Zooglobble: What are your musical memories growing up?
Stefan Shepherd: I remember being in the back seat of the car on weekend drives through northern California hillsides, listening to whatever easy listening station my parents could find. I still have a soft spot in my heart for Herb Alpert and ABBA...
I remember my dad building an electronic organ with multiple keyboards and pedals, the works, when I was in elementary school, maybe first or second grade? I took lessons for maybe 8 or 9 years. I even took piano lessons for a year or two to strengthen my fingers for organ, that's how hardcore we were...
We went through Babies R Us when my wife was pregnant with Miss Mary Mack. I was excited to look through their CD section. I recall it being pretty small. We found a CD -- I can't even remember the title and I doubt we have it anymore -- and I remember being very disappointed when I actually listened to the thing -- the nameless (literally, there were no credits on the thing) people responsible for the music couldn't have been bad musicians, but they produced something so schlocky that we had to find something else to listen to.
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Last week Jeff Bogle from the fine kids music website Out with the Kids participated in a "debate" with the music critic and musician Tom Moon. Heard on WHYY's Radio Times, the hour-long program featured a discussion of whether kids should listen to kids' music or adult music. You can probably guess which side Jeff took, and therefore can also deduce Mr. Moon's position on the question at hand.
I say "debate" in quotation marks, because, as someone quipped on Facebook near the end of the hour, it was like hearing a fundamentalist debate a Unitarian Universalist. Jeff would cede some eminently reasonable point made by Tom ("You're not going to catch me arguing against the Beatles"), while Moon would entirely refuse to grant even a single point Mr. Bogle made worth considering.
Let's put it this way -- it started out by Tom criticizing Lunch Money's gently amusing fable "It Only Takes One Night To Make a Balloon Your Friend" (listen here). As the 20- or 30-second excerpt ended, Moon railed against it as a song teaching kids to make friends with balloons (it's, um, not) and by the end of the show seemed to imply that Mozart would never have composed his many masterpieces had he listened to music like that.
For someone so interested in musical discovery he wrote an entire book about it (1,000 Records To Hear Before You Die -- download the list here) to be so utterly dismissive of an entire subset of music (in response to hearing the Dan Zanes/Sharon Jones cover of "In the Basement," he said that it was nice, but he was pretty sure he'd enjoy anything on her records with the Dap-Kings than on that album -- sound unheard) was a little dispiriting.
At first I chalked it up to the way that debates end up polarizing the argument so that people are more concerned with making points rather than finding some common understanding. But maybe I misunderstood Tom Moon -- maybe he completely believes that, that there is no point to kids' music.
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This past year I've thought some about how to spread the word about great kids' music to the world at large. So I presented at the EMP Pop Conference on adult artists creating second careers in kids music, for example. And I've tossed around some other ideas.
But what if there are lots of people who ask:
"So what? Who. Cares."
It's not an unreasonable question.
We in the kids music world spend so much time talking about what we think to be good kids' music -- mostly to others in the kids' music world -- that we don't take a step back and say why it's important in the first place.
My goal here, then, is to lay out my theory of why kids' music is not only valid but important. I've borrowed a few pieces of information here and there (and I'll note those borrowings accordingly), but the theory (and its faults) are entirely my own.
Last week Jeff Bogle from the fine kids music website Out with the Kids participated in a "debate" with the music critic and musician Tom Moon. Heard on WHYY's Radio Times, the hour-long program featured a discussion of whether kids should listen to kids' music or adult music. You can probably guess which side Jeff took, and therefore can also deduce Mr. Moon's position on the question at hand.
I say "debate" in quotation marks, because, as someone quipped on Facebook near the end of the hour, it was like hearing a fundamentalist debate a Unitarian Universalist. Jeff would cede some eminently reasonable point made by Tom ("You're not going to catch me arguing against the Beatles"), while Moon would entirely refuse to grant even a single point Mr. Bogle made worth considering.
