giddyup" and Laurie Berkner singing beautifully along with Buck on "Happy Trails". There is also one of the best parodies I've heard on a kids' album listed as the bonus track, but I don't know that I can give it away being that it's titled "Bonus Track". I really should have seen the chorus line coming, but it still made me laugh out loud when I first heard it.

Giddyup! was the first Buck Howdy album I'd heard (he also released Skidaddle! in 2002) and I was instantly a big fan. Buck released the follow-up, Chickens, last year, and in addition to more great songs, he also added a fine singer to his act (BB, pictured above). Chickens has a lot of what might be called "Western swing", with an almost jazzy feel to a number of the tracks. There's still a predominance of country to the sound, but there's a bounciness and arrangement to some of the tracks that emphasizes the "swing" as much as the "Western".

Chickens also has a lot of chickens. "Ain't Nobody Here but Us Chickens" is a winner and is so heavy on the swing that you might have expected Glenn Miller to have orchestrated it. The title track is a little bit unfortunate, though... It plays with expectations where it sounds like it's about a philandering husband but really he's just a farmer who loves taking care of his chickens. It's a clever turnaround and it's the type of innuendo that kids aren't going to get anyway, so it's no big deal in that sense. But the thing is, it's not a great subject for adults, either, with lines like "I buy ‘em food and give ‘em drinks, along with lots of lovin'. Then those girls lay out the treats by the dozens." Using distasteful imagery as some kind of metaphor or correlation still includes the distasteful imagery on the surface. So the song is enjoyable but for me it left a little bit of a bad taste in terms of the subject matter. Rounding out the chicken-related material on the album is the instrumental bonus track. You can probably guess what it is by my mention of "instrumental" and "chicken-related".

There are a lot of other great tracks on Chickens, including "Wiggle, Waggle, Wave", a super-swingy ode to friendly greetings; "Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda", a catchy, easy-going tune about doing things you're supposed to do before you regret the consequences; "I'm My Own Grandpa", Buck's engaging version of the old novelty hit about the ultimate family paradox; and "I Can't Imagine", a sweet ballad duet which really shows the complement of Buck and BB's voices.

Chickens was nominated for a Grammy last year and shows an interesting change from the more straightforward old-time country feel of his earlier albums, perhaps making it more accessible to a wider audience. With his great delivery and sense of humor, I'm intrigued to see what kind of yarns Buck will spin next around the campfire.

Buck Howdy website

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My Lucky Day video

2008-01-25T09:38:00.000-08:00

My wife, Roseann, did the animations for a new video in a Schoolhouse Rock kind of style and it turned out really nice. It's for the song "My Lucky Day" from my Snow Day! album. The song was co-written with children's artist Eric Ode.

Please add your comments and if you liked it enough to rate it 5 stars, let me know and I'll send you a link for a free MP3 download of the song. Here's the link to the YouTube page where you can comment or rate the video, or you can just watch it below...

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

Coming up, I'll be doing features on Mr. Richard, Ira Marlowe, Dog on Fleas, Johnette Downing, Debi Derryberry and a few other things that have come in recently. I'm having trouble keeping up with everything, though, so I can't promise when those things will be covered.

I'm actually thinking of closing the submissions for a while... especially as I'll be on the road for about 4 months straight starting the end of March and won't be able to get anything that comes in the mail, anyway. I'll still be keeping up on what's coming out in the kids' music world through Zooglobble and CDBaby and elsewhere, and if there's something I'm interested in hearing more of, I may request a promo copy to be sent wherever I am. But as of March, I don't want any new CDs sent when there's no chance I'll get to hear them for several months, and as I'll have enough of a backlog to get caught up on in the meantime. I'll make a post about that and change the "Submissions" page when the time comes... As for now, though, please feel free to keep sending new releases and I'll look forward to checking them out on the road this spring and summer.

Gustafer Yellowgold

2008-01-07T09:53:00.000-08:00

For a long time, my appreciation for Gustafer Yellowgold hadn't really been sparked, in the same sense as I described for Frances England's music... I had read a lot of glowing accolades but had only heard a few brief samples, and thought, "It sounds okay..." But I hadn't been blown away enough to get really excited about it. In the case of Frances England, it just took one listen through the actual album, beyond just brief samples, to have her infectious and brilliant songs imprinted on me. With Gustafer Yellowgold, all it took was a viewing of one of his DVDs. To use terms usually reserved for the world of magic and sorcery, I was utterly enchanted, spellbound, mesmerized and charmed.

Gustafer Yellowgold is the cute cartoon creation of singer/songwriter Morgan Taylor, who writes and records Gustafer's musical musings and also illustrates and provides the storyboard direction for the DVD animations. There are two Gustafer DVDs, Wide Wild World and Have You Never Been Yellow? (for which he gets a half point off for parodying the title of an Olivia Newton-John album). Gustafer comes from the sun, as the introduction song ("Cooler World") on both DVDs describes, and has traveled to Minnesota, where things are apparently quite different than on the sun (he was aiming for somewhere a little colder). The songs and videos, full of wit and whimsy, relate Gustafer's experiences and wonderment with various things he discovers in his new Earth life, and so we share the same wonderment through the simple but clever animations and generally mellow but engaging songs. The subjects can be a rather odd assortment, including pinecones, mustard slugs, eels, cake, cheese and beards, and there isn't really any narrative or theme connecting everything, other than Gustafer observing and commenting on his new world. But every song/video is its own little amusement, and they each work terrifically in that sense.

In terms of influences for the general idea and animation style of Gustafer, one might guess that Morgan Taylor has probably watched Harry Nilsson's classic animated story, The Point, once or twice (or fifty times). In that story, a round-headed boy named Oblio finds himself in a world where every other creature and object must have a point (literally, as in a pointy head or a particularly pointy nose). Being that Gustafer is the odd one on Earth, I imagine that Gustafer's rather pointy head might be an homage to that show. Regardless, Gustafer is very much an original and the combination of classic storybook illustration and animation almost has more of the feel of Ken Burns' pan-and-scan documentaries, with objects gently and creatively moving around each other. This is clearly 2D animation, but there is very nice use of object layering and every animation choice is used to great effect.

Musically speaking, the Gustafer songs seem to be happily ensconced in 60's/70's acoustic melancholy, hearkening to Harry Nilsson, James Taylor (presumably no relation) and The Beatles circa The White Album and Yellow Submarine. While the production and sound is clearly from that era, the songs themselves are true originals, with hooks and chord turns that aren't overt, but reach out and tickle you enough to keep your interest throughout. Morgan's voice is often double-tracked into a sweet syrup, and his delivery and tone is akin to both Neil Young's plaintive acoustic singing and Billy Corgan's whispery breathings. Personal taste leans my ears toward the former, and not so much the latter, so I prefer the Gustafer songs (or parts of songs) where Morgan sings out fully, like on the transcendent anthem, "Pinecone Lovely" (video below). But regardless, Morgan has a beautiful sense of contrast between the different songs and song sections, in terms of varying his vocal delivery to fit the needs of the moment.

Would the songs alone stand up, without having ever seen the animations? For adults, yes, but I don't think they would work as well for kids without having any connection at all to the imagery. But the Gustafer package is clearly meant to be a fusion of songs and images (and his live shows always feature the animations on a video screen), and kids and adults alike can certainly appreciate the combination as intended, in a very big way. Stephen Sondheim is often criticized for not having any "take home" songs from his musicals ("Send in the Clowns" being the notable exception), but his songs are meant to work perfectly within the context of their shows. That is their primary working environment. I think the same can be said for the Gustafer songs working best along with the environment of their video accompaniment. However, having seen the video several times, kids will definitely have a big attachment to the songs and can thereafter enjoy them strictly from the CDs (which are included with the DVDs).

The Gustafer DVDs have been big hits for my girls, who request them often along with their other video favorites like the Pixar movies and The Wiggles. My 5 year-old, Becca, has even given Gustafer the rare honor of a space in her dreams. Every night, as part of their bedtime routine, our girls like us to ask them what they're going to dream about. (Apparently, they're really into "directed dreaming".) Well, there have been a few nights recently where Becca specified "Gustafer" as her dream choice. A budding artist and animator, herself, she has also stated that she wished she had created Gustafer (heheh... Me, too!).

In addition to the Gustafer videos and music, Morgan Taylor also provided a few songs for a nice compilation of children's music by the ArtsCetera organization, called Sing, Shout & Clap. Click here for song samples and to order the CD.

Gustafer Yellowgold website

"Your Eel" from Wide Wild World -

"Birds" from Have You Never Been Mellow? -

"Pinecone Lovely" from Have You Never Been Mellow? -

A video by Becca

2007-12-15T10:30:00.000-08:00

My daughter, Becca, has always been very artistically inclined, and recently she has wanted to learn about doing animation like she sees on her favorite TV shows and movies. We found a cool program called Flip Boom that is meant for kids to easily create simple animations. She took to that program in a big way and when we asked if she might like to do a music video for Daddy she was very excited and went right to work.

So anyway, here is a video for "Dance Like an Animal", with animations by Becca. She had a little bit of help and direction from her Mommy (who also did the disco background and put everything together with me in the video editing program), but by and large, this is Becca's work. Give her another year or two and she might be working for Pixar. :o)

Speaking of kids' music animations, coming up soon I'll be featuring one of Becca's favorite animation influences... Gustafer Yellowgold.

The Wiggles: Getting Strong and Wiggly Wiggly World

2007-12-05T11:32:00.000-08:00

If you've followed this blog at all, you'll know that I am an unabashed fan of The Wiggles. Musically speaking, I think they're terrific, with many great songs that introduce young kids to a variety of music styles. Say what you will about them otherwise, but they can really deliver the goods when it comes to their songs being memorable and fun for younger children, and I believe that they have rightfully achieved their enormous success as children's entertainers.

The Wiggles have always primarily been a visual band, what with the colored shirt thing and all, and so they have usually emphasized video releases over CD releases. Their latest is a DVD called Getting Strong, which is unique in two ways; it is the first from a planned Wiggle and Learn series that has a particularly educational focus, and it is also the first with the new yellow Wiggle, Sam.

I'm not going to speak too much about the video's merits... I want to focus on the music... but it definitely has the best production values of any Wiggles video I've seen. Top notch effects and sets and it looks really sharp, which hasn't always been the case with other Wiggles videos (not that they've suffered for it, but you kind of expect more from them, considering their success). Some of the between song skits, such as the recurring theme of Captain Feathersword pretending to be among a group of trumpeters or guitarists or ballet dancers are okay and some are a bit tedious. Paul Paddock (Captain F.) has an amazing vocal range and ability to do impressions, but the high-pitched squeals of his guitar impressions (I honestly don't know how he gets up there without helium) can wear a bit on the ears of adults. But that's nothing new for Wiggles videos... their skits and between song interludes have never been the greatest at appealing to adults, no doubt. But little kids laugh at them and enjoy them alright, so that's fine.

Educationally speaking, they are clearly targeting toddlers (their bread and butter audience) with subjects that include exercise and sports ("Getting Strong", "The Sporting Salsa"), comparative use of language ("The Biggest of All") and the five senses ("The Five Sense" and the oddly infectious "Smell Your Way Through the Day"). Perhaps it is the educational theme, but it seems that the songs have much more of a "sing songy" feel to them than previous Wiggles collections. They're not bad, as sing-songy songs go, but a lot of my favorite Wiggles songs have a little bit of rock 'n' roll to them and for the most part, these tunes don't really go there. Notable exceptions include the great title track, which is reminiscent of The Who's "I Can See for Miles and Miles", and "Sporting Salsa", which has a cool sound with a bit of a Miami Sound Machine groove to the chorus. "Smell Your Way Through the Day" has a rock feel to it and is very catchy, but it's also kind of kooky in a way.

So I'm not sure if Getting Strong is likely to convince any of the adults who grumble about the Wiggles to realize that they do have a lot of great music (see my review below about Wiggly Wiggly World for an example of that), but it's a solid collection for the kids and answers any doubts as to whether Sam could make a good replacement for the ailing Greg. Greg always had a really smooth and unique vocal delivery, and thankfully Sam doesn't try to emulate that, but offers his own voice, which is more polished and even somewhat operatic at times, but is still a really good fit for the group's music.

The Wiggles website

Watch the "Getting Strong" video

The "Frog Went a Walking" video can be seen here, temporarily, at least.

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

Wiggly Wiggly World

In my original feature on The Wiggles, I said how their various video collections were kind of hit-and-miss for me. They've put out quite a few by now, and so as we've borrowed different ones from the library, we've seen some that were top notch and had a lot of great songs and others that seemed kind of thrown together. Until this past summer, we had only owned two Wiggles videos that we particularly liked, but I gave Wiggly Wiggly World a blind chance when I saw it at a library sale for a few bucks. I'm glad I did, because I think it's a terrific collection of songs, and it's particularly nice if you don't like the aforementioned skits and interludes, because they go right from one song to another, only stopping briefly to introduce a guest performer to set up the next song. And though The Wiggles can hold their own, musically, and in terms of songwriting, as evidenced by the hooks on songs like "In the Wiggles World" and "In the Big Red Car We Like to Ride", the guest performers really add a lot to this particular video.

Opera singer Kamahl performs on "Sing With Me", and it's amusing to hear his thick, profundo voice singing lines that include "Dorothy the Dinosaur", but it's quite a beautiful song, regardless. In terms of catchy pop-rock melodies and hooks, you can't beat The Wiggles' version of "Six Months in a Leaky Boat" by Tim Finn of Crowded House and Split Enz. And the gorgeous ballad "Taba Naba", performed by Greg and Christine Anu, is particularly stunning, and I love to hear my 2 year-old, Evee, attempting to sing that one. It's all in the language of the Torres Strait Islanders, and here are the real words: "Taba naba, naba norem, tugi penai siri, dinghy e naba we". As you can imagine, it comes out quite different when Evee sings it! There's also Rolf Harris playing the wobbleboard along with his classic "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" and Australian country star Slim Dusty joining in for "I Love to Have a Dance with Dorothy".

Other highlights on the video include "Another Cuppa", which has one of the best uses of counterpoint I've heard outside of musical theater, the folky "One Little Coyote", with it's cute backing vocals ("come home shooooon"), and the pretty Japanese ballad "Haru Ga Kita", sung with Atsuko Arai. All together, Wiggly Wiggly World is quite a smorgasbord of multi-cultural music, but it all sounds great with The Wiggles renditions and arrangements.

Listen to samples from Wiggly Wiggly World

Sugar Free Allstars

2007-11-10T11:54:00.000-08:00

The organ is an instrument that can run the gamut from sounding really cool (think Booker T or Greg Allman or Ray Charles) to sounding really cheesy (think soap opera music or anything played on a cheap Casio). I suppose most instruments can be cool or cheesy, depending on how they're played or what kind of music they're played with, but it's much harder to not look cool, at least, when playing something like an electric guitar or a saxophone. Then again, some musicians like Ray Manzarek could make even the cheesiest sounding soap opera organ be cool in its context on the Doors' records. Weighing in on the very cool end of organ playing is Chris Wiser, one half of the duo that comprises the Sugar Free Allstars, who have released their first kids' album, Dos Niños.

It's an unusual mix, to be sure, with the core sound consisting of organ, another organ, bass and drums (by Rob "Dr. Rock" Martin). I'm not sure how they pull it off... I'm pretty sure from the picture that Wiser only has two hands, though he might have a couple of mutant arms hidden around his back... but it sounds fantastic, regardless.

It's a short album, with only eight songs, but they're all good to great tracks and show off a surprising variety and a lot of musical depth. "Bathtub Boy" starts things off with a discordant organ chord that is offset nicely by a very active vocal melody and some cute lyric lines like, "I'd rather soak in the tub 'til my skins gets so pruney, and all of my friends, thinkin' that I'm loony". "He's Okay (The Spider Song)" has a very Doorsy riff in the verses and then has a Soundgarden/Nirvana chorus. It's cool to hear that kind of thing done so well with organ as opposed to the usual grungy guitar. There's also a fun envelope filter solo that evokes images of a spider slinking along a wall.

Next up is "Poppy and MeeMaw", which has a funky Allman Brothers meets Sly and the Family Stone groove and a very catchy chorus, a la Anthony Keidis, where Wiser rhymes "MeeMaw" and "seesaw" with what else, but "Hee-Haw". "Petting Zoo" has that Supertrampy (er, maybe "Supertramp-esque" would be better) Wurlizter electric organ sound (also think of "My Best Friend" by Queen) and accordingly continues with a thick 70's feel throughout, complete with a cheesy jazz chord ending. The tune has a great transition between the verses and choruses and like the other tracks is very memorable.

"P. Kitty" (live video below) is a super funky tune which would probably be at home on a Chili Peppers or Funkadelic record (who says funk bands can't play children's music?). Again, some of the organ chords are of a weirdly dissonant variety, so the music might sound a little strange on its own, but the vocal line is greatly accessible and it all works very well together. "Banana Pudding" is practically a Deep Purple style parody, with Dr. Rock dispensing some funky drum medicine and Wiser rockin' on the thick Hammond.

"Stinky" is a one-word instrumental that isn't nearly as memorable or fun sounding as something like "Tequila", but the word choice of "stinky" is the perfect choice for a kids thing (and, of course, a whole lot better than "tequila"). The CD ends with the track, "Buck Up, Little Camper", which is a marked departure from the rest of the album into Monty Python territory, a la "The Universe Song" or "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life". It's obviously campy and tongue-in-cheek with its "don't sweat the small stuff" message, and I'm guessing that the cruel irony for the band is that this is probably one of the most popular songs with kids and parents, because of its simple, cheery message. The folky piano style melds into a big band ending, where Wiser does a Louis Armstrong impression, which ends up sounding more like an impression of Bill Cosby doing an impression of Louis Armstrong. Fun stuff.

A quick side note about the album cover, which is strange and disturbing... the kind of thing that you wouldn't want to get in the mail unless you knew all of your kids were home and accounted for, and even then, you'd probably want to notify the police and have them dust the envelope for prints. I don't quite know what to make of it, but whatever...

All in all, this is an awesome album, though I suspect it may have some of the same effect as The Sippy Cups' Electric Storyland, where it's really great for adults but not necessarily quite as great for kids, depending on the kid. My kids' musician blogging friend Yosi mentioned on his blog about how he tried to get his kids to love this album but they just said, "It's weird." He felt like they really should like it and that he should maybe even try to force them to like it, as if it is akin to the cod liver oil your mother used to give you when you were sick (well, maybe your mother did, but thankfully mine didn't)... You don't want to take it, but it's good for you, so just swallow it, already!

I think that's a faulty premise, because although we can certainly try to encourage an appreciation for music to our kids, I don't think we can ever really instill an appreciation for particular music to them. And even if they grow to appreciate a certain kind of music, that doesn't necessarily mean they'll ever really love it. For example, I had no interest in my father's kind of music (big band, Sinatra, etc.) when I was growing up, and though I can appreciate it now and enjoy a lot of those classic tunes, it's still not what I would remotely consider my favorite kind of music. People like what they like, and though some of the uber-hipster parents may groan at the oh so horrible taste of three year-old kids, I suspect that many of them would still choose things like The Wiggles or Barney over The Sippy Cups and Sugar Free All Stars in a blind taste test. It's just a matter of kids' sensibilities.

That being said, my girls like this album okay, and dance around a little bit when it's on, but we do have to encourage them to do so and they're not listening closely, so we have to explain how it's a funny song about a kid who takes baths, or about a petting zoo, etc. There's not an automatic or instinctive feeling that it's meant for them when they hear the music, which I think is much more of the case with artists like Ralph's World and Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang. And if I had to put my finger on one thing that might help or hurt when trying to achieve that, it would be how prominent the vocals are in the mix. They seem to be mixed a bit low on this album and Wiser's vocal melodies are often very active, so if a kid can't understand the words well enough to tell that a song is talking about something they might care about, then they're probably not as likely to have a really big connection with it.

But even if your kids might think that this album is weird, it's a really cool album, regardless, and it would certainly be worth trying out on them. If they don't like it now, wait a year or two and maybe they'll enjoy it then. And like Electric Storyland, even though I can't share it quite as well with my kids as some other CDs, Dos Niños has definitely gone into my list of personal favorites.

Sugar Free All Stars website

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Halloween Green Bean

2007-10-30T21:55:00.000-07:00

Ah, there's nothing quite like the purest form of kids' music, meaning music that kids' themselves create. It's strange and bizarre and sometimes totally nonsensical, but also brilliant and creative in cool ways.

Two years ago for Halloween, my Becca wrote this song: "Halloween Green Bean" (mp3) Her mommy helped her just a little bit with the phrasing for one of the lyric lines, and I arranged the music, but it was essentially very much her own creation.

In case you can't quite understand the lyrics, here they are:

I wanna be a Halloween green bean.
I wanna be a Halloween bear.
I wanna be a Halloween monster,
so I can give you a scare. Boo!

Not bad for a three year-old. :o)

Becca is five now and she's written a few other songs, including a melodic epic called "The Sun Goes Up", which has some beautiful lyric verses balanced by some really kooky lyric verses...

The sun goes up, and the moon goes down.
The stars go down and the dark goes down.
The apple says, "Hi". And we eat the apple.
There's a freckle on my arm. There's a freckle on my leg.
Etc.

I totally didn't see the apple/freckle lines coming. And that's kind of how it is with all of her songs... Wonderfully weird, with some unexpected turns. She's also been noodling a lot on the piano and coming up with several little riffs that she likes to play over and over. She has descriptions for each of them, too, like the spooky sounding one, which is apparently supposed to be the soundtrack for a movie she wants to make about circlemonsters. And her sister, Evee, is following right along in her path, banging away on the piano and drums and belting out her favorite songs.

People often ask me if my material is inspired by my kids... Certainly, some of it is, but before long I might be able to just have them create all of my material, themselves!

Pictured above... Evee and Becca with their pumpkins for this year, which they designed themselves (we did the carving).

Have a safe and happy Halloween!

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Thirteen for Halloween

2007-10-20T15:02:00.000-07:00

With Halloween coming up, I thought I should gather all of the Halloween themed kids' CDs I've received since starting this blog and do a collective plug for them. Then I realized, um, wait a minute... I've only received one Halloween CD that I can recall. So that means that M. Ryan Taylor's Thirteen for Halloween gets all the attention, and deservedly so, because it's quite a nice collection of spooky Halloween tunes.

