A lot of kindie musicians dream of creating their own TV shows.
Most of the rest of them want to become authors.
That works out to varying degrees, of course. Chris Ballew, AKA Caspar Babypants, in addition to being a talented musician (and visual artist), has the good fortune to be married to artist Kate Endle. Togther they have combined to produce two lovely books -- Bunny Rabbit in the Sunlight and My Woodland Wish -- which parents (or kids) wholly unfamiliar with Caspar Babypants or Chris Ballew would be happy to have on the shelf.
In fact, these books owe the majority of their charm not to the words but to Endle's cut-paper artwork, which is simply beautiful. It's a collage but with everything meticulously planned and put just in the right place. (Take a look at that cover -- you'd think that it was entirely hand-drawn until you look closely at those bushes.) Both books are nature-based -- Bunny Rabbit presents a series of animals in different light settngs while My Woodland Wish is an ever-so-slightly more narratively-driven book that follows a girl spying on (and interacting with) various woodland creatures. The books are cute, but not too much so -- they don't over-anthropomorphize the animals (or give them eyes waaaaay out of proportional to the rest of their bodies).
The words/lyrics to the books (created by Ballew alone in the case of Bunny Rabbit; the two of them together for My Woodland Wish) aren't bad, they're just not what keeps me returning to the books. Ballew created Caspar Babypants melodies for the words, and while they don't have the zippy energy that I personally enjoy most about CB songs (nor should they given the subject matter), they definitely create a sense of dream-like wonder like many of his other songs do.
Caspar Babypants - "Bunny Rabbit in the Sunlight" (book preview) [YouTube]
(The video book preview for the other book is at the end of this review.)
The board book Bunny Rabbit in the Sunlight is most appropriate for kids ages 2 through 5; the picture book My Woodland Wish is more appropriate for ages 3 through 7. You can download both books' tracks here.
I should also note that this is not a typical self-published book, which in my experience can look kinda cheap when you hold it in your hand. These are both releases of Sasquatch Books, a regional publisher distributed by Random House; they both look and feel gorgeous and solidly made. You can find the books, therefore, all over the internet (and maybe even your local bookseller); Endle also sells them at her Etsy store.
I've been almost a little scared as to how easily Ballew has made the transition to part-time (bordering on full-time) family musician. There's not a single dud in his Caspar Babypants CD canon, and now he's helped create two wonderful kids' books with Endle. (A third, Augie to Zebra, is due out in May 2012.) Given their success with books, perhaps they should think about TV... Definitely recommended.
Disclosure: I received copies of these two books for possible review.
Laurie Berkner is without a doubt the brightest female star in kids music (and quite possibly the biggest star, period), so I've been surprised that there haven't been more artists who've attempted to follow in her footsteps. There are obviously lots of successful female artists, for the most part, however, artists like Elizabeth Mitchell, Frances England, Molly Ledford, and Ashley Albert have taken different paths than Berkner's taken, that of melding bright pop takes on traditonal kids' music with catchy new melodies.
But if your family enjoys Berkner and would like to know if there's more where that came from, the answer is, yes, indeed, as Charlie Hope and Laura Doherty are two of the best artists making music for the preschoolers in your life.
Songs, Stories and Friends: Let's Go Play!, Hope's third album for families, mixes traditional tunes ("Wheels on the Bus," "Ants Go Marching," "Robin in the Rain") with some of the shiniest pop tunes you'll hear this year. "Best Friends" and "One That I Love" are sparkly and joyful, with Hope's bright, clear voice carrying the tune. Caspar Babypants repays the favor of Hope dueting on his recent album by helping out with "Alouette," while Hope's mom tells the story of "The Bear Family." Perhaps the best track might be the kicky "What I Like To Do," which uses kids' voices to great effect as individual kids sing about what they like to do, punctuated at the end with Hope singing "What I like to do / is sing songs for kids."
There's little to dislike about the album, though it sounds to me like Hope's voice gets auto-tuned a bit, not like Cher in "Believe," but just slightly more than I like to hear (and Hope probably needs). Aside from that personal bugaboo, I like the album a lot. It's 45 minutes long, targeted at kids ages 2 through 5.
