Video: "If We Were Twins" - Michal "Peanut" Karmi (World Premiere!)

Michal "Peanut" Karmi with teddy bear friend

I am a sucker for a cute video and a cute album title, which means that I'm a total sucker for "If We Were Twins," the first video from Michal "Peanut" Karmi's upcoming album.

The video features hand-drawn animation from Dominique Blöink, gentle and organic in craft, matching the song in tone.  Peanut's vocals give a slightly whimsical tone to the song and its ooh-la-la chorus, but it's also helped out no doubt due in part to Dean Jones, who produced it and the rest of the album, Peanut's third.

So what's that album title?

Ampersandwich.

I know, right?  Anyway, the album will be out later this year, but you can get a first taste, regardless of your sibling status, with this world premiere video.

Michal "Peanut" Karmi - "If We Were Twins" [YouTube]

A Decade of All Kindie Things Considered

Meltdown album cover

Exactly ten years ago today, I had what was at the time a very weird experience -- I heard my voice on the radio.  That's because my voice was hitting the airwaves as part of an interview with Melissa Block about kids music on NPR's All Things Considered.  Over the course of five minutes, Block and I chatted about Dan Zanes, Brady Rymer, Laurie Berkner, and Justin Roberts, my kids, a philosophy of kids music, with a slight diss of the Beatles -- a band I really like! -- thrown in for good measure.

The whole process actually started a couple weeks before when I received an e-mail from Block herself asking for some more information about me.  Fast forward a couple weeks, and after some discussions with Block and an NPR producer -- no doubt to make sure that I had something to say and could say it without sounding like an idiot -- I went to a local studio (not my NPR affiliate) and chatted about the various albums.  I have no memory of how long the conversation went -- I'm sure it wasn't for much more than 30 minutes -- but the next day I got an e-mail saying that they'd edited the piece together and it would be airing later that afternoon.

I don't remember if I had an actual "driveway moment" listening to that piece, I don't even remember where I heard that piece (in the car, maybe, or at home).  But I'm guessing that the piece generated quite a few driveway moments across the country, because eight months later, I found myself back on the air, talking about some more kids music.  Three more times, Block and I chatted, and then starting in 2009, I started writing and recording honest-to-goodness reviews.  My first NPR kids music review was for Lunch Money's Dizzy in 2009, and it remains one of my most favorite pieces of audio I created for ATC.

Since that review, I've done 20 more kids music pieces for ATC, featuring 24 albums.  (Oh, and a commentary on the sound of a lawnmower.  Yeah, I know!)  It has been an absolute blast writing, editing, and recording these reviews, and working with the amazing folks at NPR who, if they've ever been frustrated with my written product or slow starts in warming up my voice ("a little more Shatner"), never mentioned it to me.  I learned quite a bit about writing and editing for radio.  And of course it's been a thrill to be able to bring serious (and fun) consideration of an oft-maligned musical genre to a broad national audience.

Having said all that, the worlds of public radio, of music consumption, of music promotion -- these have all changed significantly over the past decade.  People can argue about the value of criticism, but it is hard to argue that the perceived value of criticism has faded over the past ten years.  All Things Considered has not been immune to those changes, either, and the amount of reviews they've run from any genre of music, particularly over the past six months, has dropped dramatically.  I do not think that will change significantly in the future, and so I'm not sure when I'll next appear on All Things Considered.  (If I do, I'm not sure it'll be in the standard 3:30-ish review format I've honed over the past 6-7 years.)

I would be sad about that possibility, were it not for the fact that the past decade has just been so damn fun.  I've never ever taken for granted the gift I was given with a short e-mail from an NPR host titled "Who are you?" a decade ago.  So I just think it's an appropriate time for me to say "thanks" to everyone at NPR who have let me share that gift with all the wonderful musicians I got to talk about.  I hope this piece on Jazzy Ash's Bon Voyage isn't the last piece I record or write for NPR, but if it is, I'd be cool with that.