There have been a number of good Halloween songs by many different kids' artists, including Ralph's World, Monty Harper, The Hipwaders, etc. (here's a list that Stefan from Zooglobble and Bill from Spare the Rock compiled last year), and a great compilation CD could certainly be made from them. But many of those songs, fun as they are, are really just the same kind of pop/rock/folk as their creators' normal work, with a bit of spookiness or Halloween flavor added on top. And that's certainly to be expected, and the same thing would probably be said for my song, "The Cruelest Lullaby", a Halloween themed lullaby which is available as a bonus download from my Snail's Pace CD.

But what I love about M. Ryan Taylor's Thirteen for Halloween CD is that it is really its own thing, and it has a perfect sense of the creepy kind of atmosphere that really screams (and shrieks) Halloween. Of course, Halloween can encompass the goofy and funny as well as the genuinely spooky and macabre, and normally I'm all for goofy and funny stuff, but it's almost as though the genuinely creepy kind of Halloween songs have gotten short shrift lately. I suppose that the most famous Halloween song of all-time, "Monster Mash", kind of set the standard for the novelty/goofy and pop/rock aspect of Halloween songs, but for me growing up, Halloween was also about the Horror Sounds of the Night kinds of records, and it's nice to hear a new album of Halloween songs that is a bit more frightening in nature, while not being gory or gross or demonic or anything like that.

The album begins with the beautifully scary "Welcome, said the Spider", with its deliciously creaky doors, jangling harpshichord and chilling vocals. M. Ryan employs his operatic vocal range to great effect throughout the CD, ranging from the softly mysterious to the powerfully ominous, as on the Phantom of the Opera style organ song, "Three Little Ghostesses", or the wonderfully string-laden "Old Witch, Old Witch". The vocal effects, sound effects and arrangements are very nicely done throughout; creative and varied and not always what you expect, but also not overblown. He even finds a way to use a jaw harp in a spooky way on the mummy song, "We're Back". I gotta tell ya, that ain't easy...

Some of the songs are reworkings of traditional tunes like "Mactavish is Dead" and many are originals (including "We're Back", "Welcome, said the Spider" and the pirate counterpoint number, "The Ghost Ship"), or folk songs with original lyrics and arrangements. There are a few bonafide startles and there is a very authentically nail-biting atmosphere throughout the CD, so some parental discretion is advised as far as who should listen.

Now that he's tackled one of the major holidays so well, I'd like to see what M. Ryan Taylor can do with other major holidays, like National Chocolate-Covered Anything Day (Dec. 16) or Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day (Jan. 29). I'm sure he's hard at work on those as we speak.

Thirteen for Halloween website

Thirteen for Halloween on iTunes

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World of Warcraft meets "The Elephant Song"?

2007-10-16T09:21:00.000-07:00

It's been about four years now since my first kids' CD came out. I'm grateful that it was received so well (it's hard to say for sure if I'd still be doing this if that was a flop), but I never would have imagined that one of the tracks, which was the first real kids' song I ever wrote, "The Elephant Song", would still be going strong years later.

I've had many people tell me how their family has adapted "The Elephant Song" in some way... a clothes version, a food version, a toy version, etc. I performed my own Halloween version ("Vampires, I like vampires", etc.) at an event last year. We've got The Elephant Book in the works, and there's been the new recording featuring my girls on my recent Snail's Pace CD. And we might still do a new version of the video at some point (the video as it is was only ever supposed to be a demo). It's been really nice that so many people have appreciated that song so much, and it's sort of taken on a life of its own.

For example, nothing could have prepared me for the tip off I received this morning about the video above, made by Meeko of Hakkar. Wow! Or should I say "WoW"? It's definitely a unique interpretation, and I had to laugh out loud at some parts, like where I say, "They don't? Well, what am I thinking of?" and at the end where the minotaur scratches his bottom and then bursts into tears. Okay, the donkey is a horse, but you gotta give him credit because you can tell he put a lot of work into it and it was a very funny idea.

Booking a Tour for 2008

2007-10-13T12:24:00.000-07:00

If you ever wonder how an independent children's music performer books a tour... well... so do I. :o)

In my experience over the past few years doing this full-time, a lot of the more substantial trips have been built around whatever comes up first. For example, two years ago a school in Utah wanted me to come and perform there. They couldn't fly me in so it wasn't really practical to go all the way there just for that one school. But I took a chance and booked the assembly anyway, and then thankfully was able to hook up with another 20 gigs or so in the same general area (or on the way there and back) to correspond with that time frame. It was definitely worth the effort and most of those places have since asked me back, but it was quite a lot of work to coordinate all of that in the first place.

Well, thinking back on that, it feels like a piece of cake compared to what I'm looking at right now. Back in 2006, I was booked in advance for several libraries in the Baton Rouge area for June of 2008. I knew the day was coming when Roseann and I would have to plan for that trip and plot a course there and back. That day has come... The good news is that I've had a number of inquiries from schools and other events in places like L.A., San Diego, Kansas City, Phoenix and elsewhere, so we have a bit of a head start to include those places in the path for this trip. The bad news is, well, gosh, it's an enormous amount of area and population to cover. It will no doubt be an incredible amount of e-mailing, phone calling, postcard mailing, faxing and other means of contacting people in these areas.

So to answer the original question about how an independent children's musician books a tour (at least this independent children's musician, for this tour)... he asks for help.

I know there are a lot of people who read this blog who have kids in elementary school, and there might even be a few who know booking agents in some of these areas. If you live in or near the target areas (see below) and have any contacts at elementary schools, libraries, day cares, parks & recreation departments, churches, corporate events, festivals, fairs, etc., please let me know and let your contacts there know that I'll be coming through. Any contacts you can share with me or plugs you can pass on will be very much appreciated. There are printable PDF flyers at this page with some basic information about what I offer. They can be passed on to your school's principal or PTA/PTO members or to your local children's librarian or to your parks department's event coordinator, etc.

Here is the list of target dates and areas (subject to a little bit of adjustment):

Seattle: March 24-27

Portland: March 29 - April 1

Medford/Redding: April 4-5

Bay Area: April 9-15

L.A./San Diego: April 18-25

Las Vegas: April 29 - May 2

Phoenix/Tucson: May 6-10

El Paso: May 14-16

San Antonio/Austin: May 21-23

Houston: May 27-30

Baton Rouge: June 2-19 (already booked for several shows)

Dallas: June 21-25

Oklahoma City/Tulsa: June 27-28

Branson/Springfield: June 29 - July 6

Kansas City: July 8-11

Colorado Springs: July 15-18

Denver: July 19-23

Salt Lake City: July 26-31

Ogden/Logan: August 1-2

Boise: August 5-6

Tri-Cities, WA: August 7

Seattle, Portland, Spokane, Boise, Tri-Cities, etc.: The rest of August and September

If you have any inquiries or information to share, please contact me. I'll be glad to send out promo materials as needed.

It's also helpful to know if anyone can offer us a safe place to park our RV for the night in any of those areas. And if so, your kids might end up getting an impromptu Eric Herman concert in your living room.

Thanks so much,
Eric

The Hipwaders: Educated Kid

2007-10-08T02:43:00.000-07:00

The Hipwaders are one of the best kid rock bands to emerge in recent years, and their latest CD is called Educated Kid.

In my previous feature about The Hipwaders, I mentioned how much I liked the songs on their debut CD, but that their influences often seemed too obvious, so that it sometimes sounded like a Beatles tribute band performing original kids' songs. Thankfully, on Educated Kid, the band seems to have largely shed the need to wear their influences so prominently and are sounding more like a very unique band that blends a variety of sounds and musical approaches with clever lyrics and stories. There are still some sound-alike parts here and there; the "baa baa" sections of "Little Baby Brother" and "You've Got to Move" that sound a lot like "Let's Spend the Night Together" as if sung by The Monkees; and the Proclaimers joined by John Mellencamp "uh huh, uh huh, uh huh" of the title track. But even in those cases, the integration into the songs is more transparent than it seemed on their first album.

Speaking of the title track, wow, it's absolutely incredible. A really cool tremolo guitar riff, a great verse leading to a greater pre-chorus leading to a perfect hook, and a poignant message about how your education, no matter how or where you get it (clown college, beauty school, home school, researching on your own, etc.), can help you to achieve great things in life. It doesn't get much better than this in kids' music, and Tito Uquillas and Co. have definitely got their biggest hit so far with this song.

With the "Educated Kid" song as great as it is, it's a tough act to follow for the rest of the album. After a few listens through the whole CD, the other songs haven't grabbed me as well as that title track, or as well as some of the songs on their first CD (regardless of the sound-alike thing), but it's hard to compare the other songs fairly with "Educated Kid" on there. There's a whole lot to love on this album, to be sure, and without the benchmark of the title track, I'm sure the other songs would stand perfectly well on their own. Other favorite tracks of mine include the chunky reggae of "You've Got to Move", the frenzied rock of "Art Car", featuring some awesome drumming by Nick Baca (see video below), and the spacey trip through the ages of the Earth called "The History of Declan Rae".

Befitting the title, The Hipwaders seem to have skewed more heavily toward educational subjects on this disc, and the obvious comparisons will be to Schoolhouse Rock! But it can be very difficult to craft an informative message about things like paleontology, geometry or the Dewey Decimal System into a memorable and captivating song. On Educated Kid, sometimes the attempts work really well and sometimes they don't quite. "Dewey Decimal System", for example, kind of meanders through several different musical stages, so for the most part I would put it into the "doesn't quite work" category. But then it does score some big points for the funky part where the title is repeated. Give the words "Dewey Decimal System" to a hundred different songwriters and I doubt any could make them sound as cool as Tito did with that chorus. So with this type of material, I don't think they've yet reached the level of accessibility and "all-time classic" feel as Schoolhouse Rock!, but they're certainly in the right neighborhood and show terrific potential to create a cool new brand of educational songs in addition to the other fun songs in their catalog.

Overall, Educated Kid continues to highlight what an incredibly creative and tight band The Hipwaders are and what a fantastic voice for kids' music Tito Uquillas has, both as a singer and a songwriter. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go play that title track about ten more times... Oh, yeah... I'm just an educated kid... uh huh, uh huh, uh huh...

Buy Educated Kid and hear more samples.

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Glenn Colton

2007-09-24T16:24:00.000-07:00

When I first decided to make the plunge into doing music for kids back when I lived in Buffalo, people from the area kept telling me, "Oh, you mean like Glenn Colton?" or "Oh, you should go see Glenn Colton." Recently, a musician I know from Buffalo named Matt Suroweic contacted me to ask some advice about his own foray into doing music for kids, and so of course I had to say, "Go see Glenn Colton!"

Suffice it to say that Glenn Colton is without a doubt the first name in children's music in the greater Western New York area. A quick scan of his schedule and you can see how popular he is as a performer, and many of the venues where he performs have him back year after year after year. That's not surprising, as Glenn writes very memorable songs for kids and performs them in very interactive and involving shows that are a lot of fun, and he provides a wide variety of school assembly programs that cater very well to what a lot of schools want to offer for their students.

After heeding the advice of those who said to me, "Go see Glenn Colton," I went to one of his park concerts and one of his school assemblies, and was inspired by how well a one-man-band performer could entertain a large group of kids. I had one of those "that's what I'd like to do with my life!" kind of feelings (not a moment too soon, considering I was about 33 at the time). Glenn made it look so easy and fun (of course, I hadn't seen the many years of experience he already had up to that point) and his use of conga lines, limbo sticks and other various props and jokes was also inspiring for the kind of fun shows I wanted to offer kids and families. If you saw a show with me and Glenn on a bill together (hopefully we'll put that together sometime when I'm out in Western New York again), you would probably notice a difference in some of the styles of material and humor that we each employ, and yet, you might also recognize that Glenn was a big influence on me as a children's performer, and so I would expect that you might find both shows to be highly entertaining and fun in their own unique ways.

When I first met him, Glenn was generous about sharing some tips to get me going in the right direction, and I really appreciated that. We've been friends ever since, and so when I was back in Buffalo recently, I thought, why not do an interview with him, since I've been meaning to feature him here at some point? Glenn invited me over and he shared a lot of great insights into his musical approach and how he's achieved and maintained his success performing music for children. The interview is split up into two parts below...

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Glenn Colton website

Interview on Saints & Spinners

2007-09-04T08:07:00.000-07:00

Alkelda the Gleeful has 1) a really cool nickname 2) a really great family, which she affectionately calls The House of Glee 3) a really funny song called "Superhero Tea Party" 4) many wonderful stories, story ideas and thoughts about performing as a children's storyteller that she shares on 5) a really great blog called Saints and Spinners, which today features an interview with a guy named Eric Herman.

My own "RV of Silliness" got to meet The House of Glee at a show of mine near Seattle this summer, and we really enjoyed sharing some tasty ice cream and good conversation with them afterward. Her blog has become a favorite of mine and I'm always eager to click the link when I see a new post from there pop up on my Google Reader. I want to thank Alkelda for sharing her time and talents with us all, and for not digging out too many skeletons in her interview with me. We hope to see her perform sometime when we're out that way again.

Scribblemonster

2007-08-27T12:51:00.000-07:00

Scribblemonster is a super-cool kids' band from the Chicago area. In my article about John Hadfield, I mentioned how his music seemed to have a sharp dichotomy between two different styles. Well, Scribblemonster performs several different styles of music, but they seem to have an even more dramatic distinction when it comes to the overall sound they have. The first two songs on their second album, Chocolate Milk, are a perfect demonstration of that.

The first song, the title track, is a power chord anthem which almost seems like a style parody of Joan Jett's "I Love Rock and Roll". Jumping right out at you through the speakers is the voice of ScribbleMonster, which is indeed very "monstery", sounding something like Dave Mustaine, Harvey Fierstein and MacGruff the Crime Dog if they all gargled with turpentine. It probably is a bit scary of a voice for the youngest or most timid of kids, but then again, if you're putting on a CD called "Scribblemonster", you should probably expect a scary monster voice, and this certainly delivers that along with a heavy dose of crunchy distorted guitars.

You might think from the first track that this is going to be one of the only original heavy metal albums for kids, but then track 2 makes you wonder if maybe you actually bought a compilation CD and Scribblemonster only had the leadoff track. "Beautiful Day" is an upbeat acoustic pop tune with jangly guitars and the decidedly ungruff and quite beautiful voice of ScribbleKitty. This song is catchy and cool and well-written and performed, just like "Chocolate Milk", and yet couldn't be more different from that track unless it was an Indian raga performed with kazoos and featuring a chorus of peacocks (I've yet to hear a children's music act do that convincingly).

But the more you listen to Scribblemonster, the more you realize that those two very divergent sounds, and many more, are just part of the whole experience. So it was probably very wise sequencing to put those two tracks up front like that, so you didn't get too familiar with one voice before being presented with the other. But ScribbleMonster and ScribbleKitty are actually only two of the four Scribblemonster voices... There is also ScribblePiggy, who has a bit more of a bluesy tone to her, and ScribbleBunny, who is more of a cute little boy character. ScribbleMonster and ScribbleBunny are both voiced by James Dague, who also writes and produces most of the Scribblemonster material. I'm not sure how he pulls off performing the two different voices live, but I'd like to see him try. (ScribbleKitty is Joyce Stuart and ScribblePiggy is Jayne Saniat).

All together, the four characters make for an interesting group, and I love the way they interact throughout the very hooky songs. And Scribblemonster has several songs that cleverly leave room for kids to interact directly with the song. For example, on "The World's Greatest", each of the Scribbles sing a verse about what their character would like to be (i.e. "I'm gonna be the world's greatest dentist" or "greatest singer" or "greatest plumber"), and then they leave a verse with just the music, so that kids can sing about whatever they want to be. It's sort of like karaoke mad libs. On the song "I'm a... (Anything I Like)", they sing the first part of the line, but leave the end for the kids, such as, "I'm a box of... (???)". It's especially funny to hear ScribbleMonster singing the verse that goes, "I'm a girl named... (???)" This has become a fun game for us to play on the road, because you can make up just about anything. For example, my two year-old created this gem, "I'm stinky and I'm a foot." I don't know if James came up with the idea for this type of song, but I can't recall hearing this kind of thing before, and regardless, they do a really great job with these.

Throughout both of their albums, Scribblemonster has a terrific blend of melody, rhythm and subject matter that is perfect for kids. Their first album, Best of Friends, is a little rougher in terms of its production, but has just as many great songs as its successor, like "Wishin' Around", which has a wonderfully soaring melody; "A Monster Goes Rrrargh!", which has a monster going "rrrargh!" (see video below); and "Hooray!", which is one of those aforementioned "make up your own verse" songs.

Scribblemonster has also performed some notable guest appearances, including their popular track "I Wish I Lived in Michigan", which appears on Kevin Kammeraad's epic 49 track CD about the state of Michigan called A Curious Glimpse of Michigan, and backing Monty Harper on the title track of his Get a Clue album.

Scribblemonster website

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Randy Newman

2007-08-20T10:26:00.000-07:00

Randy Newman has had quite a varied and successful career as a singer-songwriter and film composer. He has won virtually every major award there is in the entertainment industry, including Oscars, Grammys and Emmys. In recent years, Randy has become even more well known for his songs in popular children's movies.

I use the term "children's movies" with some hesitation, because while Pixar's films are particularly geared toward children, I consider them among the finest movies of any type, and I'm 38. I can sit and watch any of the Pixar movies on my own, repeatedly, and thoroughly enjoy them. When I was traveling on my own for about a week recently, and had a few hours free, I felt no hesitation whatsoever to go and see Ratatouille all by myself. My favorites, in particular, are Monsters Inc., Toy Story 1 & 2 and Finding Nemo, but I think they are all terrifically entertaining.

Toy Story started the ball rolling for Pixar's tremendous run of success, and Randy's songs and scoring are a big part of what helps to drive the story. Randy's songs are unassuming in their approach, usually with a basic pop arrangement and his uniquely twangy voice that can only be self-referenced. Randy Newman's voice sounds like... well, like Randy Newman. They are simply great songs, with a catchiness that belies their sophistication and melodies that are sublime and inspired. "You've Got a Friend in Me" is the signature song for the Toy Story films, and it welcomes you right into the world of Woody and Andy. It's a perfect hummable theme song with a heart, as Randy eloquently sings, "Some other folks might be a little bit smarter than I am, bigger and stronger, too. But none of them will ever love you the way I do. It's me and you, boy."

The next song in the film is the funky rock song, "Strange Things", where Woody is realizing how Buzz is taking some of Andy's attention away from Woody. I love that the film's producers chose Randy to create new songs specifically for the movie instead of just filling in a bunch of soundtrack songs and calling that a "score". Sometimes that kind of pop soundtrack can be just right for a movie, and certainly there are several songs that might have fit okay to underscore the general feeling there. But it's especially perfect to have Randy's specific lyrical descriptions like, "I was on top of the world, it was right in my pocket. I was livin' the life, things were just the way they should be. When from out of the sky like a bomb comes some little punk in a rocket. Now all of a sudden some strange things are happenin' to me."

The other song in Toy Story, "I Will Go Sailing No More", is later in the film when Buzz is realizing that he is indeed a toy, and it is a beautifully dramatic and dynamic piece that reminds me of some of the achingly powerful Roger Waters tracks on The Wall. Each of the three songs on Toy Story couldn't be more different from each other, and yet each is brilliant and perfect for what it is and for what it is supposed to be achieving in the film.

There is only one new Randy Newman song in Toy Story 2 ("You've Got a Friend in Me" is reprised a couple of times), but boy, is it a doozy. "When She Loved Me", sung wonderfully by Sarah McLachlan, is so touchingly sad it makes you want to weep for the plight of forgotten toys everywhere. McLachlan, known for her breathy pseudo-yodeling vocals, was a perfect choice to give voice to the memory of Jessie, the Yodeling Cowgirl, and Newman's melody and arrangement in this song is truly stirring. Newman actually won his Oscar (after 13 nominations) for the fun jazzy pop tune "I Wouldn't Have Nothing if I Didn't Have You" from Monsters, Inc., but my feeling is that he deserved it more for "When She Loved Me".

Other songs Randy composed for children's movies include the songs for the great version of Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach, "That'll Do" from Babe: Pig in the City, and "Our Town", which James Taylor plaintively sang (as he does so well) in Cars. Pixar is scheduled to release Toy Story 3 in 2010, presumably with Randy Newman doing the music again, though his involvement hasn't been confirmed for that yet. He is definitely doing songs and music for Disney's much-touted return to traditional 2D animation with "The Frog Princess" in 2009.

Randy Newman website

Roseann Endres

2007-08-12T07:01:00.000-07:00

I ended my recent article about Robbi K by saying, "A husband and wife producing children's music together... How about that?!" I was making a wink smile kind of comment about my wife and I producing my kids' music, but I realize that it may have been a bit of an oblique reference for anyone who didn't know that.

Yes, my wife, Roseann, and I produce my kids' music together, and I realize that it's not just us and Robbi K and her husband, Bakithi... Gwendolyn and her husband, Brandon, produce the music for Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang, and I believe that Ellen and Matt (who I've been meaning to feature here at some point) also produce their music in addition to performing together. I'm sure there are other kid-music-producing couples, too. (Please let me know if I'm missing any.) And of course, there are many spouses out there who play an important role in the careers of their musical counterparts, though that may not specifically include the music production aspect.

But since I've mentioned Roseann, I wanted to give you a better glimpse at what exactly she does in respect to my musical career. I get all of the applause at my concerts and most of the accolades for the CDs, but I would like to applaud her for all of her efforts and talents behind the scenes. You might get an interesting glimpse into the dynamics of a husband/wife entertainment team, and I might score some major love points with the Mrs., which never hurts!

If Roseann were applying for a job somewhere, and using her work with me as a reference, the list of her job functions could look something like this...

Producer, songwriter, copy writer, casting director, stage manager, musical director, marketing research, PR manager, business relations, video producer, child psychology and development research, video director, camera operator, child wrangler, costume designer, mascot performer, puppeteer, business adviser, artistic adviser, performance adviser, promoter, agent, networking, event planning, graphic artist, mechanic, electrician, handyman, talent coordinator, assistant to the artist, cashier, retail sales, quality control supervisor, performer, vocalist, business founder, entrepreneur, photographer, stylist, roadie, groupie, navigator, image consultant, operations manager, physical therapist, first-aid caregiver, nutritionist, human resources, sounding board, development team, muse, ego booster, ego leveler, backseat driver, map reader, relief driver, bargain hunter, customer service, billing/collections, legal adviser, set designer, comedy writer, temporary pickle jar opener (until my arm and finger injuries heal).

And then of course there are the all-important jobs of wife and mother. Certainly there are more job descriptions that I could add for her, but that gives you some idea of the many things that she does. It would take too long to elaborate on all of those job descriptions, but I'd like to add a few notes about some of those aspects.