On her second album Shining Like a Star, Laura Doherty plumbs a slightly less traditional, slightly less pop-py line than Hope, with such as with the wurlitzer-like keyboard on "Rocket Ship," the country/western-dusted "Quiet as a Mouse," or the circus organ on "Ferris Wheel." Like Hope, Doherty's blessed with a clear voice that elevates the material -- her samba take on the Joe Raposo classic "Sing" is excellent.
Targeted at kids ages 2 through 6, the songs on 33-minute album are very preschool-subject-focused ("Hula Hoop" is about, you guessed it, hula hooping), which may eventually limit the number of times you can handle hearing Shining Like a Star with your kids, but it'll take you longer than with most albums to reach that point. That even happens with Laurie Berkner albums eventually.
Even though they remind me (in a good way) somewhat of Laurie Berkner, Charlie Hope and Laura Doherty are charting their own course in the kids music world. Even if they never reach the heights of popular success Berkner has, on their latest albums, both artists show off their talents in a way suggesting they, too, may be around for years to come. Recommended.
What's that? Another month has gone by? Then it's time again for an updated list of new and upcoming releases. (Last month's list is here.) Additions to the list are noted with a "++"; changes to previously-mentioned items are indicated with italics.
As always, if I've listed you on here and gotten something wrong (or something not ready for primetime), let me know and I'll edit or delete it. And if you're not on here and think you should be, drop me a line, too, and I'll get you added for the next iteration.
Chip Taylor & the Grandkids: Golden Kids Rules (Oct. 18) [next family release from Smithsonian Folkways]
++ Slugs & Bugs: Title TBA (Oct. 25)
Recess Music (Various Artists): U R Some 1 (mid-October)
The Secret Mountain: Songs from the Baobob (October)
The Ohmies: Morning Wish Garden (October) [prodced by Tor Hyams]
Jim Gill: Music Play for Kids of All Stripes (October)
DidiPop: Everyday Adventures (Nov. 1)
The Deedle Deedle Dees: Strange Dees, Indeed (Nov. 1)
Laura Veirs: Tumble Bee: Laura Veirs Sings Folk Songs for Children (Nov. 8)
Coal Train Railroad: Coal Train Railroad Swings! (late November 2011)
Central Services Board of Education: Binary [tentative] (fall)
Suzi Shelton: Title TBA (fall)
++ The Good Ms. Padgett: ... Tells The Little Red Hen and Other Stories (fall)
++ RhymeZwell: Robots on the Dance Floor (fall)
++ Big Don: Big Don's Brand New Beat (fall)
++ Renee & Jeremy: Title TBA (holiday singles, due fall/holidays)
Maestro Classics: The Soldier’s Tale (Dec. 1)
Riff Rockit: Title TBA (CD, DVD, January 2012)
Randy Kaplan: Mr. Diddie Wah Diddie (2012)
++ Mo Phillips: Title TBA (March 12, 2012)
++ Gustafer Yellowgold: Gustafer Yellowgold’s Year in The Day (April 3, 2012)
++ Orange Sherbet: Delicious (May 1, 2012)
Hope Harris: Picasso, That's Who (spring 2012)
The Dirty Sock Funtime Band: Dirty Socks Come Clean (June 2012)Andy Z: The Grand Scream of Things (Halloween 2012) [produced by Tor Hyams]
Other 2011/2012 albums: Ah-Choo, Peter Apel, Funky Mamas, Ratboy, Jr., Sugar Free Allstars ++, Renee & Jeremy ++, Farmer Jason duets album ++, The Bramble Jam ++, Secret Agent 23 Skidoo (Make Believers ++). Also, Rockabye Baby for Van Halen, The Police, Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Time for the Ketchup Report, kids' music favorite collection of news bits and videos I couldn't figure out how to write about on its own or didn't have the time to do so! (Yay, adequacy!) But I feel confident that at least one of these items will be of note to you...