The Imaginary Accomplishments Podcast: Todd McHatton's New Thing

Just the other day, I was talking about podcasts for kids, and noting that there wasn't enough different kinds of podcasts aimed at the pre-teen and below crowd.  A fair number of (really good) science podcasts, but stuff for younger crowds?  More comedic and fictional in nature?  Not so much.

As it turns out, kids musician Todd McHatton, who already has a ton of side projects, is adding one more project to his list, one I'm pretty excited about, not to mention explore some of the less-traveled areas of the podcast, er, space.  It's called "The Imaginary Accomplishments Podcast," and I think this image from Todd sums it all up... sort of.

OK.  Maybe it doesn't explain a lot.

So what is it really?  McHatton says that heroes above (that's monsters like Finch, Larry, and Marvy, in addition to Todd himself) will "explore the stories and accomplishments of random champions throughout the galaxy."  There will be news coverage and imaginary ad breaks, original music and humor.  He promises an "all ages, family friendly mix of The Muppets, Cheech & Chong, Monty Python, and 70s rock and roll cartoon shows."

McHatton says he's already got six episodes ready to go, so when the podcast officially launches later this month, you'll have a lot to look forward to.  (I know I am.)

Review: Explorer of the World - Frances England

Explorer of the World album cover

Frances England didn’t plan on becoming a kids musician when she made her first album more than a decade ago.  She just wanted to contribute something to her son’s preschool fundraiser, and wrote songs for a homegrown CD while supervising her son’s baths.  But that album’s popularity far surpassed the small world of that San Francisco school.  Last Friday she officially released her fifth album for families, Explorer of the World.

As the album title suggests, England is concerned with themes of exploration, observation, and investigation.  But rather than traveling long distances, she pays close attention to the world literally outside her front door -- walking her dog around her neighborhood, for example, noticing patterns and colors.  She’s inspired as much by visual artists like Wendy McNaughton and Keri Smith as by musicians, and like those artists, she encourages her listeners to pay attention to the art around them daily.

England’s music isn’t as shiny and poppy as that of her peers, but this new album is even more experimental than most kids music.  Instead of using chord progressions as the jumping-off point for songs, on some tracks she used field recordings she made walking around San Francisco.  “City Don’t Sleep,” for example, started with recordings from late-night walks along North Beach.

Co-producers Dean Jones and Dave Winer bring a lot of different perspectives in terms of the musical production, and the result is an album that vibrates as their approaches (Jones: earthy kitchen-sink sound; Winer: try-anything sonic collage and percussion) differ, but resonate with each other and with England.

I was trying to come up with the appropriate age range for the album, and while I'm going to put at ages 5 through 9, like much of England's more recent work, it's probably broader than that.  Not for toddlers, perhaps, but also for kids older than 9, if you get them to sit down and really listen.  (You can listen to this album -- along with the rest of her music -- here.)

Even though this album celebrates exploring her own backyard, Frances England is more interested in the process of keeping her eyes open to the world around her.  In discovering her own neighborhood, she reminds the rest of us that we can do the same with our own streets and sidewalks.  Highly recommended.

Podcasts for Kids

"Why aren't there more podcasts for kids?" is a question that to my ears sounds like a close cousin to questions in the kids music world -- "Why isn't kids music as popular as children's books?" or "Why don't more people know about all this great music?"

It's a question that's been getting some attention recently.  This morning, The Atlantic's website published "Why Aren't There More Podcasts for Kids?," an attempt to answer that question.  The piece echoes a lot of the discussion that Nicholas Quah tackled several weeks ago for his essential weekly newsletter Hot Pod.  (Yes, you should totally sign up for the free newsletter.)  Quah's piece, in turn, was inspired by articles that podcast producer Lindsay Patterson (more on her in a minute) wrote asking that question for Current.  (She expanded a bit in a piece on Medium.)

No, I'm not going to make you read all those links, though if you'd like to -- original source material being important for some of us -- please be my guest.