Producer: Roseann is definitely an equal partner in terms of the producing aspect of my music. We have similar tastes, but we also have some individual preferences that make for a good blend. We have some arguments now and then about certain things, but when that happens, we've found that it's usually a case of properly communicating what it is that we want or don't want (which isn't always easy to do), and then finding something that works better. We try not to just compromise when there is a difference of opinion, but to find another solution that makes the whole thing better for both of us.

A good example of that is the song "Ants in the Lunchroom" from Monkey Business, where I really liked the song as it was but Roseann kept insisting that it felt too "heavy". I felt like that early Rush meets Jethro Tull kind of sound was cartoonish in this case and worked well for the idea of the song. We butted heads for a while on whether the song should be on that album (and if we didn't get beyond that argument, it wouldn't have been included). But then I had the idea to add the ant voices as part of the recording. I did a basic demo of that and Roseann loved it and realized that it added the cartoonishness that she wasn't feeling before and took away the feeling of heaviness that she didn't like, without taking away the heaviness that I did like. Roseann actually scripted most of the ant parts for the final recordings that she and Kenn Nesbitt performed, and we both ended up liking that song a lot better the way it turned out, and that track became a favorite for many kids from that album. We have had a lot of similar experiences while producing our albums, where there's usually something better to be gained from whatever conflict there might be.

Roseann is also a great producer when it comes to knowing when to say things like, "This song needs more cowbell!" or "Why on Earth are you using cowbell on this song?!" She has a great ear for pitch and instrumental balance and a terrific feel for what kids will respond to, or not. She generously lets me be the mad scientist and go experiment with sounds and parts, but she is also able to give some great direction and offer many creative ideas of her own, which often helps to complete the songs. I don't recall Roseann contributing too much to the writing of "Blackbeard, Bluebeard and Redbeard", but she was a big part of producing how the recording turned out, such as getting together the intro/outro parts with the big kid's interjections with the narrator, which I think added a lot to the self-deprecating nature of that track.

Another very significant production contribution Roseann had was to use just one really cute sounding little girl (who she found in her capacity as "casting director") as my audience for the recording of "The Elephant Song". I kept thinking we should use a live version or to bring in a throng of kids to respond together, to capture some of the frenzied and insistent responses that the song elicits in a live setting. But she felt that for the CD, it would be best to have a more controlled focus, because she wanted to feature the song better and she also felt that while a parent at a concert might laugh and enjoy watching their kid go bonkers, on an audio recording with a group of kids, that could be grating. Roseann was also instrumental (in her capacity as a "child wrangler") in getting Meghan, the girl who did the recording, to deliver a terrific performance that would be received well.

A quick mention here that Roseann the video director and graphic artist also designed the video for "The Elephant Song". It was originally meant to be nothing more than a demo, so she threw some pictures together on the MS Paint program, with the help of our daughter, Becca, to show me how it might work. But once we put it all together, we decided to show the "demo" to some other people and it took off from there, though she's still a little embarrassed that her initial rough sketch drawings are what is being seen around the world.

Songwriter: I give Roseann co-writing credit on all of my songs, because there is often something specific that she's added to every song. That may be minimal for some songs, such as, "That phrase needs to be reworded... How about this, instead?" or "How about a different chord there?", but there are also several songs where we've worked very closely together and her contribution has been very significant, and those have turned out to be some of my most popular, including "There's a Monster in My House", "The Elephant Song", "Bounce and Flap and Twist", "Cowboy Bergaleoukaleopaleous" and "No Big Deal".

Performer: Roseann has performed the following parts on my albums... The "Awww!" on "In the Box"; monkey sounds on "The Monkeys"; the parrot on "Blackbeard, Bluebeard and Redbeard"; backing vocals on "Crazy Over Vegetables" (which she also arranged); the mother on "I Am a Robot"; the legal speak on "Prune Juice"; some of the ant parts on "Ants in the Lunchroom" (Kenn Nesbitt did most of them); the mother in "Cowboy Bergaleoukaleopaleous"; co-lead vocals on "Steve the Superhero".

Stage manager/performance adviser: Roseann has been crucial over the last several years as an observer at my live shows, to help me improve as a performer and fine-tune my shows to be the most entertaining experience they can be, which can vary quite a bit depending on the audience, the venue and the particular circumstances of the event. Sometimes it feels a little disheartening when I feel like I just had a terrific show and then she tells me afterward about something I said or did that didn't work so well or could have been better, but I have learned to graciously accept her notes and use them to do better next time. Conversely, once in a while I feel like a show didn't go so well, but she might tell me about some things that I didn't observe that were very well received.

On rare occasions, she might even come up and give me an instruction during a show which is helpful to get things going in a better direction, or to keep things going in the right direction. For example, at a recent show I wasn't aware that most of my audience were European immigrants and weren't English-speaking, and so when I was getting a little frustrated that I had little reaction from the kids early on, she sensed that and told me about it after she found that out from the sound guy. And so for the rest of that show, doing more physical/dancing songs went over much better than the story/joke songs had early on. Roseann has some background in early childhood development and child psychology and experience working with special needs kids and has observed a lot from that which she has brought to our involvement with entertaining children.

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I could go on and on about the specific things that Roseann has done and continues to do on a daily basis to help me do what I do, but this has probably been long enough. Hopefully I've scored enough bonus points with her already. Suffice to say that I'm incredibly grateful to be married to such a wonderful woman and to be able to work together with her and for the life and the love that we share. Also, as I talked about in this article about how I got into kids' music, I probably wouldn't be doing this at all if it weren't for Roseann's faith in me and encouragement, and I'm particularly grateful for that.

Eric Herman and the Injurable Hand

2007-08-11T10:26:00.001-07:00

It hasn't been the best year for personal safety...

First, the broken arm, and then last week I cut a nice chunk out of the tip of my middle finger with a shaving razor.

I know what you're probably thinking... Eric, you're not supposed to shave your fingers. But it's just that every night when the moon comes out, they get really hairy, and... Well, actually I was rummaging through a bin on the top shelf of our bathroom closet in the RV and there was a razor in there with the safety cap missing. That'll teach me to leave safety caps off and to go rummaging through uncharted bins.

Fortunately, the gouge is over on the side of the fingertip and shouldn't affect my long-term guitar-playing. It's healing well and should be okay before too long, but it has made it difficult to play guitar at my recent shows. "The Elephant Song" just doesn't sound quite right with two-finger power chords. And there's a gesture that is created now when my hand is playing the guitar neck that, well... it's not the nicest thing for family shows, if you know what I mean.

So anyway, with the arm brace still on my right forearm and the finger splint on my left hand, I've decided not to sing any "safety" songs this year, for fear of looking hypocritical.

Robbi K

2007-08-07T08:31:00.000-07:00

In her career, Robbi K has performed and recorded with some of the biggest names in the music industry, including Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, Diana Ross, Rod Stewart and Mary J. Blige, just to name a few. She's also performed on big-time TV shows like Oprah and David Letterman. She has quite an impressive resume, and with her amazing vocal talent and engaging personality and sense of humor, she could really do anything at all in the entertainment world. But Robbi was inspired by a children's theatre production in 1981 to make children the main focus of her musical talent, and the children of the world are very blessed for that choice of hers.

Robbi's latest album, her second CD for kids, is called Music Makes Me Happy, and it's an outstanding collection of songs for kids, covering a wide variety of styles including world, jazz, blues and gospel. Robbi sites Paul Simon's Graceland as a seminal album and influence for her. I would say exactly the same thing about Graceland's influence on me, and so it's interesting to me how different people can be influenced in very different ways by the same work of art. This is not to say that Robbi's music (or mine) sounds much at all like Graceland, but the idea of exploring and trying to be unique and creative with a variety of musical approaches is certainly prevalent throughout Music Makes Me Happy, and in that sense, I can definitely recognize that influence.

The CD begins with a fun percussion song as Robbi and a small group of kids "Feel Da Beat". "Summer's Here" is next and is a catchy calypso style song in the vein of "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid. "Eating Some Pizza" shows off some great kid singers describing what makes them shout "Hallelujah!", and I particularly love how the background singers sing the "hallelujah" phrase. This is a really cool track and my only complaint is that the kids singing are mixed a little too low to understand throughout. The kids they got to perform on this album are right on with their pitch and timing and the production showcases them well throughout the rest of the album, but I wish I could have heard them a little better on this track.

Robbi's take on "The Legend of John Henry" has an upbeat Motown feel, very reminiscent of "Papa Was a Rolling Stone". Next up is "Music is My Friend", which is probably the only track I didn't really enjoy on this album. I think that people make too much fun of the music from the 1970's, when there was actually quite a lot of great music happening then, but this reminds me of the kind of 70's songs that didn't endure very well. Musically, it's kind of catchy, so that's not the major issue, but lyrically it seems to include some forced and rather odd phrases, such as, "It can take down up. Fill an empty cup. Fill it with magic stuff." and "Music brings a charge, makes the small seem large. Rides you on a barge." Rides you on a barge?? A very strange choice for a lyric... Robbi didn't write this song, so I'm not going to hold it against her, but regardless, those kind of lyrics combined with the lite jazz pop of the music make the song a little difficult for me to warm up to. I like that this is yet another style that she is experimenting with, and I like the general message that music can be very uplifting to your spirit, but it just doesn't seem to measure up with the strength of the rest of the album for me. But to say that this is the only song I don't really care for is in itself quite a recommendation for this CD, as even some of my favorite albums have two or three tracks that I'm not all that crazy about.

"Favourite Things" is a swing jazz version of the song from The Sound of Music, and Robbi shows off some nice phrasing, for example, pausing in just the right way to make a line like "schnitzel with noodles" sound cool instead of hokey. The band is sizzling hot on this one, and the musical performances and Robbi's arrangements throughout the CD are terrific. My favorite tune, the "Got Me Laughing Blues", definitely got me laughing with some brutally honest examples of things that make Robbi laugh, including her brother's little butt and passing gas. "Music Makes Me Happy" is an upbeat and joyous blues number (yes, blues can be that way!) and features several different people joining in to celebrate, including children's music artist Brady Rymer and blues legend Guy Davis.

"Happy! Happy! Happy! Happy! Happy!" begins with a Barney impersonation that seems to imply that the song will be a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but you could certainly take it at face value to be a musical depiction of the seesaw mood swings of a kids' life. I like the contrast between the happy and mad sections, and how they change into each other. The feel of the happy part reminds me of Vince Guaraldi playing piano for a polka band, and then the mad part has shades of things like Fiddler on the Roof and even Frank Zappa. It's an unusual combination, but somehow it works well and is a fun diversion.

"I Love My Teacher" (see the video below) has a chorus of kids (including Robbi's daughters DiDi and Mbali) singing in an old doo-wop style (with Bowzer from Sha Na Na appropriately guesting), doing a fitting tribute to teachers everywhere. I can remember idealizing a few of my teachers growing up, and I think this song speaks well to that kind of kids' perspective. A lot of kids, especially elementary aged kids, really do think of teachers as being in a different realm entirely, which is why it was always so weird when you happened to see your teacher at the supermarket. I'd think... What is Mr. Edholm doing here? I thought he lived at the school and studied science books all night?! And lines like "I'm so glad that I'm her child" made me realize that the kids could also be singing this to their parent or parents, who are certainly the most important of all the teachers in their lives (a relationship which is completely reciprocal, since kids teach us so much).

The final track is a beautiful medley called "The Peace Song", which is gloriously arranged with angelic voices and lush strings, as the Latin words for "Give us peace" are interspersed with references to classic gospel songs like "Amazing Grace", "His Eye is on the Sparrow" and "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands". Robbi's voice has such versatility throughout the album, strongly belting out jazz and blues and also showing much beauty and restraint on a track like this. All told, Music Makes Me Happy more than proves its title, providing an enlightening and entertaining experience through the joy and power of music.

I should mention that Music Makes Me Happy was co-produced by Robbi and her husband, Bakithi Kumalo (who also plays bass on the album and who has played bass for many years with Paul Simon. You know that famous bass solo on "You Can Call Me Al"? That was Bakithi.). The arrangements and instrumental performances are varied, colorful and altogether quite enjoyable, without ever getting in the way of Robbi's vocals, and the overall production is top-notch. There's no doubt that Bakithi and Robbi make a really great team. (A husband and wife producing children's music together... Hey, how about that?!)

Robbi K website

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John Hadfield

2007-08-02T15:51:00.000-07:00

If I were a kid, John Hadfield would be someone who I would camp out overnight to buy tickets for. Well, that's probably not a good thing for kids to do... I mean, the camping part is fine, but waiting in line all night for concert tickets isn't typically the most wholesome activity. Then again, maybe you can talk your Scoutmaster into having the next Boy Scout campout in the parking lot in front of Ticketmaster instead of at Lake Wikihaha. Then it might be alright...

But do people even do that anymore... sleep out for concert tickets? I used to do that once in a while, but it got to the point where I'd tell a friend, "Dude, I slept out for Soundgarden tickets last night and got seats in the 10th row!" and then he'd be like, "I called in for tickets this morning and got 8th row." And it's probably even more like that now with internet ticket sales available. I'm not sure that the idea of sleeping out and forming a line at the ticket window is really much of a guarantee of the best seats anymore.

But anyway, John Hadfield... Yeah, he's like the performing equivalent of Elvis, David Copperfield, Steve Martin and Bozo the Clown. In his show he sings, cracks jokes, does magic tricks, walks on stilts, clowns, bakes pies, carves wood sculptures with chainsaws while juggling them... you name it. Well, maybe he doesn't quite do all of that, but it sure is a heck of a variety, and you can tell from his promo video (see below) that he does it all with great flair and creativity.

John Hadfield is another example of goofiness being alive and well in children's entertainment. His latest album, Robot Monkey Head, is full of goofy songs and silly noises and is altogether quite delightful. I can imagine some snooty kids' music aficionado somewhere pooh-poohing this kind of material, and I can only feel sad for their lack of humor and sense of kids' sensibilities when it comes to what really entertains them. As I said in the Barry Louis Polisar article, most kids will eat that goofy and silly stuff right up.

The opening title track is kind of weird as it describes John's earnest desire for a battery-powered, life-size, wireless robot monkey head. He patters the words over mysterious synthesized beats, reminding me of a cross between Oingo Boingo and Falco. There are some amusingly bizarre lines like, "You'd be my missing link. Your neck leaks when you drink," and "I'd tell you funny knock-knock jokes and demonstrate karate, but you could never punch or kick, 'cause you don't have a body." Clearly, John has tapped into the brains of kids and is giving them the kind of absurdist humor that they love to discover and are apt to repeat over and over.

Musically, John seems to have a dual personality. About half of the songs on Robot Monkey Head are in a style that is sort of 80's rock/pop/techno/synth oriented, and the other half are folky/bluegrass/acoustic in nature. He probably could have split them up, added a few more tracks of each kind, and made two entirely separate albums, and you might think they were made by two completely different artists. But sequenced as they are, going back and forth between one style or the other, you eventually get used to it and accept the dichotomy. And kids, of course, are able to change gears on a dime, so I can't imagine that being any problem for them.

Much as I love rock and various incarnations of that, my preference for this album is actually for the folkier songs. I think they are far more cohesive and enduring, with the synth rock songs sounding a bit dated and disjointed at times. But to say something sounds "dated" is another thing that's probably more relevant to adults... kids won't necessarily have the same frame of reference to think, oh that's so (insert year here).

The first of the folky tunes is "Uncle Tony's Dentures", with a knee-slapping country hook and a funny story about where those dang teeth could've got to. "I Like Beans" is next and has a great "Shaving Cream" misdirection, where you're expecting one word and get another. Yes, this is in essence a fart song, and a great one at that, so be forewarned that there will likely be squeals of laughter induced in your children should they be allowed to hear this. I say "should they be allowed to hear this" because I know there are some parents out there who try to limit the "crude humor" that their kids are exposed to. I don't hear that too much in relation to kids' music, but quite often in relation to kids' movies and TV shows, so I'm sure it translates through all children's media, or at least, it should. I suppose limiting the intake of crude humor isn't a bad idea, and I certainly have no right to question what anyone thinks is good or bad for their kids.

But let's face it... farts are funny. The combination of the sound and the smell makes for a unique experience that is virtually irresistible as comic fodder. Of course, the timing and the character involved often has something to do with whether it's funny or just plain gross. I'm thinking of the Monty Python sketch where the Queen of England is at a very formal event and excuses herself to the bathroom, and then you hear all kinds of gaseous expulsions... That's hilarious, because the Queen is so prim and proper. But on the other hand, your weird Uncle Frank, who already smells a little strange to begin with, asking kids to pull his finger... that probably falls under the "just plain gross" category. But farts are the great equalizer of all humanity... rich, poor, young, old, men, women, beautiful, not-so-beautiful... Everyone farts, or at least has farted at some point. So why should bodily humor like that be considered off-limits for kids? I'm amused to think of some parents who might be diligent about keeping crude humor completely away from their kids, but who themselves enjoyed the Austin Powers movies, or who were among the well-dressed adult audience who were laughing uproariously at George Carlin's fart routine when I saw him at an upper-scale theatre venue in New York. In other words, apparently kids are just too young to really appreciate the intricate sophistication of fart humor?? Yeah, that must be it.

"The Duct Tape Festival" is the next folky tune and is a Charlie Daniels style story song about a very real festival held every year in Avon, Ohio. I love the rolling melody and plaintive feel of the song, as if his very happiness depends on whether he will attend and how many duct tape jackets and wallets he will be able to sell. My favorite of the folk tunes is next with the very catchy "Bad for the Roads, but Good on Chicken" (see video below), discussing the pros and cons of salt and featuring a funny-sounding local-yokel background chorus singing "good on chicken!" The song includes some poultry-insensitive lyrics like, "If it's icy when I go for a ride, and I hit some chickens when I start to slide, I pull out my sodium chloride, 'cause it sure tastes good on chicken." John is careful, though, in the final verse, to recognize that some may not like to eat their feathered friends, while asserting his own pleasure in doing so: "Now chicken is a food that's good to eat, unless you're a vegan or you don't eat meat. So keep your chickens out of the street, 'cause you know I love my chicken!"

The last of the folk songs is the very clever "The Rhyming Song", which like all the others is very memorable and employs another lyrical misdirection, playing beautifully with our rhyme scheme expectations.

Highlights among the rock/synth tunes include "Stink Monkey", a nice modern retelling of the old Struvelpeter German stories my mother used to tell me, showing the consequences of what happens when you don't bathe or brush your teeth; "Bunny Foo Foo", with an unlikely bully character in a Tone Loc groove; "Best Friends", which adds yet another unique take on the idea of imaginary friends; and "Ready, Fire, Aim!", which has a great message about thinking first before you speak or act on something. That's a very cool tune in its own right, though it seems a little out of place in its style and approach, being rather serious and sounding more like modern punk or like Neil Young when he turns on the heavy distortion.

Musically, Robot Monkey Head is sort of like having a peanut butter and tuna fish sandwich. They are both great sandwiches on their own, but a little strange put together. But John's humor, charm and engagingly goofy voice are the glue that bind it all together (mmm... peanut butter, tuna fish and glue!), and considering the subject matter is often pretty strange, it ends up working just perfectly.

John Hadfield website

I usually include MP3 samples with my features, but I really want to encourage you to see John's great video promo below, which includes several samples from his songs.

"Bad for the Roads, but Good on Chicken" live video (below)

Roger Day's new CD, Dream Big!

2007-07-29T09:48:00.000-07:00

The great Roger Day, one of my favorite children's music artists (click here for my previous feature on him), has released his third CD, called Dream Big!, and it adds several more Roger Day classics to the kids' music catalog.

Roger has a way of making memorable, easy to follow and also very musically fulfilling songs, and the first several tracks on Dream Big! are terrific examples of that, including the poppy title track with its enthusiastic exhortation for kids to sing loud, jump high and dream big; "Rumble in the Jungle (The Elefunk Song)"; the mid-career Beatles with string quartet sound of "Zachary Hated Bumblebees"; the laid-back charm of "I Like Yaks"; "Roly Poly", with a Buddy Holly/Bo Diddley riff that appropriately employs The Crickets as the backup band and has a hilarious line about not knowing "Bo Diddley squat"; and "Uno, Dos, Tres", with a catchy and beautiful Spanish melody.

The album is only hit-and-miss for me after that point. I give Roger mucho bravery points for his rapping on "Turn Off the TV" (my wife and I have instituted a strict "no middle-aged white guy rapping" policy for my albums). I'm not sure how well the song will work, but if you're trying to get your kids to watch less TV, I suppose it can't hurt. "Hello Sunshine" is nice in a Turtles meets The Osmonds kind of way, but also sort of innocuous (in a Turtles meets The Osmonds kind of way). "Zoe's World" would have made a perfect 80's sitcom theme. "Happy Hippos Hopping" and "The Greatest Day on Earth Day" sound very similar to each other, and remind me a bit of Ralph's World's more cutesy folk-pop songs. "Life is a Miracle" is a very engaging reggae anthem, and "I Love You (More than My Shoe)" is a fun old-style tune reminiscent of "The Goodbye Song" from Roger's last album, Ready to Fly.

The later songs that didn't grab me as much are still decent and well-produced by any other standard, so to say that they aren't as good as the earlier tracks or as some of Roger's other hits like "Mosquito Burrito" and "Open Up the Coconut" is not to say that they're not good. It's just that the bar has been set very high. Altogether, it's a really fun album, and it's great to hear some new music from Roger, especially considering that Ready to Fly was released waaaaaay back in 2001.

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Mr. Billy

2007-07-20T08:06:00.000-07:00

Mister Billy is a very popular children's entertainer from Wisconsin. He performs over 300 shows a year, which is an amazingly busy schedule for any performer, but especially for someone doing energetic live shows for kids. Obviously, he is great at entertaining kids in a live setting, but his CDs also stand up on their own, with a lot of great songs and energy, and a nice variety of styles and approaches.

Much of Mr. Billy's music has the feel of classic rock 'n' roll, and he appropriately rips on guitar, with many cool riffs on his songs. Vocally, he's got a twangy blues rock delivery, which can also be very expressive when needed. If I had to pick another artist that he reminds me of, it would probably be ZZ Top, ranging from their early raw music ("La Grange", "Cheap Sunglasses", etc.) through their more commercial later music ("Legs", "Sharp Dressed Man", etc.), and also on another end of the music spectrum, he's kind of like Howard Jones.