Tomorrow, Todd McHatton will be guest-hosting Spare the Rock, Spoil the Child, which, well, y'know, wouldn't be something I'd normally note. But in honor of the guest spot, McHatton's also donating 100% of profits raised this week from his new album Galactic Champions of Joy to the Haitian People's Support Project, the beneficiary of Spare the Rock Records' excellent Many Hands: Family Music for Haiti compilation. Go here, name your price (at least a buck), and get a download of the album and benefit a worthy charity. The offer ends tomorrow, October 8th. So tarry not.
-- Jim "Mr. Stinky Feet" Cosgrove has done the crowd-funding thing, now he's doing the crowd-sourcing thing, looking for fans to produce his next video. He's encouraging everyone -- including families -- to give it a shot for one of four songs from his most recent album Swimming in Noodles. And in addition to "fame, glory, [and] warm-fuzzy feelings," Cosgrove is also offering cash prizes for the top three videos. Finished videos are due November 14th. All the details are at the link above.
A video and a very long-form video after the jump...
There is just barely enough kids' music in the United Kingdom that reaches North America for me to note how little kids' music there is in the United Kingdom whenever I review an album from across the pond. But the genre there is maturing a little bit, as evidenced by the number of albums released by artists best known for playing for adults. Two of the most recent come from Mick Cooke -- best known as a member of the band Belle and Sebastian, but a composer and arranger for film and TV as well -- and Nick Cope of the now-dormant band the Britpop band Candyskins.
Cooke's album Down at the Zoo sounds very much like a soundtrack to an animated children's TV special about, well, a zoo with anthropomorphically familar residents. It's an extension of "The Monkeys Are Breaking Out the Zoo," Belle and Sebastian's contribution to Colours Are Brighter, the kids-comp Cooke put together a few years back. On that song (also here), the monkeys scamper ouf of the zoo, while the peacock sings "Pay attention to me / pay attention to me" ("The Peacock Strut") and the penguins goof off playing Dixieland jazz ("Playtime for the Penguins"). They're character sketches primarily, with a mix of simply-arranged pop styles that don't step much into rock territory, though the tracks that do -- "We Are the Tigers" and the especially awesome "The Crocodile Synchronised Swimming Team" -- are among the best. But the 32-minute album (listen to a couple tracks and hear more about the recording here) probably won't satisfy fans of Colours Are Brighter hoping for yet another, more muscular collection of rockers recorded for adults as much as kids.
As gentle as Cooke's album is, Cope's is even more delicate. My Socks is his second album for families, following up last year's What Colour Is Your T Shirt?, and it features hummable acoustic chamber-pop tunes about very preschool-ish issues. The title track is an unambiguous and unironic celebration of, well, socks. Other songs deal with going to the grocery store ("The Very Long Shopping List", which could be a long-lost Burt Bacharach track), bubble baths ("Pour in the Bubbles"), and manners ("Thankyou"). It's mostly mellow mid-tempo stuff about familiar concerns, which makes a song like the peppy "There's a Bear" (most preschoolers having not seen "a bear / over there") stand out even more. It's a good album for a rainy day.
Despite their UK origins, both albums are available Stateside (via iTunes and other outlets). Parents who pick up Down at the Zoo or My Socks in hopes of finding a string of pop gems that they will listen to without reserve when their kids are out of the room or the car will be disappointed -- these albums' target audience is unambiguously the preschoolers. But just as it's important sometimes to listen to your own stuff and not have kids music totally take over your stereo or iPod, it's important that preschoolers occasionally get music recorded without hesitation for them. And I'd recommend crafted-with-care-and-purpose albums like these two above most mass-produced TV tie-in stuff for this age. Here's hoping they encourage more folks to join 'em.
Disclosure: I received copies of the albums for possible review.
As I sat amongst roughly 49,000 other fans last night at Chase Field watching the hometown Arizona Diamondbacks thoroughly dominate the Milwaukee Brewers 8-1 to force their playoff series to a Game Four, it occurred to me that there are two places where praying publicly is tolerated or even expected -- church and your local sporting stadium ("oh please, oh please, turn the double play").