And before I go any further, let me just say that if you found this piece because you're looking for recommendations for podcasts for kids and don't care about the existential issues facing this category of audio entertainment, go to the very end of this piece, and I'll give you several recommendations [Edited to add: and a link to a (reasonably) complete list of podcasts for kids].

Basically, the theories outlined in articles thus far come down to these two following:

1) Lack of historical precedent: Patterson, in particular, subscribes to this theory -- as a relatively new format in which to present entertainment, there haven't been many examples of podcasts for kids.  Perhaps this is because podcast makers started off making podcasts for others like themselves, and since relatively few 7-year-olds had microphones and editing software, there weren't many podcasts for kids

2) Sponsorship issues: I think Quah gravitated more to this explanation, proffered by Guy Raz, he of NPR and Mindy Thomas' best bud on SiriusXM's Kids Place Live Breakfast Blast Newscast.  How do you convince sponsors to underwrite programs for shows when parents might feel a bit queasy about advertising?  Where is the value for underwriters in that equation?  And if you have a reluctance to invest in advertising, that's going to make it difficult for producers -- individuals or institution -- to invest the time and money to produce a high quality podcast.  (Until kids start demanding to run Squarespace sites or send MailChimp newsletters.  Then all those problems are solved.)

Quah and I exchanged a couple e-mails on the topic when he first broached it a few weeks back, and at the time I thought that both explanations had merit.  I also thought that it'd be interesting to see whether the moves toward acquiring kids' content by entities like Netflix and Amazon would be duplicated in the on-demand audio field -- will Spotify, Audible, and Rhapsody get into the game beyond music?  Are parents going to prefer their podcasts sponsored or paid upfront, buffet-style?  (Notable for being left unstated in all these discussions, nobody's considering whether parents will want to simply purchase individual or season episodes of a podcast.)

But as I've thought about it further, I'm more convinced that something that's been touched on briefly, particularly by Patterson, is just as important, and that's how [expletive] hard it is to find good, new podcasts for kids.

3) Discovery issues: This is not a problem just for podcasts for kids, but I think the relatively small universe of quality kids' shows makes the problem that much worse.  Let's start with the worst offender: the iTunes Kids and Family podcast chart.  Imagine, if you will, that the iTunes music charts folded all songs about kids and families into the iTunes Kids and Family music chart, thereby including, perhaps Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle" and Lukas Graham's "7 Years."  That would be pretty silly, right?  But that's exactly what the podcast chart reflects -- by my count, of the top 30 podcasts in that list as I'm checking on it, 20 are targeted specifically at the parents and not for the kids.  It's not like the ratio seems to get much better as you roll down the next 170 podcasts in the chart.  (Waves hi to friends of Zoogloble fighting the good fight Spare the Rock Spoil the Child and Saturday Morning Cereal Bowl.)

What are the other ten podcasts specifically for kids in the top 30?  One Taylor Swift podcast, a Sesame Street video podcast, a Nickelodeon video podcast, and 3 story podcasts.  That leaves 4 podcasts in the top 30 that are full-fledged audio productions that don't echo something you (or your kid) might find elsewhere: a Focus on the Family-produced podcast that "combines the faith lessons parents appreciate with characters and stories that kids love!," something from the Story Pirates, and 2 science podcasts: Lindsay Patterson's podcast Tumble, produced with her husband Marshall Escamilla, and Brains On!, the brainchild of 3 public radio producers and released via NPR.

Compare that list with other top-podcast charts in iTunes for other genres, which are filled with podcasts I've heard of (and, in some cases, actually heard) and it's clear that people are doing a terrible job finding and spreading the word about good podcasts for kids.  And it's not like there are other sources filling the gap.  NPR?  Their NPR podcast list suffers from the same definitional issue iTunes has, with only Brains On! being specifically for kids, and their fancy earbud.fm podcast recommender doesn't even have a kids and family subcategory.  Googling "best podcasts for kids" yields a dispiriting short list of lists, and a dispiriting number of distinct, made-for-kids podcasts on those lists.  Patterson's newsletter for Tumble does occasionally feature podcast recommendations for kids, but it's fairly new.