Mr. Billy has released four CDs, and while most of them are electric guitar-based, his latest album, Batteries Not Included, is all acoustic, though still with a lot of the same rock feel to it. It starts off with "Good Morning", which has a catchy and funky feel and includes a very nice counterpoint section. This is charmingly quirky and reminds me of my friend Kent Olmstead, who writes and produces cool indie rock with the band Fast Sundae. "Clap Your Hands" is a participatory rock anthem, which largely cops the "Satisfaction" riff at one point. "We Went to the Sea" chugs along nicely with an enthusiastic chorus of kids. By and large, Mr. Billy seems to be targeting the younger range of kids with these songs, and he does a really good job of appealing to their interest and attention.

Songs like "R-I-N-G-O" and "The ABC Blues" are kind of fun the first time for me and then don't really hold any interest beyond that, but kids would give them more longevity, and ultimately that's what matters. Other covers on the album are either hit or miss, and my definite preference for Mr. Billy's recordings are his original songs, which are very memorable in their own right. My favorites are in the middle of the album, starting with "Something Fishy", which is a take on the old "Teasing Mr. Crocodile" song and has a cool Grateful Dead with minor chord harmonies kind of sound. Next is "Chug-a Chug-a Choo Choo", a very catchy blues rock hit with an amazing sped up fiddle break (see video below). "I Heard Said the Bird" is a really fun 50's rocker a la Elvis and the Stray Cats.

The album closes with two more great songs. "Bernie the Bubble Breathing Dragon" has some terrific chord changes and a nice "don't play with fire" message. "Goodnight Sun" is a gorgeous lullaby. There is another Grateful Dead comparison here, but this time in the sense of some harmonies that don't quite lock in together. But just because the harmonies are a little off on "Box of Rain" or "Uncle John's Band" doesn't mean they aren't still great songs to listen to, and the same thing definitely applies for "Goodnight Sun".

I wanted to feature Mr. Billy and Monty Harper subsequently, because they have worked together on a few projects. The pair collaborated on both "Chug-a Chug-a Choo Choo" and "Goodnight Sun", and one of my favorite songs on Monty Harper's new Get a Clue album is "Can You Guess?", featuring Mr. Billy's arrangement and instrumentation.

I also received Mr. Billy's Greatest Hits album, which includes a wider variety of styles and sounds, and features his electric guitar sound. "Seuss on the Loose" has that modern ZZ Top sound that I mentioned before. "The Ants in Your Pants Dance" is kind of like a cross between Huey Lewis' rock songs and "Hand Jive" from Grease, and is thankfully nothing at all like my own song of the same name (another example of what I said in my recent Idea Tree 2.0 post, that the same idea or title can yield totally different results). "First Day!" is partially a parody of "Summertime Blues" with a bit of a Scorpions riff and ably tackles the tough job of making the first day of school seem like a great thing. For some kids it is (and for parents, definitely), but for many a little propaganda like this might help ease the long walk out to the bus stop after the all-too-brief summer fun. "I Like Dinosaurs" has a really great riff and a B-52s 80's rock feel. "Let's Go Writing" has a bass riff that's kind of a fast version of "Peter Gunn" and a sweet vocal echo on the hook. "Bubble Trouble" goes some interesting directions and has very clever sound arrangement. "Don't Call Me a Bird" is a neat riddle with a Sting/Bon Jovi/Howard Jones flavor.

You can gather from some of my descriptions above that Mr. Billy is pretty heavily influenced by 80's music, running the gamut between 80's rock and metal and 80's synth pop and new wave. So that might be a determining factor as far as how well parents will take to his music. But regardless, kids will find a lot to love in Mr. Billy's songs, and they might be a good way to transition your kids into listening to your old Flock of Seagulls and Men Without Hats albums.

Mr. Billy's website

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Snail's Pace and a Bloggy Birthday

2007-07-09T10:07:00.000-07:00

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).

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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

Monty Harper

2007-06-25T05:49:00.000-07:00

Monty Harper is without a doubt one of the most lyrically sophisticated writers working in children's music today. He might be considered the kids' music equivalent of Stephen Sondheim. However, whereas Sondheim is often ribbed for not writing hummable tunes ("Send in the Clowns" the notable exception), Monty is also gifted with being able to create very memorable hooks and melodies.

Monty has six CDs of music for kids, and a while ago he sent me all but the newest one. I still haven't had a chance to listen to them all, so I'll focus my attention here on his live recording, The Great Green Squishy Mean Concert CD. I've heard that disc a few times already, and it is a really great collection of the different kinds of things that Monty does and does so well, and should certainly make a good jumping off point for anyone to check out his other work.

"Loose Tooth" starts things off with a catchy Buddy Holly vibe and some clever lyric lines like: I've got a loose tooth. I can't wait to surprise her when I tell my teacher: I'm losing an incisor. "Silly Song" is exactly that, with a catchy chorus that would be at home on a Barney video (and hey, say what you will about Barney, but it's hard to be that catchy). "Horny Toad" has a cool funky sound and tells you just about everything you might like to know about the creature. For example, when provoked, the horny toad squirts blood from its eyes. How cool is that?!

"Hanging Out with Heroes at the Library" reminds me of the kinds of songs that Eric Ode does so well... the music is good, it involves the kids' thinking and responding, and it plugs reading and libraries. "Pop Up Sit Down" is a fun song where Monty increasingly plays with the audience's expectations to great effect. "Love This Baby" is a cute take on the old "Shaving Cream" gag. "The Frog Song" is an interactive story about a prince looking for the perfect princess in every frog he sees. "You're a Dinosaur" is a rock song with a nice refrain that covers a number of popular dinosaurs. It goes on quite a while over several verses, but never feels too long.

"Big Red Fire Truck" seems a little ordinary, musically, until the chorus hits the line "See me race to the rescue" where it hits an incredibly awesome chord change sequence, which sounds particularly great with the fire alarm wailing over it. That little section alone makes that song a favorite of mine, and it's a good example of how Monty makes all of his songs interesting in different ways.

It's appropriate that Monty subtitled his first album with the phrase "Intelligent Songs for Kids". He definitely doesn't dumb anything down, and he isn't afraid to use big words, trusting that kids will either understand them or will want to learn them if they don't already know their meaning. And at the same time, his songs are fun and involving for kids and can work really well for a wide range of ages. In other words, you don't need to be a brainiac to appreciate Monty's songs, though it may help.

Monty's latest album is called Get a Clue, following the current Summer Reading Program theme that many libraries adopt. His last album, Paws, Claws, Scales & Tales was based on last year's theme. I believe that next year's theme is bug related, so I'm guessing that Monty may be hard at work on writing a number of bug songs. If songs like "You're a Dinosaur" and "Horny Toad" are any indication, not only will we learn a lot of cool information about bugs if Monty does a bug themed CD, but we'll also really enjoy the tunes while we're learning. Combining real educational content with memorably entertaining music can be a very hard thing to accomplish... Schoolhouse Rock is probably the best-known example of that... but Monty Harper is definitely a master of that in his own right.

Monty Harper website

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Desert Island Kids' Music

2007-06-16T12:13:00.000-07:00

Some fellow kids' music bloggers have recently posted what would be their "desert island" kids' music albums... the albums they'd most want with them if they were stranded on a desert island. I was going to make my own list, but realized that it would be hard to narrow that down to a number like 10 without leaving off something really great. And also, it is very likely that my list could change almost completely were I to be rescued and stranded again in a year's time.

So I thought perhaps it might be better to go right to the source... people who are actually stranded on islands... and see what kind of kids' music they're listening to.

Very interesting, indeed. And I'm sure Captain Jack Sparrow sang Captain Bogg and Salty tunes when he was marooned on a desert island before the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, but I wasn't able to get visual verification of that.

So what are your desert island album picks, kids' music or otherwise??

Johnny Bregar

2007-06-12T09:06:00.000-07:00

Johnny Bregar (also known as Johnny Breakdown or Johnny Brady Are) is a super soulful Seattle singer and songwriter (how's that for some alliteration?) who manages to sound a lot like Dr. John, Harry Connick Jr., Jack Johnson, Taylor Hicks and Lyle Lovett, while still sounding very original. He has two CDs, both of which are incredibly upbeat, infectious and fun.

Johnny's first CD, Stomp Yer Feet!, focuses mainly on traditional kids' songs like "If You're Happy and You Know It", "B-I-N-G-O", "Polly Wolly Doodle", "This Old Man", etc. Like Little Nashville, Johnny has found a way to make each of these classics new and fresh while still retaining the spirit of the original. Johnny stays closer to the traditional kind of acoustic folk arrangements that these songs feel most at home with, but the playing is top notch and never gets dull, even though some of the songs go on pretty long (but hey, it's not his fault that "This Old Man" had to play all the way up to ten). And some tracks really spice things up with some great electric piano, organ, ukulele, banjo and other instruments.

Johnny's voice is very seasoned and belies his age (unless he's a lot older than he looks?), and he can carry some pretty heavy tunes with what seems like effortless ease. But it's the little details in his vocal phrasing that really sell his songs, like the cool way he says "uh huh" in "Froggy Went a Courtin'" or the gentle rasp that aches through "Toora Loora". And his version of "Waltzing Matilda" may have finally sold me on that song, which I was only kind of "meh" about before.

Hootenanny, Johnny's second CD, includes a few more traditional songs like "Five Little Monkeys" (done in a swinging Stray Cats style with some nice Harmon mute trumpet) and "Miss Mary Mack" (with a hoppin' Cajun backbeat), but focuses more on original songs, which are mostly in the same style as the tunes he covers. I'm not sure that his originals like "Blue Dog", "Best Friend", "Blackberry Pie" or "Owl" will become classics like "If You're Happy and You Know It" or "You Are My Sunshine", but they are very catchy and it's telling that they stand along so well on the same albums as those standards. The only thing that seems a little out of place is the song "Moon" on Stomp Yer Feet! It's a great song on its own, but the style is more modern and feels a little unusual among the rest of the traditional tunes on that CD.

I'm all for people doing something unique with their music and finding their own creative voice, and though Johnny Bregar's songs would seem to hearken way back to days of yore and territory that is oft-covered, I'm not aware of anyone else doing kids' music, traditional or otherwise, with his kind of style and soul. Bravo, Johnny!

Johnny Bregar website

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My Not So Imaginary Rhino

2007-06-03T08:59:00.000-07:00

So, I broke my arm last Tuesday saving a family of chipmunks from a giant grizzly bear. No, not really... I was actually arm- wrestling Arnold Schwarzenegger, and after I beat him I jumped up and went "woo hoo!" and slammed my arm into the ceiling. No, not really... I actually missed the landing when coming out of the back of a pickup truck while helping a neighbor move their new grill. But I was happy with how many kids at the schools I performed at this week chose the Arnold story when I gave them those options to choose from. Yeah, they know I could take the Governator...

I was a little worried when that happened as far as whether I'd be able to do my shows well enough in the coming weeks. Fortunately, The Invisible Band is versatile and able to cover for me on guitar for most songs, and I do have enough movement in my right hand to strum chords very feebly for a song or two each show, though I can't finger-pick like I usually would for things like "The Elephant Song". One problem is that I can't really clap my hands (well, I can but it hurts like heck and you can't really hear any "clap") or hold a leaky squirt gun or do a few of the other things that would normally be part of my show. Thankfully, my wife, Roseann, is a great costume designer and is willing to be a mascot performer when needed, and she happened to have a nice new rhino costume that we'd used for some recent school promotions, so she did a great job filling in and helping out. (Many thanks also to Rachel from the Auburn library for helping to watch our girls while Roseann was busy rhino-ing, and thanks again to SunWest Sportswear for the cool T-shirt for the rhino.) I'm not sure that the rhino will be able to appear for all of my upcoming gigs, but it did buy me some time to adjust my show as needed and gain a little more strength in the arm.

So I have to apologize again for the lack of updates here. I did have a list of new features ready to go including John Hadfield, Mr. Billy, Johnny Bregar, Monty Harper and Randy Newman. But then of course this happened and it's really tedious to type with just one hand, especially when that hand is your left hand and you're not left-handed. I did find a really cool voice recognition program online that translates your speech into text, so I'll be using that for the next while to get some things done. The program works really well but it does have to get used to your speech patterns, and it doesn't do the best job with things like people's names, so I have to go back and edit a few things. For example, here is what this previous phrase was supposed to be - So I have to apologize again for the lack of updates here. I did have a list of new features ready to go including John Hadfield, Mr. Billy, Johnny Bregar, Monty Harper and Randy Newman. And here's how the program translated that section - Zeile left of college as a gang for the lack of tape here any analyst and it features ready to delegate in John Hatfield Mr. Killeen Johnny breakdown money harbor and randy Manning. Actually, to be honest, that's what happened when Roseann did it... It has learned my speech patterns pretty well by now and so it got that part very close when I originally dictated it (the only differences were "Johnny Brady Are" instead of Johnny Bregar and "Mr. Bailey" instead of Mr. Billy). But her version was a lot funnier and indicative of how these programs can function until they learn your voice, or until you learn to slow down your speech and be very deliberate with your articulations.

Anyway, I have a lot to be grateful for, particularly that the injury wasn't worse... I landed on my back, but my arm slamming into the ground first broke the fall enough that my back didn't sustain the brunt of it. Also, when I was called to go help my neighbor, I had just been recording the final guitar parts for my upcoming album, so that can still go out soon without further delays. I have many supportive people and rhinos around me to make sure I can continue doing what I need to do. And I got this really awesome itch stick from the hospital. Ahhhhhh, that's the spot!

The Return of the Return of the Son of the Bride of the Idea Tree

2007-05-26T22:22:00.000-07:00

A few more thoughts to follow up my post from last week.

Look for the second right answer... or trust the first.

One of my favorite "idea" persons is Roger von Oech of Creative Think. He's penned some really cool creative thinking books with great titles like A Whack on the Side of the Head and A Kick in the Seat of the Pants. One of the techniques Roger teaches is to look for the "second right answer" (or third or fourth right answer). We can sometimes find a good answer to a problem or discover a great new idea that might be perfectly workable, and yet, if we don't continue searching at least a little bit further from there, we might miss out on what might be an even better answer or idea.

I agree that looking for "the second right answer" can be a great tool for many creative and problem-solving applications, and I often have to employ that when working on lyrics, where a general sense of what I'm trying to say will come first, and then a better way to say it comes later. However, I find that when I'm creating music, my instinct is usually to go with the first thing that struck me when I was playing around on an instrument. There's something mysterious about music and why it works to create enjoyment, and for me it's almost a Tao kind of thing where I trust to follow whatever the flow is when I'm in the mode of creating something. I may spend a lot of time crafting and honing whatever it was that first came out, or making some adjustments to it, but more often than not I will keep at least some essence of what it was that came out initially.

Sometimes, once I've got part of a song together and I'm recording a rough demo, I'll be brave and continue recording into whatever part of the song I didn't have finished yet, completely ad libbing the chords and/or vocal part. At the time I'll think, ah okay, I'll have to come up with something better for that part later... but when I listen back, it often turns out that there was something about where I happened to go that was quite interesting and useable, perhaps with a bit of work. I might not have recognized it so much while I was actually playing it, but listening back later can give a totally different perspective. (It seems that the bridges of songs are quite amenable to that kind of thing... You can create bridges of all shapes and sizes that will work just great to transport your ears safely from the second chorus to the third verse.) That perspective of time and being able to get outside of what you're doing can be very important to appreciating the work (or not). There's a great story Jerry Garcia used to tell about how he once pushed Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh down a flight of stairs after a concert (yes, Jerry Garcia did that!) because he was so upset at how bad the band had played. But when he and the band listened back to the tapes later, they liked that show so much that they actually released it as a live album.

"Write what you know" and/or "make stuff up".

The old adage about writing is to "write what you know" and I agree that's often very useful; Scott Adams worked for years in cubicle-lined companies before creating Dilbert; Kurt Vonnegut was actually at the Battle of the Bulge that he wrote about in Slaughterhouse Five; and Charles Dickens grew up and worked among the wide cross-section of humanity that he wrote so colorfully about. But then again, Robert Plant was in Morocco when he wrote the song "Kashmir" and most of the Beach Boys never surfed. So I would say that "make stuff up" is also a good motto for writers, perhaps especially for songwriters. I suppose it's easier to get away with making stuff up when writing a song because you're only talking about as many words as might equal about a half of one page of the average novel. Novelists have a much more detailed story to describe and they should probably have a better idea of what the details of their story are all about.

But very few "true stories" are anywhere near 100% as they really happened, so writing what you know can always be combined with making stuff up. I've done that several times... "There's a Monster in My House" was based on a true story... not from me, but from my wife when she was little... though how the song turns out is made up. "Hide and Go Seek with the Moon" was based on how my girls are avid "moon spotters", but that idea was embellished from there. A musical I wrote called A Week in the Life (think The Office with singing and dancing) was based almost entirely on the company where I used to work in customer service, and I used several of my colleagues there as the characters and a lot of dialogue from things I'd noted over the years. But since the day-to-day work in that kind of company doesn't typically involve what we normally think of as "plot", I had to create and embellish a few concurrent plots involving some situations there, some of which had occurred and some of which only sort of happened. By the time the show ran I estimated that it was about 70-75% true to life, and the rest was either completely made up or embellished in some way or other.

When writing songs for kids, how much you write about what you know (or knew, or observe about kids) and how much you make stuff up depends to some extent on what kind of perspective you're coming from as the singer... Are you singing as a kid talking about his own life, or singing as a kid talking to other kids or telling a story to another kid, or singing as an adult to a kid, or singing as a pirate or some other character that is enacting a story for kids? I think Justin Roberts is an absolute master at writing from a kid's perspective, and Frances England does that amazingly, too. It's great not only for kids, who can relate so well to it, but it also helps you as an adult to appreciate a kid's world better. But then making stuff up will probably work better for songs that are more character or story based, or just meant to be purely imaginative or absurd.

Ultimately, I don't know that it really matters all that much if you write from your direct experience or just make stuff up, as long as there's something interesting about it. As Ginger Hendrix said so well in a recent article she wrote about writing lyrics for kids' songs: "Maybe the criterion I'm reaching for is just the word authentic. Is the song authentic or was it written to lure cd-buying parents into feeling like they’re teaching their kids something? I don't know about you, but most days I feel like my kids end up teaching me a lot more than I manage to teach them."

But then, some great kids' songs have lyrics that are really about nothing more than teaching something to kids, sometimes even in a very generic or by-the-book way. For example, perhaps the most popular kids' song of all time has these lyrics: "A B C D E F G, H I J K L M N O P, Q R S T U V, W X Y Z. Now I know my ABC's. Next time won't you sing with me?" Not really the most artful or authentic lyrics ever, and it's totally trying to push a concept on kids... but hey, it's great for what it is and kids love it, so to me that's great kids' music. I almost wonder if the new indie kids rock aesthetic is putting too much emphasis on music and lyrics for kids needing to be oh so artfully hip and brilliant all the time... That's stuff that adults care more about, anyway, and then again, a lot of lyrics for adult songs are pretty silly and insipid and are pushing messages, and yet we still love a lot of those songs, so why should we care if some kids' songs are like that? If we're always looking down our noses at all of those so-beneath-my-level-of-cool Barney-esque kinds of songs, we might be missing out on giving our kids the next great simple and timeless learning anthems like "The Alphabet Song".

The Idea Dream Team = Columbus, Van Gogh, Judge Judy and Joan of Arc.

Roger von Oech talks about the roles of the creative person being the explorer, the artist, the judge and the warrior. First, the explorer has to go out and search for the raw materials that could make up an idea. Then the artist takes those materials and molds them into something. Then the judge looks at that "something" and determines whether it needs more work, needs to be thrown out, or is fit to go forward. And if the idea gets the okay from the judge, then the warrior takes it and fights for its success out in the world. It's not always a linear process like that... sometimes all of those roles are being enacted concurrently, and sometimes what the judge determines gives the artist a new direction which gives the explorer something new to discover, so the process can work backwards as well.

To me, the explorer is always discovering things, no matter where he travels or whether he stays put in his easy chair at home... And it's not the explorer's job to have any thought about what is to come from his discovery, but only to recognize that there is some potential in that moment of discovery. A song of mine for an upcoming album is called "How Big", which began with a feeling my "explorer" had while watching a YouTube video that zooms into a single atom from the far reaches of the universe. Another song called "Heartbeat (The Stethoscope Song)" began when my explorer smiled and laughed while my girls were playing with a toy stethoscope and listened not only to my heartbeat, but also to my nosebeat and elbowbeat, etc. And the feeling inspired by my one year-old (at the time) prying me from my busy work one day by saying, "Daddy... come play!" (with her eyes like Puss 'n' Boots from Shrek) led to a song by the same name.

Of course, many things that the explorer thinks are noteworthy don't even get past the artist, much less the judge. The artist takes all of those little nuggets of possibility and tries to turn them into something more tangible. Sometimes that works, and sometimes not. The artist often has to mangle and warp and twist the basic materials to create something he is happy with. Sometimes my artist will spend an undue amount of time trying to make something workable that just isn't... but that's to be expected, because he's good friends with the explorer and doesn't want the explorer to feel like his discovery wasn't at least given a good chance.

I think many artists can give too much weight to their judge. And then again, if you've seen any of the Americal Idol audition shows, you know that some people don't give their inner judge nearly enough power to stop them from embarrassing themselves on national television. I don't think I need to elaborate on what the judge is all about, only to say that there are times when you have to remind your judge that absolute perfection is not really a viable option in art, and that sometimes it is okay to let things through that are a little rough around the edges.

One thing to be really wary of is paying too much mind to anyone else's "judge" when they make a judgement about your work, especially when it's still in progress. I'm not a huge fan of creating artistic things by committee, and so I adhere to the advice I was given when looking for feedback on my first musical and handed out scripts to several people whose opinion I valued... The advice was to completely ignore individual criticisms. One person, even someone whose opinion I respect greatly, or even someone who is hugely successful in the same line of work, might really dislike some particular thing about my work, but if I change that aspect of the work to please only that person, I might have just changed something that everybody else but that person would have liked just fine. Everyone has particular tastes and preferences, and one person's opinion about something in particular should never supercede the artist's vision and inspiration for the work. But if you get what seems to be a general negative consensus about something from several different people, then it is worth looking into. It's still not necessarily worth changing, though... sometimes the artist just knows best about their own work... but it's certainly worth sending back to your explorer and artist to look into.

The ancient Greek sculptor Polyclitus once did an experiment where he worked on two sculptures simultaneously, one in his private workroom and one in the room where he often entertained guests. Whenever someone commented on the viewable sculpture, Polyclitus would change it as they suggested. When both sculptures were finished and showed to the public, the private one was declared a masterpiece and the public one considered an artistic disaster. When asked how the two sculptures could be so drastically different in quality, Polyclitus answered, "Because I made this one (the private one) and you made that one."