I'm not sure there's a direct connection, but those are the two places where you can expect to hear group singing on a regular basis.
In the Christian church, regardless of whether you're singing Ralph Vaughan Williams or some modern praise song, there will likely be at least a couple points where your vocal participation is encouraged. And every sporting event will start out with the national anthem (two, at most hockey games), with sing-song chants (or actual songs) used to varying degrees in different stadia and sports.
I have long sung the praises (so to speak) of singing in groups. Bill Harley suggests that "singing is an expression and fostering of community." In that regard, it's not that surprising that religion and sports -- two realms in which community is an essential component of participation and enjoyment -- still turn to communal singing as ways of bringing and keeping its attendees in the fold. Singing those centuries-old hymns that I may never have heard before but sound so familiar anyway -- that's one of the things I most enjoy about church.
And sports? I suspect that one of the reasons I have little taste for pro basketball (and to a lesser extent pro football and hockey) is that after the national anthem, the crowd is mostly silent, relentlessly pummeled by a sound system cranked up to loud volumes in order to generate a simulacrum of energy. College sports (at least when and where I went to school) generally had more crowd participation, at least in certain sections, as the cheers and songs were crowd-driven -- between the fight songs and the bands playing the same dozen or so popular songs game in, game out, I did a fair amount of singing on fall Saturday afternoons and winter Wednesday evenings.
Two of my favorite sports -- baseball and soccer -- may just be the biggest encouragers of song and chant in the sporting world. Soccer matches around the globe have songs and chants echoing through the stands for the entire game. And in baseball, besides the chants which seem every bit as important to some kids' rhythmic development as patty-cake ("here we go, D-Backs, here we go!") and which occur more often, it seems, than at other professional sporting events, we have at least one other song where it's exepcted that everyone sings. Even better, "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" is sung across Major League Baseball, so even if you're visiting another stadium you're guaranteed to be able to sing it. (And now you often get "God Bless America" thrown into the mix, a song which, regardless of your take on God's blessing of America, does have a pretty cool melodic line and is quite fun to sing.)
I'm not going to suggest that you take your kids to church -- no way am I stepping into that discussion -- but I am going to suggest that you take your kids to a baseball game for their musical development. I don't know if Bill Harley would agree, but I'm willing to bet he's a baseball fan...
A lot of kindie musicians dream of creating their own TV shows.
Most of the rest of them want to become authors.
That works out to varying degrees, of course. Chris Ballew, AKA Caspar Babypants, in addition to being a talented musician (and visual artist), has the good fortune to be married to artist Kate Endle. Togther they have combined to produce two lovely books -- Bunny Rabbit in the Sunlight and My Woodland Wish -- which parents (or kids) wholly unfamiliar with Caspar Babypants or Chris Ballew would be happy to have on the shelf.
In fact, these books owe the majority of their charm not to the words but to Endle's cut-paper artwork, which is simply beautiful. It's a collage but with everything meticulously planned and put just in the right place. (Take a look at that cover -- you'd think that it was entirely hand-drawn until you look closely at those bushes.) Both books are nature-based -- Bunny Rabbit presents a series of animals in different light settngs while My Woodland Wish is an ever-so-slightly more narratively-driven book that follows a girl spying on (and interacting with) various woodland creatures. The books are cute, but not too much so -- they don't over-anthropomorphize the animals (or give them eyes waaaaay out of proportional to the rest of their bodies).
The words/lyrics to the books (created by Ballew alone in the case of Bunny Rabbit; the two of them together for My Woodland Wish) aren't bad, they're just not what keeps me returning to the books. Ballew created Caspar Babypants melodies for the words, and while they don't have the zippy energy that I personally enjoy most about CB songs (nor should they given the subject matter), they definitely create a sense of dream-like wonder like many of his other songs do.
Caspar Babypants - "Bunny Rabbit in the Sunlight" (book preview) [YouTube]
(The video book preview for the other book is at the end of this review.)
The board book Bunny Rabbit in the Sunlight is most appropriate for kids ages 2 through 5; the picture book My Woodland Wish is more appropriate for ages 3 through 7. You can download both books' tracks here.