There could be more great podcasts for kids and kids and families (two separate categories) out there, but it's incredibly difficult to find them.  And without the critical mass that might propel them into slightly broader consciousness -- only the top 4 in the Kids and Family charts place in the top 200 of all podcasts at the moment -- it's going to be hard to get more folks to think of "kids podcasts" as a thing, as something to recommend to families and as something to think about creating.

Thinking of "kids _____" as a thing is one of those concepts that kids music as a genre struggled with for a long time.  Ten years ago, when there was a wave of attention to the artists who started around the turn of the century -- Dan Zanes, Laurie Berkner, Justin Roberts -- it seemed like not a week would go by without a newspaper article introducing the genre as if somebody would say, "Did you know there are people who make music for kids?  And it's good?"

Thankfully, kids music is mostly beyond that, even if the genre hasn't fully punched through to the national consciousness in the way that the general public accepts without question the existence and usefulness of books and TV made for kids.  Podcasts for kids are at an earlier development stage.

4) Podcasting tools: Again, this is not a problem limited to podcasts for kids, but I think that the target audience for kids podcasts suffers this problem even more.  It is not necessarily easy for adults to figure out how to listen to podcasts or any on-demand (non-music) audio in the way that adults know how to find TV or books.  (I know -- this is not news to anyone.)  That obviously puts some pressure on the parents who are looking for something to listen to with their preschooler as they're driving around town.  But presumably a parent who's interested in podcasts for kids knows how to get podcasts generally, so this is no greater technological problem for this genre than for podcasting generally.

Imagine how hard it would be for an 8-year-old, though.  The 8-year-old probably doesn't have their own iPhone, but if they did (or their own iPod touch, etc.), no doubt their parents don't want to be constantly checking different websites or podcatchers to try to find a podcast for their kid.  And the kid, who wants some degree of autonomy, particularly as they reach double-digits, age-wise, may not get that autonomy.  It's the walled garden problem of video -- I've seen plenty of startups attempt to create a safe kids-only video area, but I'm not sure that any of them have been fully successful, or at the very least, none that don't have some tie to a broader entity (a "Nick" app or Netflix's and Amazon Instant Video's kids' sections, for example).

Beyond these other problems, I'm not sure that there's enough variety in kids podcasting.  As I read these kids-podcasting articles, I kept thinking about Ear Snacks, a delightfully loopy series of shows from kids musicians Andrew & Polly.  Sure, there are the occasional science-based conversations, but it is the closest thing I know of to a half-absurdist podcast for kids.  And it's totally unique.

Where are the kids comedy podcasts?  Why in the world don't The Listies have a podcast?  Why in the world isn't (wasn't) there a Chicken Weebus podcast?  Where are the actual kid-friendly radio hours like the Radio Adventures of Doctor Floyd?  (There are good, specific reasons for those, to be sure, but those are examples.)

Having said all that, I've written a lot here, and I should really press "Publish" on this piece and get into the world.  Two additional thoughts:

1) Once kids music became a "thing" again, there were a lot of folks who got into the genre who made music that was, well, not very good.  Assuming that kids podcasts take the same route, we may see a bunch of crappy podcasts for kids over the next few years (along with a bunch of really good podcasts).  That's why discovery tools are going to be so important -- nobody wants to hear their first podcast for kids and have it be a boring guy droning into a microphone or conversing with middling audio quality over Skype.  (I have experience producing some of those myself.)  One of the difficult things musicians have to learn is that not everybody is good singing songs for kids, and I have no doubt that some podcasters will learn for themselves that they're not very good making stories for kids.

2) These days, recorded music is mostly the calling card to get fans interested in seeing live music or supporting the musician in some other way.  Musicians are, generally, not pleased with this development, but I don't think Spotify or Pandora or Rhapsody et al. are going away.  Podcasts are even more isolated.  So if I have one piece of advice for kids podcast makers is that you have to get out in the world and do live shows.  Other podcasts for adults have done this - Radiolab, Pop Culture Happy Hour, Song Exploder, the list is long - but it's time that kids podcasts enter the fray.

