I've been to a lot of great concerts in my life -- Bruce Springsteen, Buddy Guy, U2. One of the key factors is the feeling that the crowd is having a shared experience -- amazement at Bruce's endurance, Guy's prowess, or U2's yearning. But that communal experience is one that ends up being focused on the performer(s) on stage (or not, as Guy ended up his concert jamming on the sidewalk in front of the Cats Cradle in Chapel Hill (back when it was in Chapel Hill) while his band played on inside).
The wonder of a Dan Zanes concert, then, is that he produces a very communal experience that isn't so focused on him. Instead, the community itself is the communal experience...
Listen To This: You Might Be Tired of Key Wilde & Mr. Clarke...
... but I'm not. The latest song from Key Wilde & Mr. Clarke tells the gently bouncy story of Sylvester the Pig. It's a fun enough song, but it's the shouted questions and comments in counterpoint that make me want to listen to the 2-minute tale over and over. Track #5, "Big Pet Pig".
By the way, it sounds like they're posting a new song every week or so, so I'll see you here next week.
Listen To This: New (Really New) Music from Mr. David
I know that Mr. David has had a new tune -- "Hey It's Lunchtime" -- available for listening or downloading on his Myspace page for awhile. It's kind of an angular post-punk tune delivered in his loose style.
That tune is growing on me, but his new single -- the title track from his upcoming Jump in the Jumpy House album (tentatively scheduled for an August release) -- is an immediately accessible and fun track.
And, courtesy of Mr. David, I'm proud to offer it to you for your own enjoyment.
Mr. David - Jump in the Jumpy House
That nifty, insistent guitar lead comes courtesy of Greg Lisher from Camper Van Beethoven. If you, or someone you know, is getting one of those bouncy houses (sorry, I call 'em "bouncy houses") for a kids' birthday party, you need to have this as the soundtrack -- nails the pogoing aspect of those things to a T.
Listen To This: 3 Rs For Recess Monkey!
Earth Day songs generally preach, and I think one thing that a lot of parents really dislike about a lot of kids' music is when that music tells listeners what to do. So, the trick in writing an Earth Day song for kids that parents will tolerate is writing a catchy tune.
Which Recess Monkey did with "3Rs for Ours," which debuted on last weekend's Spare the Rock show and is now available for listening and downloading at the band's Myspace page.
Yeah, it's April 25th, but get it now anyway. Because every day is Earth Day, right?
Review: Listen UP! - Danny Adlerman & Friends
New Jersey-based Danny Adlerman is part of the kids' music equivalent of the Rat Pack (or the Brat Pack, or the Frat Pack, depending on your generation) -- along with Kevin Kammeraad and Jim Dague of ScribbleMonster, they seem to be responsible for about 10% of the kids' music released every year, and they all seem to be on each other's albums.
Adlerman's latest contribution to the genre is the recently-released Listen UP!, and while Dague isn't here, Kevin Kammeraad and a whole host of others join in. One benefit of having such a large extended musical family is a sense of familiarity blended with a diverse set of approaches. Although the songs are typically squarely in the rock tradition (the Who-inflected "Veggie Song," for example, or the big guitar-pop of "Crooked"), the musicians also tackle a few less straightforward songs such as the call-and-response game of "Flea Fly." In either case, the band sounds great together, especially on my favorite track, the goofy wordplay of "The Dozsins."
I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention Jim Babjak from the Smithereens, who plays on the album and co-wrote 5 of the album's songs. A couple of the tracks -- "In the Future" and "Somewhere I Wonder" sound like they could have fit into a Smithereens album without much rewriting. Lyrically, those songs don't have an obvious "kids' music" stamp too them. Other songs, feature topics like eating pizza ("Too Much Pizza Blues") and the hundredth day of school (the old-timey "Hundred's Day," natch). Overall, the album is nice blend of songs targeted right at the kids and songs less age-specific.
I think the album is most appropriate for kids ages 5 through 9. You can hear samples from the 37-minute album at its CDBaby page. I hope Danny Adlerman keeps hanging out with his friends, because he's got a good thing going on musically. With a gentle sense of humor and playfulness, Listen UP! will be popular with many families looking for an album of kid-appropriate rock-n-roll. Recommended.The Stuff of Kids Music
I have, in the past, babbled on regarding the need for artists to improve their album art and overall packaging.
Why? Because unlike many other genres of music, children's music is still very much reliant on physical modes of distribution and, as a result, the physical products counts, and far more than just about any genre.
Children's music publicist/all-around-good-person Beth Blenz Clucas' recent newsletter offers the thoughts of some of her clients on this very issue. It's worth a read, and not just because it agrees with my world view. There are some very good reasons given for why actual CDs won't go away, but one of my favorite has to do with cassettes. A couple people make the comment that cassettes, which I would guess many of us haven't purchased a cassette since, oh, buying that Erasure "A Little Respect" cassingle, took forever to go away in the kids' music industry. It's a technologically lagging genre. That does not indicate the dominance of downloads any time soon.
Frankly, because the parents are buying this music, not their 3-year-olds, and because the parents who are interested in this music grew up in a time before downloading, we're still comfortable with the physical product. Don't get me wrong, we still get music from iTunes and eMusic and elsewhere, but we like the physical product, too. We like to give the physical product to friends when they're having kids, and to the kids themselves at the birthday party. Face it, it's hard to wrap a download.
I realize that eventually CDs will go away even in the kids' music genre, but it won't really start taking hold until our 6- and 10-year-olds, who will have grown up in a downloading world, become parents themselves. And even then, their parents will still give their grandkids physical CDs.
(For whatever it's worth, here are more of my thoughts on 21st century kids music.)
