Jump For Joy album cover
Today marks the release of Jump For Joy!, the 13th album for kids from Caspar Babypants, AKA Chris Ballew.
Thirteen albums for any artist is a significant achievement, but the fact that Ballew has done so in basically little more than 9 years is even more amazing.
And the fact that those 13 albums are uniformly good to great -- not a stinker among them -- is the most impressive feat of them all.
Jump For Joy! is another good Caspar Babypants album, and while I'd probably pick a different album to introduce a listener to CB (More Please! or Sing Along!, to suggest a couple), it's certainly a worthwhile spin.
I have written many words about the music of Caspar Babypants -- many, many words. Let's face it, trying to say something interesting about the latest album from some who is releasing new music every 33 or 34 weeks can get difficult. Let's just say I think that Ballew is one of the great songwriters for preschoolers of this era or any other.
So rather than going into more detail on his latest album saying, basically, "I like this -- you should try it out," I decided to put together a playlist of my favorite Caspar Babypants songs. And as I went through his albums one by one, I quickly realized that to do something like a 15- or even 30-song list wouldn't do Ballew justice.
I present to you, then, one hundred awesome Caspar Babypants songs, up to and including songs from Jump For Joy!, out today. I have not tried to organize these 100 songs into the perfect Spotify playlist -- they are simply CB songs, ordered chronologically by release date. The one exception I made was to move all the songs from Night Night!, Ballew's lullaby/nighttime album, to the very end, but even then you'll hear a few lullabies from his other works scattered throughout. (I also tried to keep the songs I picked from Winter Party!, his Christmas/holiday album, not very... Christmas-y so that it works even in the heat of late August.)
Anyway, parents, enjoy, and Chris Ballew, thanks.