If you've read this far, thanks.  Really.  If you have any thoughts or responses, please please please offer them below or send me an e-mail.  I'm intending to keep listening to podcasts for kids and continue to think about the kids' media space and would love to hear other perspectives.

---

So, as promised, let's end these rambling thoughts with a list of recommended podcasts for kids.  I'm excluding podcasts that may have some interest for those listeners who don't yet have their drivers' license or who may even be in elementary school -- certainly Welcome To Night Vale, Radiolab, This American Life, and 99% Invisible all could attract the interest of a certain (brainy) youthful audience.  But they're not made with kids in mind.  These are.  Also, I've excluded items you can't find via iTunes' podcast link.  I know that the on-demand world is a big one -- you can listen to those Guy Raz Breakfast Blasts, for example, via the Soundcloud website (and presumably their app).  But that seems like an awful lot of work, and, as should be fairly obvious, making it even more work is not what we're going for.

[Edited to add: Now I've gone ahead and compiled a long list of podcasts for kids.  Feel free to start with the ones listed below, then explore further!]

Anyway, if you've got more suggestions, please leave 'em in the comments, or send me a direct e-mail -- I'm always happy to expand this podcast world a little wider...

Brains On! and Tumble: It doesn't feel quite right combining two podcasts together, but the truth is they're both science podcasts that take kids' questions about science and get kids to answer them.  They're both very good, so if you're looking for science-based podcasts, particularly for older elementary school students, try 'em both.  My sense is that Tumble is the slightly more informal-sounding, the Radiolab to Brains On!'s This American Life, but, like I said, try 'em both. (Also note: I threw in a token donation to Brains On!'s recent Kickstarter campaign, which had more than 1,000 supporters.)

Ear Snacks: this, by the way, is excellent for preschool listeners, an area served very well by kids music but very poorly by kids podcasting.

Short & Curly: ethics for kids, a description which sounds like it could be bland or didactic (or worse: both), but which this new podcast from the Australian Broadcasting Company, makes fairly entertaining and not didactic at all.  Appropriate for elementary schoolers of all ages.

The Radio Adventures of Doctor Floyd: Like those radio serial adventures of yore, these are entertaining, pun-filled, and with a bunch of funny voices.  Think of it as The Thrilling Adventure Hour but targeted at 8-year-olds and without the in-joke learning curve that made (to me, at least) Thrilling too much of an effort.

Music discovery: Spare the Rock Spoil the Child, Saturday Morning Cereal Bowl, OWTK Kid's Music Monthly: Regular readers don't need any introduction to these podcasts, but if you're looking for the kids music equivalent of the indie-attitude podcasts plugged here, these will fit right in.

Video: "Astronauts Love" - Jumpin' Jamie (with Danny Weinkauf)

So here's a song (and video) born out of Kindiecomm, the annual gathering of kids' music artists in Philadelphia.

Last year, Jamie Theurich, AKA Jumpin' Jamie, met Danny Weinkauf, bassist for They Might Be Giants and occasional kids musician in his own right, at Kindiecomm. Weinkauf agreed to produce Theurich's first single, which ended up being "Astronauts Love," a look at all of the things (maybe besides space) that astronauts love.  It's got an angular pop melody reminiscent of early Elvis Costello, with a la-la-la chorus -- Weinkauf on the instruments, Theurich on lead vocals -- it's a charming slice of kindie pop-rock.

For the video, Theurich recruited French animator Marie Chatelot, who threw in references to the band Weezer (both Theurich and Chatelot are big fans) and a certain little OK Go video you may be familiar with as part of her puppet animation, just as charming as the song itself.

In any case, seeing as Kindiecomm 2016 kicks off today, this seems like the perfect time to release the single and its video, no?

Jumpin' Jamie (with Danny Weinkauf) - "Astronauts Love" [YouTube]