(Kids) Musicians Who Need (Kids) Musicians: Booking Agents

In this episode of our sporadically popular "Readers Who Need Readers" series, I'm reprinting a portion of a recent e-mail from a kids musician who shall remain nameless...
Well, Stefan, how come I can't find a professional booking agent? Apparently I am at this weird professional juncture where I am now earning a healthy living and too busy and successful with shows and production projects to have any more time to actively BOOK my own shows (that seems good), but NOT quite successful enough to attract a professional booking agent (that seems bad). So apparently I am not such The Man after all. Admittedly, the extent of my booking agent search was to send a single unsolicited e-mail to nine booking agents I found online who represent other family musicians (and it was actually even hard to find NINE real agents in this business...), but thus far my "Yes, I would love to book [X]" response rate of precisely 0% is rather uninspiring... If you have any pearls of wisdom from your experience in this business... BRING IT ON PLEASE!
Well, my specific pearls of wisdom (such as they were, and hardly meriting the all-caps of "BRING IT ON") would tip off who the artist is, but I'm opening this up to other artists out there. Thoughts about ways to find a booking agent? A booking agent you'd recommend? This does strike me as a trickier genre for booking than traditional rock music, a niche, no doubt. And don't forget about Kindiefest.com -- there's another community that may be of help. (But entering responses here will also help folks who come searching for this info in months and years to come...)

Hopefully This Contest Will Cause You No Frustration

For those of you heading back to school with your elementary school young'uns, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer have a contest to get their (and your) rhyming skills back into shape. They've got a contest to write new lyrics for their song "Jubiliation" from the Banjo to Beatbox EP with Christylez Bacon. If you read the lyrics to the song, I think it's pretty obvious what they're looking for. Details are at the link above, but the top 5 winners get a free Cathy & Marcy CD of their choice plus a washboard. Entries due Sept. 30th. Now... is Zooglobblation a word? Anyway, to get you in the mood, here's a mood for the song featuring lots of puppetation. Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer with Christylez Bacon - "Jubilation"

Video: Behind the Scenes of TMBG's "Electric Car"

I already highlighted They Might Be Giants' "Electric Car" video (not to mention the mp3). Now here's a behind-the-scenes look which, yeah, is typical "behind-the-scenes" fluff that looks good but doesn't tell you very much except the video must've been a lot of work. (Scissors, people - scissors!) But it's really good fluff, just as beautiful as the video it's promoting. (And it's not actually on the Here Comes Science DVD.) Watch it here. Update: the video's now posted to YouTube...

Review in Brief: Greasy Kid Stuff 3: Even More Songs From Inside the Radio - Various Artists

GreasyKidStuff3.jpgWhere would kids music be without Belinda Miller and Hova Najarian, the hosts of the Greasy Kid Stuff radio show? Oh, sure, the greater arc of kids music would be unchanged -- Laurie Berkner, Ralph's World, Justin Roberts, Dan Zanes -- those folks would still be popular had Greasy Kid Stuff not aired starting in 1995. Belinda and Hova were never against mainstream "kids music" -- they just didn't have as much interest in it. By not making those artists the focus of their show, what they've done is expand (or re-expand) the notion of what music for kids might mean. Greasy Kid Stuff 3: Even More Songs From Inside the Radio, just like its predecessor volumes 1 and 2 (review here) successfully mixes the rock with the silly, the (semi-)famous with the obscure, and produces another near-perfect mixtape. Just take the first three songs -- a theme song from fans They Might Be Giants to the incredible (and incredibly wordy) track from the late Logan Whitehurst "Happy Noodle vs. Sad Noodle" to Bubble's slightly off-kilter cover of "Pure Imagination." And so on. I hesitate to recommend specific songs because then you'll just go and download the best ones, and to appreciate what they're doing here you should listen to the whole thing. Really, I never would have thought that a cover (with new lyrics) of Burt Bacharach's theme for The Blob would make a good kids song, and I would've been totally wrong, because Guy Klucevsek's accordion-fueled version is perfect. Kids ages 4 through 10 (and really, a lot older) will appreciate the songs here. You can listen to samples from the 32-minute album here. If anything has changed in the five years since the last compilation came out it's that a lot more people are making more idiosyncratic kids music. So while you have a repeat appearance from TMBG, you also have Captain Bogg & Salty and Key Wilde & Mr. Clarke making appearances as do John Upchurch and Mark Greenberg, creators of the great John and Mark's Children's Album, albeit in their format guise as members of The Coctails. If Belinda and Hova are playing more "kids music" on their radio show these days, it's in part because kids music has moved in their direction. Greasy Kid Stuff 3 is a small sliver of this vibrant genre with a lot of other fun songs mixed in. Recommended.