The bottom line is that my judge, and the judges of the people that I've chosen to work with, are hard enough to get past for my artist, but my work is my work because of the particular back-and-forth that my artist and judge have with each other. If I listened to recommendations of other people, some of my most popular songs wouldn't even have made it to the album or been finished in the first place, and my musical wouldn't have been produced, etc. Or, what was released would have been less of my work and more of a work by committee (which of course created the camel while trying to make a horse). Not to imply any bitterness or disaffection for people who have criticized my work, either during its creation or afterward... that's certainly not the case at all... but only to emphasize that everyone has their own opinions, and the ultimate opinion concerning the value of my work and whether it's worth creating is the one I have of it. Heck, ninety-nine out of a hundred people might dislike a movie or song or book, but there might have still been some real value for that one person for it to have been created and released. And that one person may be me, the one who created it, but sometimes, that's enough to justify its creation and existence.

In my Thinking Outside the Box assembly program, there's a point when I play a brief game of Simon Says with the kids, at which point I hold up a picture of Simon Cowell. That always gets a laugh, but I make a serious point afterwards that there are a lot of Simon Cowells in the world, and when you are trying to think creatively and come up with new ideas, sometimes you have to be strong and brave in the face of all the Simons that you might encounter. That's one of the main jobs of the warrior, to stand tall in the face of opposition and to keep your idea alive not only in the world but also in your own heart and mind. You could have an idea that you think is really great and tell it to your very best friend and suddenly they become a Simon and say, "That's not going to work." or "That's dumb!" And they very well might be right... but they might not be. You might really know best about how great that idea is and what its potential is. It's not worth getting upset with a Simon or taking offense, though, because they might not be able to see the idea in the same way that you do, and some people just aren't good about evaluating the worth of ideas... they need to see things in a finished and concrete form to be able to appreciate them. And they might not know that there could be something very valuable for you to experience and learn as you work with that idea. But the world is full of hugely successful things that were initially rejected... the first Harry Potter book was rejected by dozens of publishers... the Beatles were turned down by many labels... etc. So keep that in mind as you send your warrior out into the world, and make sure that they are well equipped with perseverance, strength, faith, determination and some really thick armor.

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

I've enjoyed sharing these thoughts with you, and I'll compile some more for another "Idea Tree" feature sometime down the road. Please share your own thoughts and stories about how your ideas have come to you and how they came to fruition (or not). I would love to reference some other artists' experiences for the next installment.

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The Return of the Son of the Bride of the Idea Tree

2007-05-18T06:35:00.001-07:00

It's time to grab a bushel basket and head back out underneath the ol' Idea Tree and see what's ripe for the pluckin'... As I said in the original "Idea Tree" post, I believe that ideas for songs (and other things) are available in abundance, and it's mostly a matter of our climbing up into the idea tree to look for them, or catching them when they fall, and then trying our best to turn them into a delicious idea pie. Of course, my original post didn't begin to cover all of the ways and means of how song ideas happen, or how the ideas themselves develop into actual songs (or not), so I thought I'd add some more thoughts along those lines. I'd also like to encourage other musicians, writers, artists, entrepeneurs, etc., to contact me and share about how your ideas came to you and/or how you honed ideas into something fully realized. I'll probably do an "Idea Tree III: Jason's Revenge" at some point, and I'd love to include some of your stories for that.

I'm going to break this up into two installments. Check back next week for the second part...

Symphony No. 9 for Bagpipes

Sometimes a song idea doesn't start out so much as a song idea, but an idea that seems intriguing in another sense, as in, hey, wouldn't it sound great to record a song using nothing but an orchestra of bagpipes (it probably wouldn't)... Or, gosh, wouldn't it be cool if I could somehow commemorate the founding of the first curling club in Loch Leven in 1668 (it probably wouldn't)... And so there isn't a song idea, per se, but the idea that intrigues you can help to lead you in some unique songwriting directions. For example, the sonic nightmare of a bagpipe orchestra is likely to create some interesting lyrical possibilities and story ideas, and deciding to do a song about the anniversary of the first curling club is going to challenge you to find a way to write something exciting about a subject that just isn't very exciting at all (no offense meant to curling fans, but let's face it, the sport is pretty boring to watch).

We were in Utah last year and caught a show by my friend, Sam Payne. Sam is an outstanding original singer/songwriter in the general vein of Bob Dylan, Sting and Bruce Cockburn, and he also happens to be an incredible scat singer. I'd seen him perform a couple of times before, but this particular time I had one of those intriguing ideas that wasn't so much a song idea, but a concept idea, where it was like, hey, wouldn't it be awesome if Sam could scat sing on a song of mine (it probably would).

I mentioned it to Sam and he said that he'd love to do it, so at that point, the idea became slightly more than just an idea... it could actually happen. (It's usually good early on in an idea's gestation period to make sure that it even has the potential to grow beyond that stage.) The problem was that we would have a very limited time when we would be able to record him while passing back through Utah, and we really didn't have the actual song idea yet, so we had no idea what to actually record... what tempo, what key, what chords, etc. We thought, well, we could just record him ad libbing a bunch of scatting and hopefully work it into something later. And what we ended up doing wasn't so far removed from that, though we did end up having the very bare bones of a verse for a song and some specific chords for Sam to scat over.

I suppose that any song could include some scatting, but since in this case the person scatting wasn't going to be the same person singing the song, then it seemed a little more appropriate for the scatting to have some specific kind of focus or to be representative of a character. So thinking in terms of character and thinking of words that might go with "scat" led to the phrase "scat cat", and then a picture grew from there of a downtown alley where a cat is meowing all night long (or in essence, singing and putting on a show). Most of the people who live there love him and his "singing", but there are a few people who have to get up early every morning and don't appreciate his late night vocalizations, so they yell out their windows, "Scat cat!" and the cat misinterprets that as an invitation to start scatting. We had no idea initially where that basic premise would lead or if we could even make a whole song out of it, but it was enough to go on to create a very rough demo of the first verse and give Sam some chords to ad lib over. He was truly amazing, recording several wonderful takes having never even heard the chord changes before, and so then we had the raw materials for what might become a song. From there it took a lot of mental and musical wrangling to figure out where to go for the bridge and last verse, but thankfully, we eventually found a cool way to resolve the story and finish the song. But for quite a while it was nothing more than a smidgen of a song with some great scatting included, inspired by an idea that wasn't really an actual song idea.

("Scat Cat" will be on my upcoming Snail's Pace album, available for preorder here. You can hear a sample of the first two verses below. By the way, if you want your voice to be on "Scat Cat", I'm still accepting submissions for about another week to add to the third verse for the final mix. Click here for details.)

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It's all been done... woo hoo hoo... but so what?

One thing I did when I first had the idea involving the phrase "scat cat" was to Google it and see if any other kids' performers had done a song like that. Best I could tell, they hadn't, so that was good. (As it turns out, a recent episode of Noggin's Jack's Big Music Show featured a character named Scat Cat who sings a scatting song, but that came out months after my song was finished and the song is nothing like mine, thankfully.) But then again, so what if there had been another "Scat Cat" song already? Song titles can't be copyrighted, and as long as your inspiration for the idea was indeed your inspiration, then the odds are that it will be unique enough to be worth creating. Well, I mean, there's a point when public familiarity with a title sort of makes it off limits... It would be difficult to comfortably do a new song called "Stairway to Heaven" or "Bohemian Rhapsody" or "One Eyed One Horned Flying Purple People Eater" (I was really disappointed when I found out there was already a song with that title.)

Especially in the kids' music genre, there seems to be a number of general subjects that get a lot of attention, such as the alphabet, animals, pirates, opposites, cleaning up your room, imaginary friends, and the list goes on. But I've found that there is always a new and interesting way to approach the same general idea if you look hard enough for it and find your own take on it. I touched on this very briefly in the last "Idea Tree" post, about how Justin Roberts' "sock album" would be different than anyone else's. And I recently covered Little Nashville and Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang, both of whom have a song that is a Red Light/Green Light game... which isn't just a similar subject, but an identical subject... and yet, each song is fun and cool in its own way. It's always great if you can find subjects to write about that haven't really been expressed before, but there's no reason not to cover some of the same subjects that have already been done if you can put your own stamp on them. There have been times when I've been looking for ideas for songs and I've thought, well, what kind of typical "kid subjects" haven't I covered yet? I realized recently that I haven't done an "alien" song yet, so I was going to start thinking about an idea for an alien song, but when I was going through a mental list of typical kid song subjects I had another idea that sounded even better... to do a song that combines several of those kid subjects together. So that's now in the works for an upcoming album. And that's a good example of one idea leading to another, and one "already been done" idea leading to something that hasn't been done yet, or at least, not as far as I know.

Slot Machine Lyrics

For me, creating the music is the fun part of songwriting, where you get to make noise and play with sound and arrange notes and chords into colorful shapes and textures. I hate to make all musicians everywhere seem less cool than public perception has granted them for so long, but in essence, we're all just interior decorators that use notes and sounds instead of fabric and furniture. (I sometimes have to chuckle at musicians who takes themselves so darn seriously, when I picture them in that sense.) But for lyrics you sometimes have to really think, and that can be like actual work! To put it another way... Writing music is like playing with a really awesome giant robot toy, and writing lyrics is like filling out the registration card and rebate forms that came in the box with the giant robot toy; you know you should do it and you know you'll get something good out of it, but it feels like much more of a chore to actually do. Then again, when lyrics seem to come with ease in a rush of inspiration, that is very cool, but that just isn't often the case for me. I can spend a lot of time, months even, poring over one or two lyric lines for a song... which seems strange when it's a song about something silly like a cowboy with a ridiculous name or a stink bug who insists that he doesn't smell... but to me there are few things that can jolt you right out of the illusion of a song quicker than a lyric line that is clunkily worded (like how the phrase "clunkily worded" is clunkily worded) or feels wrong for the character of the song.

Sometimes working on lyrics means sitting quietly with a notebook or driving somewhere with a voice recorder nearby and trying to think it out, and other times it means playing through the song and sort of scat singing along with the vocal melody until a word or phrase comes out that sounds good where it landed. My friend Steve Brown of the great "BNL meets Simon & Garfunkel" band Border Crossing defined this as the "slot machine method" of lyric writing, and that's a perfect description of it. The first time through, one thing might lock in, the next time through another, and before you know it, you've won the jackpot, especially if the words turned out to be, "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away." Odds are, the whole song won't need to be done that way, but once you get a few key phrases in there and have more of a direction and context for the words, then you can usually finish it from there by thinking it out.

Speaking of "Yesterday", that is a great example of using "placeholder" lyrics, which is a common thing for songwriters to do. Placeholders are lyrics that don't necessarily mean anything, but fill in the spaces of the melody for the time being until you are able to get the real lyrics together later. The original placeholder lyrics for "Yesterday" went like this: "Scrambled eggs, ohhh baby, how I love your legs". And then there's the classic Homer Simpson placeholder for the song that practically wrote itself: "Baby on board, something something, Burt Ward." Much as I try to use "Burt Ward" when I can, my placeholders tend to be just "la la la"s or the like, which becomes confusing for my girls, who learn to sing the song that way from the early demos and then at some point are surprised to hear that actual words were added and they have to relearn everything. (I suppose that "la la" would be easier to replace in your memory than "Burt Ward".) I once had a placeholder for the chorus of a song that went "blah blah blah blah", and for the longest time I couldn't get any actual lyrics in there, and then I finally realized that those were really the perfect words as it was, because the rest of the song was about someone who kept asking for advice but never listened to any of it, so it pretty much all ended up sounding like, "Blah blah blah blah". It made for an easy to remember hook and the song became a favorite back when I was playing the coffeeshop circuit in Western New York.

Well, duh...

I have a lot of "well, duh" moments like that when I'm writing songs, where I'll be banging my head against the wall about some lyric or some musical part, only to realize there was an obvious answer all along. One catch phrase that I try to remember is, "If you're looking really hard for something, it's probably right in front of you." The chorus for "There's a Monster in My House" (listen below) goes "There's a monster in my house, and it's coming after me. There's a monster in my house..." And then there's a little chord sequence repeated from the intro of the song. For a long time I kept thinking there needed to be a fourth line to go over that chord sequence which would rhyme with the "coming after me" line. I tried all kinds of things but only ended up with piles of crumpled up paper in my brain. And there are a lot of things that rhyme with "me", so it was particularly frustrating that I couldn't come up with a good line there. Then at last I had the "well, duh" moment I needed where I realized, hey, maybe it doesn't even need another line there at all. These are the little battles and discoveries that are all in a day's work for songwriters. I have habits and expectations for phrasing and vocabulary, both musically and lyrically, that I can glomp onto for certain songs or sections of songs, and sometimes it can be very difficult to step outside of those and see that there was something better right in front of me all along.

One more example of that is "No Big Deal" (listen below), which my wife, Roseann, and I collaborated very closely on. We had the music down and had a direction for the lyrics to basically be a "don't sweat the small stuff" kind of thing, and as we were working on the words we were wondering what the hook and the title would be. We kept saying things to each other like, "Yeah, it should be about how that kind of stuff is really no big deal, you know?" "Yeah, exactly, it's no big deal." "Right, but what should the title be?" "Hmmmm..." That went on for a while, far longer than I'd like to admit, and then... Can I get a "well, duuuuh!"

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Check back next week for the next installment, The Return of the Return of the Son of the Bride of the Idea Tree.

Barry Louis Polisar

2007-04-27T08:06:00.000-07:00

A while ago, Melissa Block from NPR wrote an article about kids' music (click here and scroll down the page to read the article) that made me pause and wonder... The first paragraph said: "I'm the mother of a 4-year-old girl, so I spend a good amount of time in the company of kids' music. And I've become pretty choosy. I don't have a lot of patience for music that panders to what I consider to be misguided notions of what adults think kids must like. Excessive goofiness? Out. Phony silly voices? Out." I read that and thought, kids don't like goofiness or silly voices? Huh?? Having two young girls myself (ages 4 and 2), and having played shows for thousands of kids, one thing that I continue to observe on a daily basis is that kids love to be silly and goofy, even excessively so, and they also love that in their entertainment. In fact, if they love something silly and goofy, then they'll often love it again and again and again and again. If anybody likes goofy and silly things excessively, it's kids. I'll readily agree that goofiness and silly voices do not necessarily make for good kids' music; there still has to be some quality and charm to the "goofiness". And silly voices need to have character to them and be "cast" well to fit with the content of the song. And certainly there is a lot of room in kids' musical palettes for all kinds of other kids' music that is more straightforward or even serious... But to imply that it is a misguided notion that kids like goofiness or silly voices? Well, that's a very misguided notion to me.

The timing of that article was good, though, as it coincided with my receiving some CDs by longstanding children's music artist, Barry Louis Polisar. Barry has been creating and performing kids' music longer and more consistently than anybody else I am aware of (his first kids' music album came out in 1975), and he has been more successful doing that than just about everybody else in the field (over 350,000 units in print), and a lot of his music definitely falls into the goofiness/silly voices category.

Barry sings about and celebrates the way that kids are, not the idealized way that grown-ups want them to be. And a really great thing is that he lets you know up front what he's all about. His albums have titles like: Naughty Songs for Boys and Girls, Off-Color Songs for Kids, Stanley Stole My Shoelace and Rubbed it in His Armpit and Other Songs My Parents Won't Let Me Sing and Old Enough to Know Better: The Worst of Barry Louis Polisar. If you're a parent and you see a title like Naughty Songs for Boys and Girls, you should know the kind of music that's on there. Barry's music will not be every parent's cup of tea, and there are probably some kids who won't take to it, either, especially if they're used to less provocative kinds of kids' music. And I wouldn't play his songs yet for my girls... they're too young to appreciate it. But I think that most elementary school kids will find a lot to love and laugh at in Barry's songs, and Barry speaks to that audience like no other.

Sure, some of Barry's songs may seem kind of obnoxious on the surface, but a lot of them work on a level that is more than just obnoxious. For example, "Don't Put Your Finger Up Your Nose" is some darn good advice. And there are quite a lot of his songs that might seem to be a little unsettling at first until you hear how they resolve. A good example of that is "When Suzie Sneezed" from the Old Enough to Know Better CD, where the first verse goes: A friend of mine came by last night / Said, "Come on out and join the fight / Between Robert and Richard and Susan and Jimmy / 'Cause they just started beating up Timmy / 'Cause Timmy hit Billy who just hit Steve / When Steve hit Laura after Jack and Johnny / Hit Tommy and Richard hit Emily / Who accidentally pushed Debbie when Suzie Sneezed." The first time I heard that, I was thinking, is this really a kids' song about a fight club?? And it builds up in the second verse, escalating to tanks and guns. But it starts to change in the third verse: So I said, "What would happen if you tell Jimmy / You're sorry you hit him and that he hit Timmy. / Maybe Timmy would go and shake Billy's hand / Hopefully some day, they'll understand. And it continues on from there with the one kid trying to convince the other not to keep fighting, so it ends up being a great message about how misunderstandings can escalate into all kinds of craziness, but how at some point you can turn things around with an apology or a kind gesture.

"I Don't Brush My Teeth" may initially seem to glorify slovenliness, but it becomes clear that the protagonist suffers socially from his habits. I can imagine sensitive parents thinking that "Never Cook Your Sister in a Frying Pan" is giving kids all kinds of terrible ideas for how to hurt their siblings, but the final verse reveals its skewed take on the Golden Rule. And a song like "I Don't Wanna Go to School" seems rebellious until you get to the great punch line at the end. Barry's work is loaded with that kind of thing... He's really quite brilliant at playing with expectations, and kids definitely like to have their expectations played with when they're being entertained. Heck, probably 80-90% of all comedy is merely setting up an expectation and doing a twist on it. Not that it's easy to do well, though, and Barry is definitely a master in the vein of Shel Silverstein when it comes to that. And like Shel, Barry has the ability to turn some very clever phrases, such as the "stereotype" line from "That's What Makes the World Go Around": Some folks jog, some smoke pipes / Some are mono-toned, some are stereotypes / Right side up or upside down / That's what makes the world go 'round.

Barry also has a number of regular songs, without any twists or turns or controversial subjects or titles, and they can range from being quite sweet to very funny, such as "I Need You Like a Donut Needs a Hole", "I Miss Grandma" and "I Wanna Be a Dog" (which has been covered by several other kids' musicians... and should not be confused with Iggy Pop's "I Wanna Be Your Dog"). There are also some terrifically poignant songs like "Mom and Dad Are Always Right", which shows a kids perspective on parents who are always critical: Dad says he was stronger when he was half my age. / Mom never got dirty when she went out to play. / I guess they both were perfect kids when they were young like me; / They always did what they were told and that's how I should be.

Barry does a lot of silly character voices throughout his work, but even his usual singing voice might be considered kind of cartoonish as it is. It's definitely not the most polished voice, and yet it has an exuberance that works great for his material. You get the sense that he really is the kid whose point of view he's often singing from, who eats a bit too much sugar cereal and is trying to make the best of understanding his world. Fans of the Violent Femmes should like Barry's voice, as it's very similar in tone and phrasing to Gordon Gano, and Barry's music is often somewhere in the neighborhood of the Violent Femmes and John Prine.

I asked Barry if kids' tastes have changed over the last thirty years. He said that adult sensibilities change over time, and he's been around long enough to watch the styles of kids music go left, then right, then left, then right again, but that is probably more about the adults' tastes than anything... Kids have remained constant—laughing and giggling at the same things they did years ago. So it's no wonder to me that kids have made Barry so popular for so long. Barry speaks with their voice, and sometimes that voice is a very silly and goofy one, and kids love it. As opposed to advocating bad or obnoxious behavior in his songs, Barry is really making fun of it and trusts that kids can tell the difference. On his website, he says, "I have used my writing to hold a mirror up to kids, bringing things out in the open where they can be laughed at rather than swept under the rug." Elementary school is often the last chance for kids to really be kids and laugh at themselves and allow themselves to be goofy and silly without being so self-conscious, before things start getting a lot more mixed up and tense in middle school and high school. So I say, and I'm sure that Barry would agree... until that time... Excessive seriousness? Out.

Barry Louis Polisar website

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Little Nashville

2007-04-23T12:34:00.000-07:00

I should probably say up front that country music is not my forte, in any sense. It's not that I don't like country music... in fact, I like a lot of country music that I hear, but the thing is... I just don't hear a lot of country music. And I suppose that although I like a lot of the country music that I hear, I typically don't like it enough to really want to hear much more than I do, or to actively seek it out. Then again, there's a lot of sort-of-country-music that I've really been into over the years, including The Allman Bros., Johnny Cash, BR5-49, Neil Young, The Grateful Dead, Lyle Lovett, Chris Isaak, John Mellencamp and others. I also went to a Garth Brooks concert once in Buffalo when I was offered free tickets, and had to admit that I had a really great time and gained a much better appreciation of Garth as a performer and songwriter, and also for country music as a genre. I've also been caught inadvertantly singing along to country-ish songs like "Man, I Feel Like a Woman" (hey, it's super catchy... what can I say? Um... I trust that everyone who reads this will keep that to themselves...) But regardless, I still don't think I would typically choose to buy a ticket for a country music concert, or buy the latest Dwight/Toby/Keith/Alan/Kenny/Carrie album.

I guess what I'm trying to do here is to paint a picture that country music isn't really my thang, and I probably should have just said that to begin with and left it at that... But I also wanted to temper that by saying that once in a while I can appreciate it. And that's the setup I'm trying to give here, because I want it to have as much impact as possible when I say that the Little Nashville CD really blew me away. This is one terrific album of music, and I think it even transcends its genre. Like when you hear Bob Marley, it's great music, as opposed to just being great reggae.

I'm going to have some difficulty comparing things on this CD with other country artists or sounds, without having a great knowledge of the difference between Dwight, Toby, Keith, Alan, Kenny and Carrie (well, the difference between the guys and Carrie, yes...), so I may not even try. I can imagine a country music fan reading this and thinking, "He said that song sounds like Kenny Chesney, but it's totally an Alan Jackson thing." But I'll do my best to paint the picture.

The album kicks off in fine style with the upbeat "Welcome to Little Nashville", which immediately lets you know what you're in for. The production is great, and the guitar playing and singing by J. Juliano (or Sheriff Jay Hawke) is top notch. Again, a real country fan might know better, but from what country music I've heard, Jay's singing and guitar-playing is as good as anything I've ever heard in the country genre. I know Vince Gill is an amazing guitarist, and Jay's playing sounds as sharp and confident as Vince's.