I should also note that this is not a typical self-published book, which in my experience can look kinda cheap when you hold it in your hand. These are both releases of Sasquatch Books, a regional publisher distributed by Random House; they both look and feel gorgeous and solidly made. You can find the books, therefore, all over the internet (and maybe even your local bookseller); Endle also sells them at her Etsy store.
I've been almost a little scared as to how easily Ballew has made the transition to part-time (bordering on full-time) family musician. There's not a single dud in his Caspar Babypants CD canon, and now he's helped create two wonderful kids' books with Endle. (A third, Augie to Zebra, is due out in May 2012.) Given their success with books, perhaps they should think about TV... Definitely recommended.
Disclosure: I received copies of these two books for possible review.
Laurie Berkner is without a doubt the brightest female star in kids music (and quite possibly the biggest star, period), so I've been surprised that there haven't been more artists who've attempted to follow in her footsteps. There are obviously lots of successful female artists, for the most part, however, artists like Elizabeth Mitchell, Frances England, Molly Ledford, and Ashley Albert have taken different paths than Berkner's taken, that of melding bright pop takes on traditonal kids' music with catchy new melodies.
But if your family enjoys Berkner and would like to know if there's more where that came from, the answer is, yes, indeed, as 
On her second album Shining Like a Star, Laura Doherty plumbs a slightly less traditional, slightly less pop-py line than Hope, with such as with the wurlitzer-like keyboard on "Rocket Ship," the country/western-dusted "Quiet as a Mouse," or the circus organ on "Ferris Wheel." Like Hope, Doherty's blessed with a clear voice that elevates the material -- her samba take on the Joe Raposo classic "Sing" is excellent.
Targeted at kids ages 2 through 6, the songs on 33-minute album are very preschool-subject-focused ("Hula Hoop" is about, you guessed it, hula hooping), which may eventually limit the number of times you can handle hearing Shining Like a Star with your kids, but it'll take you longer than with most albums to reach that point. That even happens with Laurie Berkner albums eventually.
Even though they remind me (in a good way) somewhat of Laurie Berkner, Charlie Hope and Laura Doherty are charting their own course in the kids music world. Even if they never reach the heights of popular success Berkner has, on their latest albums, both artists show off their talents in a way suggesting they, too, may be around for years to come. Recommended.
Tomorrow, 
There is just barely enough kids' music in the United Kingdom that reaches North America for me to note how little kids' music there is in the United Kingdom whenever I review an album from across the pond. But the genre there is maturing a little bit, as evidenced by the number of albums released by artists best known for playing for adults. Two of the most recent come from 
As gentle as Cooke's album is, Cope's is even more delicate. My Socks is his second album for families, following up last year's What Colour Is Your T Shirt?, and it features hummable acoustic chamber-pop tunes about very preschool-ish issues. The title track is an unambiguous and unironic celebration of, well, socks. Other songs deal with going to the grocery store ("The Very Long Shopping List", which could be a long-lost Burt Bacharach track), bubble baths ("Pour in the Bubbles"), and manners ("Thankyou"). It's mostly mellow mid-tempo stuff about familiar concerns, which makes a song like the peppy "There's a Bear" (most preschoolers having not seen "a bear / over there") stand out even more. It's a good album for a rainy day.
Despite their UK origins, both albums are available Stateside (via iTunes and other outlets). Parents who pick up Down at the Zoo or My Socks in hopes of finding a string of pop gems that they will listen to without reserve when their kids are out of the room or the car will be disappointed -- these albums' target audience is unambiguously the preschoolers. But just as it's important sometimes to listen to your own stuff and not have kids music totally take over your stereo or iPod, it's important that preschoolers occasionally get music recorded without hesitation for them. And I'd recommend crafted-with-care-and-purpose albums like these two above most mass-produced TV tie-in stuff for this age. Here's hoping they encourage more folks to join 'em.
Disclosure: I received copies of the albums for possible review.
As I sat amongst roughly 49,000 other fans last night at Chase Field watching the hometown 