Let's put it this way -- it started out by Tom criticizing Lunch Money's gently amusing fable "It Only Takes One Night To Make a Balloon Your Friend" (listen here). As the 20- or 30-second excerpt ended, Moon railed against it as a song teaching kids to make friends with balloons (it's, um, not) and by the end of the show seemed to imply that Mozart would never have composed his many masterpieces had he listened to music like that.
For someone so interested in musical discovery he wrote an entire book about it (1,000 Records To Hear Before You Die -- download the list here) to be so utterly dismissive of an entire subset of music (in response to hearing the Dan Zanes/Sharon Jones cover of "In the Basement," he said that it was nice, but he was pretty sure he'd enjoy anything on her records with the Dap-Kings than on that album -- sound unheard) was a little dispiriting.
At first I chalked it up to the way that debates end up polarizing the argument so that people are more concerned with making points rather than finding some common understanding. But maybe I misunderstood Tom Moon -- maybe he completely believes that, that there is no point to kids' music.
****
This past year I've thought some about how to spread the word about great kids' music to the world at large. So I presented at the EMP Pop Conference on adult artists creating second careers in kids music, for example. And I've tossed around some other ideas.
But what if there are lots of people who ask:
"So what? Who. Cares."
It's not an unreasonable question.
We in the kids music world spend so much time talking about what we think to be good kids' music -- mostly to others in the kids' music world -- that we don't take a step back and say why it's important in the first place.
My goal here, then, is to lay out my theory of why kids' music is not only valid but important. I've borrowed a few pieces of information here and there (and I'll note those borrowings accordingly), but the theory (and its faults) are entirely my own.
If there's a band in kids music which comes anywhere close to actually considering all things, it's probably 
With Christmas rapidly approaching, I thought I would share some tips for caroling. I actually wrote much of this just after the new year, but thought that tips on getting the most out of the caroling experience with kids wouldn't be of much use in January. (Music can be an important part of celebrating Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday and Valentine's Day, but caroling... not so much.) So read on for my tips on how you and your kids can get the most out of caroling without driving you (or your kid) crazy.
I actually went caroling twice in December 2010, which proved useful as there were a number of things I learned the first time (on a Sunday morning with a church group at a nursing home) that I used the second time (on a Monday night with friends from our -- and in our -- neighborhood). It wasn't the first time I'd gone caroling -- I'd also organized our prior neighborhood caroling event a couple years ago -- but I paid much closer attention to what seemed to work well.
1) It helps to have a single sheet. Books of carols are nice, but it takes too long to find the carol you actually want to sing. That's why my carol sheet (see below) is two pages, which can be copied back-to-back on a single sheet of paper. You obviously still need to find the carols, but it's much easier scanning a single page or two.
2) You need to have (at least some) songs preschoolers can sing. This is assuming, of course, that preschoolers are part of the mix (although it can be argued that simplicity is essential, and it's not that bad of an idea to stick to the simplest of carols). That fancy carol sheet is of little use (beyond that of pride) to the preschooler who can barely recognize their own name let alone the second verse of "O Little Town of Bethlehem." Songs I'd include in this category include "Jingle Bells" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," though I'd note that even more complex carols like "Deck the Halls" offer opportunities for the youngsters (kids pick up the "Fa la la la la..." part pretty quick).
3) Have a variety, but not too much so. You need to have a variety of songs so you're not singing the same three songs at every stop. Having said that, there is some value in everyone singing the songs 2 or 3 times during the caroling session so they actually master it, and if you have 30 songs (many of which will be unfamiliar to many of the carolers), you're not going to get that value. Also, you need to include a preschooler-friendly song (see above) at every stop.
Like the picture says.
Almost all every track of 
It all started innocently enough -- someone makes a comment on Facebook about how there should totally be a kids' music Christmas compilation album. For charity, maybe. (Note: I cannot vouch for the veracity of the word "totally" in there.) Then somebody (I'm lookin' at you, 