Next up is the rollicking fiddle standard, "Turkey in the Straw", which is bound to elicit laughter on the "running down the street with a bear behind" line. The CD also covers several kid classics including "You Are My Sunshine", "I've Been Working on the Railroad", "The Hokey Pokey" and "Itsy Bitsy Spider", all done in a uniquely vibrant country style, and each with a different feel to it. "The Hokey Pokey" for example, is in the style of "Achy Breaky Heart", and in fact, it would seem that Billy Ray sort of ripped off "Hokey Pokey"... the chords are exactly the same and there's the similar hokey/pokey, achy/breaky wording. "I've Been Working on the Railroad" has a fast paddleball kind of sound and really cooks. I also like the vocal phrasing on "Dinah blow your horn". These songs retain the essential feel and qualities of the original, but deliver them in fresh and exciting ways.

There are some originals, too, and two of them in particular are really terrific. "A Little Different" is a whistling acoustic ballad that reminds me of the Motel 6 "we'll leave the light on" music. The song is very memorable, with some unexpected but perfect chord changes, and there's a cool message about accepting others for whoever or whatever they are. A square said to his Momma, "I saw a circle in town. You know how we've got these four sides? Well, he's just big and round." Momma Square said, "Let me explain... You're a shape, and he is, too. Hey hey hey, it's okay if he's just a little different than you." It's a simple, cute story and brilliant for the picture it paints.

The other original standout is "Like Mommy and Daddy", which is a really sweet country pop duet between Jay and Rosanna Spencer (aka Miss Laura Lee Goodheart). The voices complement each other beautifully and the song is both very catchy and very touching as kids describe how they want to do things just like their parents. It reminds me of a quote I read recently by James Baldwin: "Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."

The Little Nashville folks sent me a CD with a few songs previewing their upcoming album, and there are more great things in store. "Green Light" is another Red Light/Green Light game song, but is totally different than Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang's "Red Means Stop", and goes to show how the same idea can yield many different variations. "That's My Dog" is a very catchy pop song that could be a big hit on the country stations, at least musically speaking... I'm not sure if kid-themed lyrics are ready to break through on the pop or country charts just yet.

I wonder if people who are into the new era of kids' music but who have no taste for country music are going to give this a chance with their kids. I certainly hope so, because it's such a standout in the kids' music field, its particular genre notwithstanding. There should be no question that Little Nashville will be a hit among kids and families that already have a big appreciation for country music, but it should really transcend that label, and I hope it is embraced by others like me who aren't really into country music all that much. I still have no real desire to turn on a country music station or to go and buy a Toby Keith record, and yet I liked this so much that I immediately wanted to listen to it again after it was over, and have done so several times since. It's kind of like the old Life cereal commercials, where they didn't expect Mikey to like it so much... Well, go ahead and call me Mikey, 'cause this is some really tasty stuff. And if Mikey likes it, then you might, too.

Little Nashville website

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Updates? What updates??

2007-04-12T16:14:00.000-07:00

So I said in my last post that I was going to get caught up on all of the CDs I've been sent during the last few weeks while I was on the road. Well, you've heard about what happens to the best laid plans, right? A few days into the trip, my 4 year-old daughter put a CD (Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang, one of her current favorites other than the usual "daddy songs") into the CD player. No problem with that, right? There wouldn't have been, except that there was already another CD in the player at the time... and it's not a multiple disc player. So we ended up being without tunes for a while there, and I was too busy with shows to stop anywhere to get it fixed until a few days ago.

But in the first few days of the trip and over the last few days I was able to listen to some discs, so there will be some new updates arriving shortly, including features on John Hadfield, Mr. Billy, Little Nashville and Barry Louis Polisar. And I still have a big stack of CDs to get to, so there should be more coming soon, though I'm not going to make any promises this time!

As for the Colorado trip, it was a really great time. There were so many incredibly enthusiastic audiences, and I can't wait to go back as soon as I can. I will be sure not to schedule so many shows together like that, though. It had been a few years since I've been to Colorado and I forgot how the altitude can affect your energy. I was halfway through my first song on the first day when I thought to myself, "Uh oh." But thankfully, I was well stocked with Powerbars and made it through okay.

I think that there is some kind of magical "show must go on" power that invigorates performers. There have been times in the past when I've been really sick or exhausted and felt like I could barely move, and I had to really force myself to make it to the show at all, but once I got out to actually perform, I felt fine, or at least, fine enough to do the show alright. And then, once the show is over, the tired sickness comes right back, but there's some kind of adrenalin thing that makes it work out for the show itself. I know other performers have told me the same thing. Knock on wood, but I can only recall one time in my life when I had to cancel a show for being sick, when my voice was completely lost from laryngitis and hadn't come back at all the day before the show. I hated to cancel, but I felt like I needed to give the venue enough warning to find someone else. And as it turned out, there was a rockslide on the interstate the next morning when I would have driven out there, so I probably wouldn't have made it anyway. Perhaps my body somehow knew that and said, "Ah, forget the show-must-go-on thing... you're staying in bed, dude."

Anyway, stay tuned for some new posts, and also Part 2 of The Idea Tree, which I've been working on here and there.

Colorado, CD catch-up and a "Snow Day" video

2007-03-20T08:46:00.000-07:00

Hey all... I'm heading out to Colorado tomorrow for several shows in Colorado Springs, Denver and Utah. The Denver and Utah gigs are school assemblies, but the Colorado Springs shows are at public libraries, so if any of you happen to live near there, please come out and see a show. Here are the dates:

03/27/07 - East Library, Colorado Springs CO - 9:30 and 10:30 am
03/27/07 - Old Colorado City Library, Colorado Springs CO - 6:30 pm
03/28/07 - Rockrimmon Library, Colorado Springs CO - 10:30 am
03/28/07 - Cheyenne Library, Colorado Springs CO - 1 pm
03/28/07 - Fountain Branch Library, Colorado Springs CO - 4 pm
03/28/07 - Ruth Holley Library, Colorado Springs CO - 7 pm
03/29/07 - Penrose Library, Colorado Springs CO - 9:30 and 10:30 am
03/29/07 - Briargate Library, Colorado Springs CO - 2 pm
03/29/07 - Sand Creek Library, Colorado Springs CO - 7 pm

When we get back from Colorado, I'll have about a day at home to throw out junk mail, and then we're off to Oregon for some shows. Here are those dates:

04/13/07 - Pottery Barn Kids, Tigard OR - 10 am & 11 am
04/14/07 - Silver Falls Library, Silverton OR - 1 pm
04/21/07 - Children's Performing Arts Series, Albany OR - 11 am

I've got a pretty large pile of kids' music CDs that I've been sent but haven't featured here yet. In some cases, I've listened to the CD but haven't written anything yet, and other CDs I haven't even had a chance to listen to yet. I will try to at least listen to everything on this trip, and also try to catch up on writing a few posts on my days off. As I've said before, I can't guarantee that I'm going to feature everything that I receive, but I'll try to get to as much as I can. Whether I feature everything or not, I want to say that I really appreciate everything that I receive, and it's very cool to be able to hear so much of what's going on in the kids' music genre these days.

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My wife, Roseann, has been doing toony style graphics here and there over the years (for example, she did the pirate and cowboy to the right of my main website page), and she's starting to learn some basic animation movement. We did sort of a test animation for my song, "Snow Day" (a nice short song to start with!), and it turned out very cute and funny, so we went ahead and posted it to YouTube. You can see it below... (I think I'm going to have to buy her an actual animation program and a graphics tablet so she doesn't have to mouse-draw MS Paint pictures and sequence them in a video editing program anymore... That's also what we did for "The Elephant Song" video and wow, that is tedious!)

"Scat Cat!" wants you!!

2007-03-12T12:41:00.000-07:00

Hey, how would you like to be on the next Eric Herman album? All you need to do is record yourself, or your kids, or your dog yelling "Scat cat!" and send me the file, and I'll try to work it in to the final recording for the song "Scat Cat!" from my upcoming Snail's Pace album. If you need direction on how to do it, listen to this sample. (The tempo is 113 bpm and the words would come in on the second and third quarter notes of the measure.)

I need a man's part and a woman's part for different verses, but if your recording isn't used for one of those solo parts, then I should be able to be use it near the end of the song, where there is supposed to be a big crowd of people yelling that. It's probably not likely that you'll be able to pick your voice out among the big crowd of voices once I mix them all together for that part, but you can still honestly say, "Hey, that's me there!" and add it to your rock star resume.

So if you have a microphone, record two or three takes of that phrase (careful not to overload it with the yelling) and send the file(s) to me at eric(at)butter-dog(dot)com in WAV/AIFF or highest possible quality MP3 format, please. Recordings should be completely dry, with no effects or normalizing. If you don't really have a microphone to record with, try your video camera. They often have decent microphones, and you'll just have to export the audio from the camera into your soundcard and capture it. To do that, you can use the Sound Recorder program that all Windows machines come with, or download the free Audacity audio program. (Feel free to ask if you need more help as far as recording, capturing and saving a sound file.)

Everyone who submits a recording will get a free download of the full song when it is released and a $1.00 discount for the Snail's Pace album. A free copy of the CD will go to the man and woman chosen for the solo parts.

Uncle Moondog

2007-02-28T08:12:00.000-08:00

That's right, it's another "uncle" here at Cool Tunes for Kids... First Uncle Rock and now Uncle Moondog.

Uncle Moondog is a very cool cartoon dog who lives on Sunshine Island. Musician Mike McManus produces Uncle Moondog's music with great flair and versatility, and his self-titled first album is a favorite of mine in the kids' music genre, with very memorable hooks and melodies and fun production and arrangement throughout.

The album starts off with the bouncy and catchy "New Goldfish", which introduces the dawg and his new pet goldfish, Timmy (see the video below). Next up is "Percy the Pelican" which has a great B-52s meets The Munsters kind of riff. "Stanky Socks" has a see-saw hook to it, as Uncle Moondog describes his most foul hosiery. "Bampy's Bungalow" starts with a "Centerfield" riff and has a Jimmy Buffet feel. "Dancing With My Dog" is next and it's my favorite on the album... a fast country-ish tune with a terrific hook and some really nice doo-wop backing vocals. I'm not really sure why a dog would have a dog, and the concepts of these songs don't always make that much narrative sense in terms of a character/story arc, but so what, they're a lot of fun and this isn't meant to be a story or concept album. Uncle Moondog's voice (which is somewhere between Dr. John and McGruff the Crime Dog) is an especially perfect fit for the bluesy "Bathtime Blues". The doo-wop comes out in full for the very cute "Penny", which is my wife's favorite track. This tune has some quite tasty tremolo guitar, and there is a lot of really sweet guitar playing throughout the album. The Uncle shifts to an 80's pop/rock/new wave sound (somewhere vaguely in the range of Gary Numan and The Cars) for "Shufflin' My Feet". The album ends with the reggae track "Porpoises, Pelicans and Palm Trees", which includes some amusing interludes with Timmy, the fish.

While Uncle Moondog's voice is well-fitting and engaging for a cartoon dog, the voice of Timmy, the fish, may be an issue for some people. It's your basic Chipmunks or "Flying Purple People Eater" kind of voice, and my feeling is that it would have been better in smaller doses. Timmy appears in the first song, and that's fine, but then he's also in the next few songs and by then you may have heard enough of him, especially with certain words and phrases of his cutting through in a more piercing way. Your kids will probably have a higher tolerance for Timmy's high-pitched, silly voice, though, so don't let that get in the way of enjoying what is a great album, regardless of that.

I don't have Uncle Moondog's second CD, Baloney Cake, but from samples online it sounds like more of the same, which is a good thing when "the same" is as well-written and well-produced as the first album. Uncle Moondog has an eCard video of "The Birthday Song" from Baloney Cake available on his website at this link.

Uncle Moondog's website

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Uncle Rock

2007-02-24T11:57:00.000-08:00

Uncle Rock (aka Robert Warren) is a cool kids' performer from Chichester, New York, which is in the area sometimes considered "upstate New York". I say "sometimes", because the definition of "upstate New York" is kind of strange... You'd think it would only mean the part up near the top, and yet, I've also heard it referring to Uncle Rock's area in the Catskills, in which the "upstate" probably means "up" as in up from sea level. Also, having lived for many years in Western New York, I've actually heard references to the Buffalo area as being "upstate", which I can only assume means that for some people, anywhere that isn't New York City is "upstate". And then again, those of us in Buffalo often referred to areas like Syracuse and Rochester (there's an awful lot of "chesters" in New York) as "upstate", so who knows where it really is.

But in any case, "upstate" is actually a good description for Uncle Rock's music and how it makes you feel. He has two kids' music albums, the first of which I've only heard a few samples of, and the more recent, Plays Well With Others, which I'll focus on here.

On Plays Well With Others, Uncle Rock quickly proceeds to bring the rock to the table with the heavily T-Rex influenced opening track "Rock Out!", where he incites legions of kids to dance with their daddies, mosh with their mommies and groove with their grannies. T-Rex gives way to The Blues Brothers in the bridge with a cop of the "Everybody Need Somebody" riff. The folky "Playin' Possum" is next and is very cute and features a rippin' snore solo. "Picnic in the Graveyard" has a memorable anthemic melody, describing a holiday celebration of one's ancestors. This is both a beautiful song and a really wonderful holiday (see the video below), and thematically the track leads nicely into the acoustic ballad, "Brand New Butterfly". Throughout the album, Warren sounds vocally like a more polished version of John Kay (Steppenwolf), or a less polished version of Kenny Loggins, and "Brand New Butterfly" particularly shows off the nice timbre of his voice. "Shoe Bandit" is one of those kids' songs that has a particularly funny and clever observation about kid/parent life, and I will now be singing this song every time my girls and I are frantically looking for their shoes so we can go out somewhere. "Break a Few Eggs" is a catchy life-lesson with a nice laid-back groove. "Sugar Talkin'" has an instantly memorable catch-phrase ("It's the sugar talkin', not me"), and could have been a real hit if it wasn't a bit sloppy in spots. Better produced is "Rock & Roll Babysitter" and then "I'm a Pirate", which covers several pirate cliches in the lyrics and has a great musical vibe and a nice "Arrr!" lead-in to every verse. "Disco Nap" is kind of a strange concept and never quite locks into its groove, rhythmically, but the album closer, "Connected" is a beautifully realized ballad, both musically and lyrically.

One thing that my wife mentioned about this CD (though she liked the album a lot, otherwise) was regarding the overabundance of kids singing along on many of the tracks. And it's not so much that there were kids on a lot of tracks... there's certainly nothing wrong with that... but that in this case it is kind of hit-and-miss as far as whether they are effective or not. Kids can make a kids' music recording sound cute and add excitement to the mix, but if they are too much out of tune or off rhythm with the main vocal line that they are supposed to be following, it's one of those things where it may sound funny and adorable the first time... but after that it can be kind of disconcerting and difficult to listen to. But Roseann wanted me to mention that her ears are particularly sensitive about that kind of thing when she is producing music, so it may not be a problem for everyone. It didn't bother me nearly as much, though I do know what she means by that and agree that there is some level of that on this CD. Not to make Uncle Rock such an example of this, though, as there are many kids' CDs, even by some of the biggest names, that have that same kind of problem, but since it came up I thought it might be worth mentioning now.

There are two cover tracks, the first a medley of "Magic Carpet Ride", "Hey Bo Diddley" and "Magic Bus", and the second an acoustic version of "Pure Imagination" from Willy Wonka. Neither of these really worked too well for me, with "Pure Imagination" vaguely reminding me of my old coffeeshop gigs when someone would request something that I only kinda knew how to sing and play. There's just not a strong sense of confidence in his performance on that track. But thankfully, Uncle Rock's original tunes are excellent, so I think if he focuses on them and works a little on getting the overall recording production a bit more polished (while still retaining some of the nice edge and grit that he has), then his CDs will continue to be among the best in the kids' music genre.

Uncle Rock website

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;If you can see this, your browser doesn't&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;understand IFRAME. However, we'll still&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://www.erichermanmusic.com/zzunclerock.html"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;link&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;you to the file.&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Planet Kid Vid

2007-02-14T13:11:00.000-08:00

Mr. Billy and Monty Harper are popular kids' music artists from the Midwest, and they've started a new blog site with various kids' music videos from around the web. For example, today they are featuring two videos by Eric Herman (who dat??).

It looks like Planet Kid Vid will be a great place to have a lot of kids' music videos gathered together, so fit as many kids as you can on your lap and crank up the cheap computer speakers and be prepared to hear, "Again! Again!" as you sift your way through the videos there. And if you're a kids' artist with videos, you might want to get in touch with Monty or Mr. Billy and see if they'll post them there.

Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang

2007-02-10T14:36:00.000-08:00

When you listen to the first couple of songs on Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang's latest album, Get Up & Dance, your brain may have a hard time putting together what you're hearing... well, perhaps it's just my brain that has that problem... On the one hand the music is very down and funky, almost like Sly and the Family Stone at times, but then there's the voice of Gwendolyn singing, and... well... her voice is about as far removed from Sly Stone's voice as you could possibly imagine.

There are several words and phrases to describe Gwendolyn's voice, along the lines of "cutesy wootsey", "Barbie doll", "bubblegum", and "Chipmunks without helium". I imagine she might list Helen Kane ("I Wanna Be Loved by You"), Bernadette Peters and Betty Boop among her vocal influences. I doubt she'll want to use "the Betty Boop of kids' music" as a tagline, but there is that kind of cartoonish and kittenish quality to her voice. Ultimately, though, as a singer and entertainer Gwendolyn is unbelievably adorable and smile-inducing in a completely wholesome way, and contrary to Betty Boop's flirty flapper-ness, her voice paints a sunny picture of Shirley Temple and Cindy Brady having a tea party with their Raggedy Ann dolls. Her voice combined with the punchy and upbeat music from the band has an effect that might actually be prescribed by doctors as a mood enhancer. If you don't feel good when you listen to this music, then you're just way too jaded, duuuude. Lighten up, already, and let the sunshine in!

This album is nothing but fun from start to finish, and is almost as participation-inducing as a Jim Gill album. Needless to say, my girls (ages 2 and 4) loved it right off the bat. The title track has a great "Twist and Shout" kind of feel and is guaranteed to get your little ones up and moving, and perhaps you, too, unless you have officially reached the age of "fuddy duddy". "Red Means Stop" is a take on the old Red Light/Green Light game and is heavy on that aforementioned Sly Stone sound. The participation continues heavily on "Run Baby Run", which changes nicely from fast to slow parts. Other highlights for me include the very catchy toe-tapper "Sweet Marmalade", which would have been a big hit for CCR, Three Dog Night or The Brady Bunch (or if you prefer, The Silver Platters); "Bicycle Ride", which reminds me of Elton John's upbeat 70's tunes; "Ode to Pets", a rock 'n' roll song which cleverly introduces the band members' pets; "Snuggle Wuggle", a sweet lullaby that I have a hard time listening to without chuckling because I keep thinking of Nanny G singing "Peek-A-Boo" to Frasier; and "Out in My Garden", which starts with a really cool laid back riff that quickly folds into a fast bluegrass song, complete with some tasty jaw harp.

I don't have the band's first album, but listening to samples on their website tells me that there's a lot more yummy stuff on that CD; "Farm Animal Friends" is a really cute (gosh, there just aren't enough synonyms for "cute" to supply me for this article) folk song, featuring a "wall of Chipmunk sound" as Gwendolyn harmonizes with herself way up in the vocal stratosphere (see the video below); "Please" features some virtuoso slide whistle playing and more engagingly adorable vocals; there are more Brady Bunch hits with "You Can Be Anything" and "Freedom of the Heart"; "Anatomy" names various body parts in the verse and then goes into a great chorus; "I Don't Think I Like It" is funny and catchy in a Monty Python "I Like Traffic Lights" kind of way, but I'm not sure if the accent of the singer is supposed to be German or Oriental; and "Little Monkey", which is a bit of a cop of both "Da Doo Run Run" and "I Love a Rainy Night", but is still fun in its own way.

So unless you're just a plain old grumpy grump, you and your kids should really love the effervescent Gwendolyn and her highly musical gang. Even if you are a generally happy person, you are bound to feel your mood being enhanced. And certainly if you need something to pick you up and cheer you up, this will do the trick, in which case, take two CDs and call me in the morning.

Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang website

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Here are my girls having fun to Get Up and Dance...

Ginger Hendrix

2007-02-01T15:19:00.000-08:00

In my recent post about performing for an audience of kids I mentioned that Dan Zanes has an instant advantage with a kid audience because he has that uniquely crazy cool look. Well, I think that Ginger Hendrix also has an instant advantage as a music performer... no, she doesn't look like Dan Zanes... that probably wouldn't work so well for a woman... but she automatically has an essence of cool about her because of her name. Ginger Hendrix! Wow, how cool is that?! 'Ginger' is a sweet spice, and also the name of the great drummer from Cream, Ginger Baker, the legendary singer and dancer Ginger Rogers, and of course that sultry starlet from Gilligan's Island. So she's already off and running with her first name. And 'Hendrix', well gosh, it would be hard to find a first name that wouldn't sound cool with that... Ebenezer Hendrix. Cool. Bertha Hendrix. Still pretty cool. Dweezil Hendrix. Very cool. I almost wonder if 'Ginger Hendrix' is even her real name, but I certainly wouldn't blame her if she did change her name to that, because it's so great of a name. (Note to self: should have gone with Eric Hendrix. D'oh!)

As if it wasn't enough that Ginger has one of the best... names... ever... she also endears herself to kids right off the bat on her debut CD of children's music, Macaroni Boy Eats at Chez Shooby Doo, by using the word 'stinky' abundantly in the first song, "Stinky Trash", and evoking the very funny image of "a nose with legs". Ginger has a voice that varies between being strong and a little raspy/bluesy, almost like a more restrained Janis Joplin, and being very pretty and smooth. Her singing is a little unpolished at times, but her voice and her phrasing are both filled to overflowing with all-important character.

The next two songs on Macaroni Boy are just kind of okaaay for me, and I might have sequenced them later on the disc (though I've second-guessed the track order on all three of my own CDs, so I'm certainly no expert in that regard!), but the CD really takes off from there in a big way. The fourth track is the title track, which is a story song about a kid in a restaurant and the persistent waiter who tries in vain to sway the boy from ordering his beloved "macaroni, that creamy cheesy treat". There's a brilliance to the waiter's offerings such as "angel tooth pasta", "artichoke flannel ragout" and "wild billy goat hoof cheese", because it's that kind of mish-mash of words that kids likely hear when fancy waiters deliver their spiels. There's almost a "Cheese Shop" feel to this track, and the only complaint is that it just kind of ends after the fourth verse, and I was expecting some kind of Python-esque punch line or ending. But it's still a lot of fun, and you can even make a game out of it. My daughter, Becca, and I have been playing it together a lot lately, where we take turns being the waiter and the kid. Whenever Becca is the waiter, she tends to use the word "sausage" a lot, as in "peanut butter sausage ice cream". "Sausage" is just one of those particularly funny words for kids, you know, like "stinky".

The rest of the songs on Macaroni Boy are very charming, too. "My Daddy Loves Tools" is about a daddy who loves tools, though I'm sure you could have guessed that from the title, and includes some percussion sounds to go along with the tool descriptions. "Let's Pretend" has a great melody and sense of imagination and participation. "Funny Word Dictionary" has some cute definitions like "baa squeezy swish swish", which means "that sheep is wearing panty hose". The first time I heard "Rocking My Cat to Sleep" I wasn't paying close attention to the early part of the song and so when I heard only the later part I thought it was a sadly sweet (or sweetly sad) and poignant song about pet loss. But then I heard the first part where she says she likes rocking her cat to sleep, so now I'm not really sure what it's about... maybe dogs are just too big to comfortably rock to sleep? I think I liked it better as a coping with loss kind of thing, but I still think it's very beautiful, regardless. "There Was Another Old Woman" is an amusing parody that replaces fly and horse swallowing with women's fashion.

The CD ends with four tracks recorded at an intimate live setting, and it is these tracks which really shine a bright light on what a great kids' performer Ginger is. With the rest of the album being almost entirely arranged with only her voice and guitar, I kind of wonder why she didn't just do the whole album as a live show. It would have made for a more consistent recording and I'm sure many of the other tracks would have also showed off her sense of humor and the audience participation in the live setting. But anyway, the first of the live tracks is "Teacher Mary School", which has a very simple and very catchy hook (most of these songs do, by the way) and a funny participation part where Ginger asks "One of our favorite things to do is..." and the kids always answer "Play!" Ginger acts as if that is the greatest answer each time it is given, which is a wonderful way to respond. "The Breakfast Song" includes more participation and amusement from Ginger and the kids as they turn what they had for breakfast into refrains, though I wasn't crazy about the coffee verse at the end (what is it with so many kids' musicians with songs and references about coffee??). The CD ends with a very sweet ballad called "My Mommy Loves Me", which includes some verses that keep it real, like "Sometimes I hit my brother and I make him cry. Sometimes I miss the potty, even when I really try." And then she brings it home with the title of the song, sung with a neat waver on the word "lu-uh-uves". Oh yeah, very nice.

Ginger has a unique and well-developed sense of humor and comedy which is rare and delightful. For adults, it's not so much laugh-out-loud humor as it is big-smile-on-the-face humor, but for the preschool audience that seems to be her ideal target, I'm sure there are many squeals of laughter when Ginger and her guitar are in the room. Ginger Hendrix not only has an amazing name, but she is a terrific all-around entertainer who really plays around in that wonderfully colorful bounce house that is a child's mind.

Ginger Hendrix website

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Ralph Tickets Winner

2007-02-01T10:33:00.000-08:00

The winner of the Ralph's World House of Blues tickets is... Barb W. of Villa Park, IL. Congratulations, Barb! Have a great time at the show.

Curious George

2007-01-24T07:29:00.000-08:00

My two year-old, Evee, became a big fan of the stuffed monkey I got for her last summer. It was on sale in the wake of the Curious George movie's merchandise push, and it was very cute. Before I went in to the store I had asked her, jokingly, if she needed anything, and she said "a monkey", so it seemed like an obvious choice once I saw the stuffed George. And until then, she hadn't had her own "special stuffed toy" to sleep with and carry around and hug tightly... she mostly had her choice of a variety of stuffed toys that her older sister had, but nothing of her very own (well, we had certainly given her stuffed toys before, but nothing that she had really glommed on to). It's a bedtime Curious George, and he's wearing a pajama with a bottom flap, and Evee has a lot of laughs pulling the flap open and saying "bummy!" There is a real personality connection between Evee and the character of "Monkey George", as she calls him... Evee is extremely curious and fun-loving, and when she's left a room it's almost as messy as if Curious George had been there.

So recently at the library, I realized, gosh, we should read some of the Curious George books. I loved those when I was little. Strange to see, though, how times have made some things in there a little bit awkward... such as the man in the yellow hat essentially being a poacher who grabs George for a zoo. I mean, zoos are good things and all, and at some points people have to go and get some animals for them... but it just doesn't seem like the best basis for a cute buddy story these days. And there are other things like George smoking from the man in the yellow hat's pipe, and being thrown in jail for making a prank phone call... Just not the kind of material that would seem quite as publishable in 2007 as it was in 1941. The book was enjoyable, regardless, but felt a little dated.

So I thought we'd give the new movie a try and see how the basic Curious George premise might be reimagined in 2006-07. To my delight, the movie is very entertaining and the changes to the original story are all cleverly done and work very well for the new story. There is a great voice cast including Will Farrell as the man in the yellow hat, David Cross (Tobias from Arrested Development), Drew Barrymore, Eugene Levy and Dick van Dyke, and a lot of humor throughout (and all very clean humor). We did pause the DVD after the intro ad for the Curious George PBS program showed George making all kinds of messes, and said to our girls that if we were going to watch this movie, we needed both of them to promise not to play "Monkey See, Monkey Do". And we had to remind them afterwards about that promise, as the urge to act like a mischievous monkey was pretty strong.

But on to the music, eh? That's what this is supposed to be about, right? The soundtrack for the movie includes several songs by Jack Johnson, the mellow acoustic singer/songwriter with the smooth as syrup on banana pancakes voice. At first my wife commented about the music being too mellow and I think I agreed and used the term "nondescript". The songs kind of blended into each other and didn't really stand out in any kind of distinct way. But the thing with a movie that kids love is that they will want to watch it again and again, which means that I am watching it again and again, or at least listening to it again and again while doing other things... and after several listens I've come to really enjoy the songs. And I realize that movie music shouldn't really call attention to itself, but it usually sets a general mood or underscores the feeling of the film. In that sense, these songs didn't really work because the feeling of the film is often very upbeat and fast-paced. But what did work and makes these songs perfect for this particular film is that I think it needed the contrast of something mellower to offset the action. I recall Stephen Sondheim talking about A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and how the songs in that show weren't as funny as the comedy in the dialogue, and weren't intended to be, but were meant as a respite now and then from the frenetic humor. And I usually sequence my CDs in a similar way, mixing up the pacing of the humor and the song tempos to give some contrast and give kids a break now and then. So once I could appreciate how Jack Johnson's songs did fit so well along with the movie, even being so laid-back, then I could appreciate them a lot more for what they were.

"Upside Down" runs in full over the film's opening sequence and is a gently churning acoustic pop song which nicely "arrives" at the chorus and has some simple but effective acoustic lead lines. "People Watching" has a bouncy Beatles flavor and a cute and catchy hook as Jack sings, "Well, I'm just people watching the other people watching me". "Broken" has some grooving Hendrix Strat funk. "Talk of the Town" has a breezy Jimmy Buffet/James Taylor sound and shows off the cool tone of Jack's voice when he says "yea-ehh". "Questions" and "Supposed to Be" are both lazily beautiful ballads. The rest of the soundtrack includes other songs in a similar vein as the ones featured in the film and has some standouts including the sweet cover of the White Stripes' "We're Going to Be Friends"; the Beck-y backbeat blues of "The Sharing Song"; the funky soul of "3 Rs", which includes a take on the Schoolhouse Rock! classic "Three is a Magic Number"; and the pretty arpeggiated acoustic meanderings of "Wrong Turn".

So thumbs way up on both the film and the soundtrack. I should also mention another great Curious George song, which is the theme song for the new PBS show. This is a terrific swing jazz tune performed by Dr. John that is very catchy and really smokes (musically... no pipes). Having heard this prior to watching the movie, perhaps I was expecting the film's music to be more like this, which is why it took a little bit of 'warming up' to the soundtrack. This has the wildly upbeat and fun kind of sound that seems to have more of an immediate connection with the character of the monkey in question.

You can hear samples from Jack Johnson's Curious George soundtrack here. To hear the full version of the Curious George PBS TV show theme, go to this page and click on the Meet Curious George link.

Captain Bogg and Salty

2007-01-16T07:23:00.000-08:00

What is it with kids and pirates? Let's face it, kids love 'em. I suppose it's probably a combination of the cool things they say ("Arr!", "Aye!", "Avast!"), the cool things they wear (hats, hooks, eye patches, puffy shirts, parrots), and the cool things they do (swashbuckling, treasure hunting, cannon firing, plank walking). A pirate is a real multi-dimensional character for a kid, perfect for all kinds of imaginative adventures. But of course, the reality is that pirates are pretty nasty people... at the very least thieves and drunkards, and at the worst murderers and rapists. It's a little puzzling why pirates have been perpetuated over the years as play characters for kids. Then again, you can't play "cops and robbers" without some kids being the robbers, or play Star Wars without someone being Darth Vader. And any actor knows that when it comes to role-playing, some of the juiciest roles are the villains. I suppose that any kid who actually idolizes pirates will need a moment like when Bobby Brady realized that Jesse James wasn't a great role model, but inasmuch as pirates are great sources of imagination and adventure, that's certainly a cool thing.

My own pirate fancy has resurfaced of late as I've been playing the fun computer game, Sid Meier's Pirates! (which I would have recommended for pirate-loving kids to play along with their parents but for one word - cleavage), and I recently saw the DVD of Dead Man's Chest. To put on my movie reviewer's hat (or thumb) for a moment, I thought that was a rollicking good time, and much better than the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, although that one was fun, too. So the pirate flag of my imagination has been flying high lately, and it was an ideal time to discover Captain Bogg and Salty, a musical pirate band from Portland. And I was glad to discover that beyond the gimmick of that premise, the band really has great music and a lot of depth and humor.

Their first album, Bedtime Stories for Pirates, starts off with a hearty encouragement from Captain Angus Bogg to come live the life of a pirate, and then his crew members trade off verses of the first song, "I'm a Singin' Pirate", which combines the sound and jubilant chorus of your average drinking anthem with the melody and sophisticated wordplay of Gilbert and Sullivan. Other selections from among their three albums include a lot of what you would expect from what might be considered the 'pirate subgenre'; hand clapping, accordian, mandolin, crew chants, etc. But then there are a number of songs that offer totally different music than what might be expected, such as "Cat O' Nine Tails", with its smarmy jazzy pop flavor; "Scurvy", a ska polka song with an important educational message about what to do when you have scurvy (eat a lime); "Manatee", a pretty acoustic ballad; "I'm a Pirate", a Ventures meets the Yardbirds tune about a pirate who also surfs; "Pirate Party", a rockabilly romp a la the Stray Cats or BR549; the funny and dramatic Spanish drone of "Scallywag"; "Doldrums", which hearkens to The Who and The Doors; and the 80's metal sound of "Dead Men Tell No Tales".

My favorite track is "Pieces of 8ight", which maintains pirate-styled chording while infusing a cool modern rock sound that reminds me of Marilyn Manson's "Beautiful People". (I'm sure that will be a quote they'll want to use when promoting themselves to elementary schools and other children's events - "Captain Bogg and Salty will remind you of Marilyn Manson!") And the band recently made an excellent video of the song, which you can see below.

Captain Bogg and Salty plays a lot of shows for kids, and they also do shows for adults at clubs (where the patrons can presumably get their fill of grog or Grog Lite), and apparently their show doesn't change at all between the two audiences. So what works as pirate themed fun for kids also works as rebellious pirate fun for adults, too. In any case, their songs describe in great detail various aspects in the life of a pirate. Some things are good (finding treasure) and some are bad (scurvy), but regardless, the band does an amazing job of conveying the fascination of the pirate's life to anyone with such a fancy.

I look forward to meeting up with Captain Bogg and his crew at some point on our mutual travels around the Northwest. I just hope they don't ransack my RV and steal my stash of root beer!

Captain Bogg and Salty website

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The Hipwaders

2007-01-12T15:13:00.000-08:00

The Hipwaders are a really tight trio from California who have a fun sound and a nice variety of styles. Their self-titled debut CD was released in 2005 and starts right off with the invitation- "Come along with us!" And then it jumps into a very upbeat song imploring all to "come aboard the Hipwader bus". The sound for this is very much like The Byrds (uh, Roger McGuinn, not Alfred Hitchcock), complete with 12-string Rickenbacker guitar. And there's also a Wonders (or Oneders, if you prefer) kind of feel from That Thing You Do! I'm not sure that this worked that well for me as a full song, but I think it would be great as a jingle or TV theme song as it's very catchy and totally "feel good".

The album continues with the Stray Cats rockabilly of "Messy Room Song". I like the idea that the kid in the song is sent to clean up his room with a feather duster, a mop and broom, and then realizes that he really needs a bulldozer and a dump truck. "Earthquake" has a similar kind of verse-to-chorus change as Geof Johnson's "Hot Sand", and adopts a B-52's kind of sound, which works great. The B-52's influence is back again with "Rock Lobster" style backing vocals in the chorus of "Twitchy". Musically, the album shifts gears pretty sharply with "Welcome to the Zoo", which has sort of a mariachi feel to it, and especially on "Silly Robot Dance", which gives a clear answer if you were wondering whatever happened to Falco. These are both fun tracks and demonstrate the versatility of the band and the vocal chops of lead singer Tito Uquillas.

Other favorites of mine include the Beatle-esque "Insect Safari", which includes some funny banter between the 'insects'; the creepy jazzy "Mr. Wiggly Jiggly Bones", which I can picture as the soundtrack behind some Tim Burton animation; the tribal rock of "Volcano"; the Smashmouth vibe and dirty guitar of "Stand Up to the Bully"; the David Lynch landscape and spooky twang of "Howling at the Moon"; and the closing song "Valentine", which opens with some Beach Boys "ba ba ba"s and turns into a bouncy Turtles love song with cute lyrics like- "Valentine, I'd like to make you mine. Can you see this heart-shaped thought balloon floating over my head when I think of you?"

If there's any complaint I have about the album (and when I say 'complaint' I mean that very mildly... it's not like I'll be calling to yell at The Hipwaders' customer service department), it's that sometimes the influences are so on-the-nose as to lose some of the character of the band itself. Tracks like "Jelly Beans" and "My Green Bicycle" are good songs, but they're so completely soaked in Beatles sounds and chord phrasing and recording techniques (and Tito doing a slight Liverpudlian accent) that I almost wonder, am I listening to Revolver or The Hipwaders? And there are a lot of other on-the-nose references like that throughout the album, like the Falco and B-52s things. These guys are super-talented musicians and songwriters and I'd like to hear their music be something more unique to who they are and have their influences be much more transparent. It's one thing to listen and think, hey, this band seems like they're influenced by the Beatles or the B-52s... that's cool... but it's not as good when they sound exactly like that. If you're looking for a tribute act, then sure, but not for something original. There was already The Beatles and The B-52s... so I'd like to hear The Hipwaders be The Hipwaders.

The band is currently working on their next album, which should be released sometime this year. I'll look forward to hearing that and seeing where they go from here. Their debut CD is terrific and makes them a real promising entry into the kids' music world. Either you're on the bus or you're off the bus... Definitely pay the fare and get on with The Hipwaders!

The Hipwaders website

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Review of The Hipwaders' Educated Kid CD

Ralph's House of Blues Tour - Win Tickets!

2007-01-10T16:27:00.000-08:00

Rice Krispies is sponsoring Ralph's World on a House of Blues tour. I have four tickets to give away to anyone who would like to go to one of the shows listed below.

To win the tickets, listen to my interview with Ralph Covert below, then add a comment to this post with the correct spelling of his name, backwards. A winner will be selected from all correct entries. The deadline is January 31.

I'll be doing some shows in Portland just a week after Ralph will be there, and probably won't be able to get out there sooner. And then when he's in Seattle is when I'll be in Portland... Bummer! I was hoping to catch him during this tour, but I guess that'll have to wait.

Anyway, I'm sure it'll be a really great time. Here are the dates:

Feb. 3 - Anaheim CA House of Blues
Feb. 4 - San Francisco CA The Fillmore
Feb. 10 - San Diego CA House of Blues
Feb. 11 - Portland OR Aladdin Theater
Feb. 17 - West Hollywood CA House of Blues
Feb. 18 - Seattle WA The Moore Theater
Feb. 24 - Las Vegas NV House of Blues
Feb. 25 - Boulder CO The Boulder Theater
Mar. 3 - Chicago IL House of Blues
Mar. 4 - Somerville MA Somerville Theater
Mar. 10 - Cleveland OH House of Blues
Mar. 11 - Philadelphia PA Theatre of the Living Arts
Mar. 17 - Lake Buena Vista FL House of Blues
Mar. 18 - Atlanta GA Variety Playhouse
Mar. 24 - New Orleans LA House of Blues
Mar. 25 - St Louis MO The Pageant

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This Post Has No Elephants... Eric Ode's new DVD

2007-01-05T16:26:00.000-08:00

My friend Eric Ode, who I posted about before here, has just released a brand new DVD called Welcome to the Workshop. This collection includes videos of four songs from his previous CDs including "I Love My Shoes" and "At the Library", as well as five new songs that are exclusive to this DVD. The new songs include the funky "Worms", the charming country-folk song "Washing the Dog" and my favorite, "This Song Has No Elephants", which is a very cute song and a really fun video. Click here to order the DVD and check out the video for "This Song Has No Elephants" below.

Kids Make the Darnedest Audience

2006-12-29T08:52:00.000-08:00

I've already posted about how I got into doing kids' music, and I mentioned in that post that I would write about kids as an audience at some point. Well, I suppose that now is "some point", so here goes...

When I started doing kids music I thought it would be pretty easy and almost effortless to engage them in live performances. When I would play shows for adults at coffeeshops and they would bring their kids, I would play a song or two for the kids... something I happened to know already like "Scooby Doo" or "If I Only Had a Brain"... and they would usually respond very well, with big smiles and big laughs. It was their reaction which turned out to be a big part of the impetus for me to do music just for kids.

But in retrospect, its no wonder they responded so well to that, because otherwise at those coffeehouse gigs I'd been playing original singer/songwriter acoustic pop songs about relationships or drug addiction or media satire or whatever... stuff their parents could appreciate, but not them. And the covers I did were things like John Lennon, Leonard Cohen and Pink Floyd (and not the kid-friendly Pink Floyd songs... wink). So it's no wonder that kids would really perk up and have a big reaction when I would take a few minutes to play a couple of silly tunes that they were familiar with and focus my attention directly towards them.

What I quickly found out once I started doing a few shows specifically for kids is that they have a different expectation entirely when they know that they are the focus of the entertainment, and you may not even keep their attention for five minutes if you're not really engaging them in some way. After I had listened to all of the kids' music CDs from the Buffalo libraries when I was first getting into doing kids' music, I learned a number of the songs that I really liked to form a set list for my first few shows at day cares. I figured, these songs are so incredibly charming that any group of kids will just melt and giggle and purr with joy as I sing them. What a piece of cake!

Well, I found that there's sometimes a big difference between what I might find incredibly charming in a kids' song, what a kid might find incredibly charming when listening to a CD, and what a kid might find incredibly charming during a live show. Merely singing what would seem to be an enjoyable kids' song to a group of kids doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to respond to it or want to pay attention to it.

In that sense, an audience of kids isn't all that different from adults... In a live situation, they often need something a little bit beyond what is merely just a song. A good song can be heard and enjoyed just fine on the CD player at home. But a live performance is expected to be something a little more than that. For artists whose music you are already familiar with, sure, you might enjoy just seeing them in person singing the songs you love... although the odds are that if you've heard of someone's music, they are probably also very good performers, as there are very few "recording artist only" success stories in the music business.

I'm not at all suggesting that an audience (kids or adults) needs video screens or costume characters or giant inflatables or a stage full of dancers or lasers or fog machines or super energetic stage antics or non-stop participation or any of that stuff... Certainly, there are many examples of people who are great about performing with just a guitar or piano and their voice (or even just the instrument in some cases), and bands like The Grateful Dead who pretty much just stood there and played their songs, without even introducing them.

But most audiences, and I think especially kids audiences, need something else as part of the live performances. And that can be as simple as the words or stories you say to set up the song, or a certain kind of way that you bop your head while you sing, or even just the way you look or dress (not to take away from his music at all, but I think Dan Zanes has an instant advantage with an audience of kids because he just looks so cool in a very unique way, so even his appearance is entertaining for kids). Sometimes it's a matter of pacing the songs right... A theater director that I worked with in Buffalo told me that she tries to direct shows with a push-and-pull or roller coaster feel to them, to keep the audience's perception of their experience in constant motion.

To Bounce or Not to Bounce

One thing that I think sets a kids audience apart is a particular need for participation. Yes, older audiences like to clap and sing along and hold up lighters and sway their arms and do "the wave" and mosh and crowd surf and all that, and in some cases it is those shared moments among the audience that really make the concert experience special, as in a U2 show where Bono can stop singing entirely and the whole crowd fills in perfectly for him. But most adult concerts don't absolutely need participation to be enjoyed by their audience, whereas kids' concerts usually do need at least some participation, if not quite a lot. Most kids have a strong desire to be an active part of whatever is going on, and want to have a lot of fun, and want to feel like they are helping in some way.

I have to say "most kids", because one thing I had to learn is that not every kid wants to participate at a live concert, and that's okay. I would have thought that surely every kid would want to "Bounce and Flap and Twist" or "Dance Like An Animal", right? It used to bother me if I ever saw a kid at one of my shows who wasn't participating. And then I met Alex.

Alex was a little boy who came with his mother to a show in Seattle. Try as I might, I just could not get Alex to participate with anything during the show. It was a smaller audience at a library, and so he really stood out (or sat out, I should say) among the other kids who were dancing and responding to everything, and I remembered him very well because once I learned his name I kept trying to coax him to participate ("Come on, Alex!"), to no avail... And then a couple weeks later I was playing another concert near Seattle and while I was setting up I noticed that Alex had joined the audience. I went out to say "hi" and his father said something like, "Alex loved your show so much that he had to come back again. He's been listening to your songs on your website and watching the videos. He's your biggest fan!"

The impact of that was very powerful, and I realized that hey, whaddya know, kids are different. And just because a certain kid may not feel comfortable acting silly like the other kids, it doesn't mean that they aren't having fun and enjoying the show in their own way. One of my nieces is a perfect example of that kind of thing... super shy and reserved at my concerts, but at home she's bouncing off the walls and singing my songs at the top of her lungs. So now when I'm doing concerts I encourage all of the kids to participate, and if I see a kid who isn't then I might make one gesture for them to participate (because some kids do need that personal encouragement to get them going), but if they don't respond to that then I don't worry about it.

Drawing the Line in the Sand/Floor/Grass

Another thing I learned early on is that kids need boundaries and expectations, and that if you provide them ahead of time, they are really great about respecting them. I recall an early show where I was singing a song without my guitar, and a sneaky kid kept creeping around the side of me to go and mess with my guitar on its stand. I kept saying, "No no no", and gently shooing him away, but he kept returning. I observed other seasoned kids' performers like Kenn Nesbitt and Glenn Colton who did such a great job with crowd control, and tried to figure out what they were doing that I wasn't. My wife pointed out that it's important that I be on top of that kind of thing and make it clear the first time it happens that it's not acceptable, or better yet, set that expectation from the beginning.

I hated to seem at all like "the bad guy" when I'm supposed to be the one initiating a fun experience for the kids. But I learned that if we set the rule ahead of time that they cannot come up past a certain point (I have my stage manager, Zeke, tell them that in a fun way before he introduces me), then it is just a matter of my enforcing that, should any kid try to test that boundary. And I've found that they rarely do try to test that boundary if it has already been set. Of course, you'll get the Wandering Infant now and then, who couldn't understand that rule and can be very hard to deflect away from the stage area without their parents help. But by and large, kids are great at respecting the expectations they've been given for their behavior during the show.

We Interrupt this Show for an Important Announcement...

One thing about kids audiences is that you never know when you're going to get unexpected interruptions. Actually, they wouldn't be unexpected interruptions if you knew when they were going to happen. But anyway... Some kids are very outgoing and really want you to know what's going on with them, and so if you sing a song that mentions a dog you might have a kid who comes up during that song yelling, "I have a dog named Cowgirl! I have a dog named Cowgirl!" And about the only thing you can do is to either ignore them or acknowledge them. If possible, acknowledging them is usually better because that's what they really want at that point, to know that you heard them and recognize them. So I may have to try hard to squeeze into the song, "That's great! You have a dog named Cowgirl. How cool!"

And one thing to watch out for is that there may be a smarty-pants among the older range of kids who must announce as loudly as possible that he's aware of something that the other kids aren't. For example, at a recent show I played "There's a Monster in My House", and my set-up for that song is to say that I'm going to tell the kids a story next, and you can tell stories with songs, and would they like to hear kind of a scary story, etc. But this particular time I forgot to say the part that you can tell a story with a song. And wouldn't you know it, there was a kid who starts yelling, several times during the song, "This isn't a story! It's a song!" Arrrrrgggghhhh. I kept looking for an opportunity when I could quickly blurt out, "Youcantellastorywithasong!" But I couldn't get it in there smoothly, and I knew that it was my fault for missing the crucial part of the setup.

Of course, most times it wouldn't matter anyway, since the kids would just listen and follow along as expected, but I just happened to have that one smarty-pants kid there that time, and it was the wrong time to give him that opportunity. Usually, it's easy enough to do a quick "shh" for any kids who may be saying something during a song, and so again, it goes back to the idea that kids are great with respecting your expectations when they are aware of them.

Too cute.

Of course, the cuteness factor makes everything so great when performing for kids. They may disrupt a little bit on rare occasions or make a smarty-pants comment, but time and again they will say and do the sweetest things, both during the show and afterwards.

At one of the very first kids' shows I played at a day care in Buffalo, where the show was very much a learning experience for me in many respects, as described above, there was a little girl who came up afterward and said, "Can you come back tomorrow and play?" And it was fun to watch another girl who had initially told me she only liked magicians, and not music, ending up in the front row and practically crawling up my leg by the end of the first song. Nearly every show since has had some kind of cute comment or reaction from the kids, and that is one of the things that is particularly gratifying about live performances for children. Kids appreciation can be so incredibly enthusiastic and jubilant and they can help you to feel the joy that they are feeling from the music and from the fun that they are having.

And that's another thing that is important with any audience, but especially with kids... that your feeling of enjoying what you do comes across to them, because that good feeling can bounce back and forth between the performer and the audience and magnify the enjoyment for all. And I think that with a kids audience, it's important not to condescend to them in the way you address them, or you might be in trouble, especially with the older kids. I gear the tone of what I say and the bulk of my material towards older kids, because younger kids will still appreciate a lot of that, but it doesn't work nearly as well the other way around. The only exception would be if the audience is entirely comprised of preschoolers, in which case my "inner Barney" might come out just a little bit.

But I think it's also super important to connect with kids on their level and celebrate their "kid-ness". Instead of being an adult performing for kids, I try in some ways to be a kid performing for kids. Part of that is playing around with them with their particular sense of humor (which is much more varied and sophisticated than I was originally aware of) and their innate sense of silliness. It's great to try to expose kids to "the arts" and a variety of different musical approaches, but it helps if it's fun for them while they're learning. As Christopher Noxon reported in his article for the Fids and Kamily blog, a parent at a kids' concert he went to said: "Stop squirming, Montana... Listen, it's a sea shanty. Can you say 'sea shanty'?" There's only so much that kids can appreciate that isn't fun in some way for them. It doesn't matter so much if that guy in the band is playing a rare dulcimer... that will probably only interest a kid for a half a second. The song and the performance has to connect with them in a fun way.

And that's probably the bottom line for kids as an audience... fun. If someone hasn't updated Cyndi Lauper's song to say "Kids just wanna have fun", then I'm sure that's in the works. Adults go to concerts and can hear the blues or rock epics or classical symphonies or punk anthems and feel things like sadness and romance and power and grandeur and loss and hope and anger. Certainly, kids can pick up on and explore some of those emotions in their own ways, but when they are part of something that is supposed to be an entertaining event for them, there better be something fun involved throughout, because that's what most kids will want to take from the experience. There's plenty of time for kids to grow up and listen to jaded bands lifelessly playing emo in some dank club. But kids are only young once, and may never have the same level of enthusiasm and wonder for the world around them, so I say let them express that and enjoy that while they still can.

I look forward to continuing my own education and experience with entertaining audiences of kids in the coming year, and I wish you all a very happy and healthy 2007! Thank you so much for stopping by.

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Maisy

2006-12-23T16:04:00.000-08:00

Maisy is a lovable little mouse (well, actually, she's rather large for a mouse) created by Lucy Cousins as a book series that eventually became an animated show. I had never heard of her before, but my wife noticed one of the Maisy videos at the library and thought it might be good for our daughter, Becca, who was two at the time. To say that Becca took to Maisy right away would be an understatement... She instantly loved everything about Maisy and her world, and her sister Evee has followed suit as she's grown up. It was a big thrill for them to meet Maisy in person at a bookstore earlier this year. And I've become a fan, too. The content of the shows is clearly directed at young kids, though, so for me, the particular hook that keeps me enjoying the repeated viewings are the highly comical sound effects provided by The Umbilical Brothers (their voicings for Charley the crocodile are hilarious), and in particular the great music.

The music for the Maisy videos was produced by Kick Production, which is a group of composers who have made music for several different animated shows including Sitting Ducks and The Koala Brothers. Their Maisy songs remind me of the Blues Brothers joke where Elwood asks the lady at the hick bar what kind of music they play at their establishment, and she answers, "Oh, we got both kinds... country and western." Only instead of country and western, in this case "both kinds" means reggae and ska. I love reggae and ska, and the generally bouncy and happy feel of those styles seems a perfect fit for kids, so it's no wonder this show and its music has been a big hit for our family.

The Maisy material includes several original songs as well as reggae/ska treatments of classic kid songs like "If You're Happy and You Know It", "Wheels on the Bus" and "Row Row Row Your Boat". I really love the catchy melodies and grooves of the originals like "Itty Bitty Bug Song", "Poor Poor Panda", "Up Up Down Down", "Walk Along Charley", "Elastic", "It Wouldn't Go", "Maisy Wore a Red Dress" and the theme song. One time when a Maisy video was on, I picked up my guitar and wanted to learn the chords to some of the songs so I could sing them together with my girls. I was amazed to discover that every one of the songs was completely based around I-IV-V chords, and I think they were all in the same key, even. That may have been intentional, to keep the sound simple and consistent for little ears, but it's always cool to realize how much variety can be found within the same simple chord changes, and also within the same particular musical genre. With some bands or singer/songwriters, a very limited sound with similar chord changes on all songs would start to make them all sound the same and I would lose interest pretty quickly, but Kick Production does a really great job giving each of these songs its own spirit and arranging them vibrantly and creatively. In an instant you know when you hear one of the Maisy songs, but you also know each of them distinctively.

Unfortunately, the only place I can point you to hear something from Maisy is to one of these preview pages (RealAudio - WMA) for the Best of Nick Jr. compilation CD, which includes a sample from the Maisy theme song. The show is currently on Noggin, so if you have that channel, definitely check it out and listen for the musical interludes. I don't believe they have any plans to release a CD with all of the Maisy songs collected together, but if they did I would certainly buy it in a heartbeat.

Maisy Noggin page

Christmas Music

2006-12-19T17:18:00.000-08:00

The Lovely Mrs. Davis is one of the main kids' music bloggers to emerge over the past year or so, and she also covers other subjects with great wit and style. She has been having several kids' musicians and bloggers doing guest posts for her site about their favorite Christmas music, and my post was added there today. Click here to read that.

On a completely unrelated note... I'm sorry it's been so long since I've had a new article posted. I've been trying to keep a schedule of posting something at least once a week since being home more over the fall and winter. I'm not going to say that I've been too busy, because I'm pretty much in a perpetual state of "too busy", so that's not really a valid excuse. What I think it is, though, is that I've been getting pretty swamped with people sending in new CDs for me to check out. I'm starting to appreciate how Stefan and Amy and others must get overwhelmed sometimes with everything they receive. I'm grateful to be getting what I am, especially as there's a lot of really cool kids' music out there... but the problem is that when I get something new I often want to check it out as soon as I can, and so that means that the last thing I was listening to gets pulled out of the CD player. It's kind of been going on like that for the past week or two. I usually want to listen to something in particular at least two or three times before I feel ready to write about it, and that just isn't happening lately. I actually have a back list of kids' artists who I've been meaning to feature here at some point, whose music I'm already aware of, so I should probably just post about one of them. But again, this new music I'm getting is what I'm immersing myself in at the moment, so it's making it hard to focus on anything from that list right now.

Anyway, I hope to be getting to a post about The Hipwaders sometime soon, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, proceed to rock on and such...

Randy Kaplan

2006-12-06T08:06:00.000-08:00

Randy Kaplan is a singer/songwriter/performer from Brooklyn. He has released several albums for adults but just released his first album specifically for kids called Five Cent Piece.

Randy has one of the most interesting voices I've ever heard, right up there with Justin Roberts for its peculiar quality. ("Peculiar" in both cases meaning distinct and special, not freaky or weird.) He shares some of the nasal twang as singers like Michael Stipe and Arlo Guthrie, and there's also just a bit of grit in there, as if his vocal chords forgot to shake their shoes out after a day at the beach. Most significantly, Randy's voice is incredibly easy-going and welcoming, and you feel like you're sitting next to an old friend on an old couch and he's playing a new tune for you and you know you're already going to be enthralled with it the first time you hear it because, ya know, it's your good friend, Randy.

That's an important quality to have for this material, because Randy is very much in the Arlo Guthrie vein of story-telling through songs, and if he wasn't such a friendly character then some of the songs with a lot of talking might get tiresome. But my kids and I love this CD and are happy to let Randy spin his yarns over and over and knit us up into a warm little mitten.

Much of the CD consists of new renditions of classic songs like "We're in the Same Boat, Brother", "I'm a Little Dinosaur", "Freight Train", "Kids" (from Bye Bye Birdie) and "You Are My Sunshine". All are done in a sweet folky style with smooth fingerstyle guitar as the backbone, and different tracks include some nice accompaniment including trombone, mandolin, violin and accordian. "Over the Rainbow" is one of those songs like "Unchained Melody" or "O Holy Night", where I thought it would need a particularly virtuoso vocalist to pull it off, but Randy's version is one of the most beautiful I've ever heard. The earthy twang of his voice along with the gently rolling guitar may not be in perfect pitch or perfect intonation, and yet it is so "just right" in every deeply soulful way that really matters. It doesn't hurt that the song is so great to begin with, but Randy has made this version truly special.

Randy also does a very funny version of "You Can't Always Get What You Want", where he replaces the Stones' verses with another Arlo styled story about a kid who wants to play all day at the playground and doesn't want to get dressed into his pajamas after his bath and wants to eat nothing but ice cream and... well... you know how the chorus goes. In the third chorus, Randy goes off and provides voices for different family members and a strange menagerie of pets who all sing along on the title phrase. This takes what David Grover and his band did so well with "Where's My Pajamas" and one-ups it. I was laughing out loud when he got to the snake and the horse and the cow. And I love his little interjections between the chorus lines like, "Adapt this as your first mantra!" and "Use it preemptively!" Good advice, indeed. The track is nearly ten minutes long, which might be a bit much for some, but I enjoyed it all. This song also shows off Randy's ability to do funny voices and to be an engaging goof, which is evident on other tracks as well.

Somewhat ironically, the cover song that didn't work for me that well was Randy's take on Arlo Guthrie's "The Motorcycle Song", which kind of felt a bit flat compared to the original, and misses the Arlo witticism of lines like, "Luckily, I didn't go into the mountain... I went over the cliff." I suppose that Randy is so good with his Arlo approach and his sense of humor on other songs that the expectation was particularly high for this.

Randy also offers four original tracks. They're all kind of odd in their own way, which is good. (Again with 'peculiar' meaning special and unique.) I especially liked the first original, which is a song about a shark who invades Randy's bathtub and orders him to "Shampoo me!" I love the phrasing when he sings the title, with his high chirp on the "poo" and the low growl on "me", and the second verse in particular is very funny as the shark counters Randy's complaint about the shark's lack of hair by telling him, "You don't have any, either," and pointing out that he still has a bottle of shampoo nearby, regardless. "Mosquito Song" is a lowdown bluesy number about Randy trying to flick a mosquito away from him. "Roaches" is very pleasant musically, but a bit disturbing as it describes an apartment where roaches are everywhere, even on the bookshelf reading Kafka (of course). The song ends with the roaches singing in a way that sounds almost like a glass bottle slide on an acoustic guitar. "Mostly Yellow" is a sad ballad about how Big Bird, with his Fruit Loop ankles, has never flown anywhere, so he's "mostly yellow, but just a little blue". (Randy might need to update his Sesame Street viewing, though, as he refers to Snuffy as being invisible, which of course is not the case.)

It's the little details during his song commentary, the warm and welcoming feeling of the music, and the instantly engaging and friendly nature of Randy's voice and character that makes this such a winning recording. I really enjoy listening to this, and look forward to hearing more music from Randy.

Randy Kaplan website

Eric's review of Randy's 2008 release, Loquat Rooftop

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Goodbye to Greg Wiggle

2006-12-03T06:34:00.000-08:00

The big news in the kids' music world right now is that Greg Page, aka "the yellow Wiggle", is retiring from The Wiggles due to health reasons. Here is a video with him explaining why he's retiring and passing the yellow shirt off to his replacement, Sam. Apparently, Greg has a rare heart condition where blood doesn't flow enough when he is active, which would certainly make it impossible to continue as a Wiggle, what with all of the singing and touring and, of course... wiggling.

After we watched that video with our 4 year-old daughter, Becca (a lifelong Wiggle fan), she said she wanted to draw a picture on the Paint program of Greg Wiggle with a Band-Aid over his heart. We'll send that picture on to him, along with our best wishes for his health and our thanks for all he's done with the group.

I've posted here before about how I feel about The Wiggles, but I would like to add a couple of thoughts that weren't mentioned in that article...

First of all, I've been thinking that one reason why some people might be so quick to dismiss The Wiggles is if they have only glimpsed some of their Disney channel shows. Disney tends to repeat the same few shows over and over. I don't think those shows are the best representation of what The Wiggles do to begin with, and especially not if you only see the same songs and segments all the time. But if you check out some of their stand-alone video releases and CDs, there really are many great songs of a wide variety represented. I don't that think anybody else... anybody else... has offered anything comparable to the body of quality music for the younger range of kids (1-5) as The Wiggles have. And as Devon from the Head, Shoulders, Knees and all that blog points out in this post, it's nice that The Wiggles unabashedly make music with just kids in mind.

Also, as I keep reading various articles about the current wave of kids' music emerging in such a big way, with virtually every one of them making some reference to The Wiggles in the sense that the new music coming out is so much cooler and better than theirs and being such a great alternative to them, I can't help but wonder... would there even be any kind of "kids' music explosion" if it weren't for The Wiggles and their huge success? They got millions of parents around the world buying kids' music CDs and videos, which I think had waned quite a bit since Raffi sort of faded away for a while there. Once somebody opens the door to something in the public consciousness, then the public is more aware of that thing in general, and I think that's one of the reasons why there is more attention on kids' music in general right now. I suspect that many others who are having success in the kids' genre now wouldn't have the same visibility if The Wiggles hadn't made such a big splash for the general idea of "kids' music".

And The Wiggles put the idea of creating new and original kids' music with a variety of sounds and styles on the map in a huge way. Like it was when The Beatles became so big, I imagine that other artists wanted to get in on that action and do the same kind of thing once they saw how huge The Wiggles had become. The Beatles made the idea of being a musician fun and exciting for a whole new wave of up-and-coming musicians in the 60's, and I think The Wiggles have done the same thing for kids' musicians. And as it was in the wake of The Beatles, when we had so much other great music coming out after them, so it is with The Wiggles with a lot of other great kids' music being produced now. But The Beatles were always still very well respected for their huge contribution to their musical genre, and so should The Wiggles be respected for what they've done.

But often they're not respected at all... and worse yet, they're somehow made to seem like the embodiment of everything that good kids' music shouldn't be. What a crock that is. When I hear people in the kids' music industry dismissing or pooh-poohing The Wiggles, it reminds me of the maples in the great Rush parable "The Trees". Why on Earth other people producing kids' music or writing about kids' music would denigrate The Wiggles is really beyond me. They are incredibly talented songwriters, performers and musicians and have produced a huge body of work that kids really love.

Anyway, I'm really glad that Greg will likely be alright, and I wish him and The Wiggles the very best as they continue on.

Eric Herman Interview

2006-11-29T10:08:00.000-08:00

One thing I forgot to mention in my recent post about Yosi was that he also has a kids' music blog. His latest post is an interview with a guy named Eric Herman. Along with the interview is a brand new Eric Herman collectible card, part of which is to the right, for all of you fervent players of the Eric Herman:The Gathering card game. To see the whole card and read the interview, click here.

Yosi

2006-11-23T10:12:00.000-08:00

Yosi is a fun and energetic performer from New Jersey. He's released four kids' music albums, and they all have some good songs, but seeing as today is Thanksgiving (btw, Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!) and Thanksgiving is known for copious food consumption, I thought I would focus on Yosi's latest release, What's Eatin' Yosi?

When most rock bands release concept albums, they tend to be very grandiose kinds of subjects, like the repression of individualism on Rush's 2112, the class structure metaphors of Pink Floyd's Animals, and The Downward Spiral depicting Trent Reznor's um, downward spiral. But kids' music concept albums tend to be focused on things like "having fun" or "lullabies" or "animals" (but not usually in the class structure metaphor way) or "socks" (well, I predict that socks will be next year's big theme of choice). Food-related songs do crop up quite a bit on children's albums, and the many different kinds of foods would seem to be a good source for material, so Yosi had a good idea with this concept.

What's Eatin' Yosi starts off with a rollickin' Nawlin's style romp called "Let's Get Cookin'". Yosi has a Buddy Holly kind of yelp and twang to his voice on this one, and it's a great first course for the meal, copping Hank Williams' "good lookin'/cookin'" rhyme on the refrain.

There are some other tasty morsels on the album... "Pass the Purple Pesto Pasta Please" is next, and the title says it all on that one. It actually builds up from that phrase to things like "Pass the purple pesto pasta in a porcelain pitcher," with Yosi ably twisting his tongue to get it all out. I might have gone with a porcelain platter, though, but I suppose pouring from a pitcher might be a faster means of pasta distribution. Regardless, it's a really cute song and a swingin' Dixieland sound makes this track a favorite of mine to snack on. "Chilly Chili" has a sweet Frank Zappa and the Wailers kind of vibe and a catchy vocal. The traditional song "Bulbes (Potatoes)" has a bouncy eastern European sound with some delicious clarinet on top by Mark Fineberg (who also adds some nice saxaphone on "Don't Doodle"). "Fresh Brown Eggs" is a chewy folk duet with Yosi and Brady Rymer. "Just Desserts" is a 50's style rock 'n' roll dish, served cool. "Schlurpknopf" is an amusing Rocky Horror style sci-fi number about the favorite food of aliens everywhere. "Spaghetti Worms and Meatballs" is an a cappella barbershop song that reminded me a little bit of The Music Man, A Mighty Wind and Arlo Guthrie (confirmed by the direct Arlo parody at the end).

Strangely, the album ends with a song called "I Just Love You", which has no reference to food at all (and it could have with that title, if he were talking about food). I suppose that might be the after-meal conversation, or meant to be a post-script in the way that "All You Need is Love" sort of 'answered' the Sgt. Pepper's album, but I'm not sure how it would connect with the food theme in any way.

Some things like "Chicken Noodle Soup" and "Eat, Repeat" didn't taste that good to me, but then again, I can't fathom why anybody would ruin a perfectly good piece of pizza by putting mushrooms all over it. But of course, some people love mushrooms. So who knows what you might prefer. Some of the songs taste really good at first but kind of go on a bit long, so it's almost as though someone gave you a nice piece of pumpkin pie and you were like, mmmm, but then they kept feeding you more and more pieces of pumpkin pie over and over. But on the whole, it's a cool album with a good variety of musical food groups represented.

I'm not sure what the overall meaning of the concept is supposed to be, though, and there are some important questions left unanswered... Does Tommy's pinball proficiency make a difference to how much he likes chicken noodle soup? Did Ziggy Stardust eat schlurpknopf on Mars? Did Syd Barrett really come into the studio during the recording of "Spaghetti Worms and Meatballs"? We may never know. But that's the thing about concept albums... they can get you thinking in different ways. In this case, thinking about food... but let's face it, food is something we animals think of often, and probably still will be a major focus of our lives even in 2112.

Yosi had a fun idea to go along with this album, by hosting a webpage with recipes from several notable kids' music performers, writers, and media folks. Click here to check that out, and look for my "Where's Waldorf Salad" and "Hippy Hippo Shake".

Yosi's website

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