Video: "HBD, Dude!" - Mista Cookie Jar & the Chocolate Chips (World Premiere)

Southern California's Mista Cookie Jar is testing my hyphenating abilities.  His blend of hip-hop, soul sounds, Motown riffs, California vibes, and whatever else he throws in the mix can be too much for the English language too handle.

For his latest track, "HBD, Dude!," MCJ and his Chocolate Chips mix a surf-rock guitar track and some flowing verses that include the word "hashtag" to produce a very 21st-century celebration of someone's birthday.  (You can buy the track via that link above, or iTunes and CD Baby as well...)

For the video, which I'm world-premiering here today, Mista Cookie Jar can't be contained to a single POV, either.  He takes Beach Blanket Bingo-era footage, hand-animates it a bit, and throws in a nice Facebook/Instagram reference or three.  Throw in some kids eating cake and surf-dancing, and you've got yourself a party.

I'm going with "surf-hop."

Mista Cookie Jar and the Chocolate Chips - "HBD, Dude!" [YouTube]

Interview Sandra Velasquez (Moona Luna)

Up above in the title for this interview, I've written "Moona Luna" after Sandra Velasquez, because if you're reading this website, you're probably most familiar with the New York-based Velasquez as the mastermind behind the bilingual Spanish kindie band.

But like many musicians, Velasquez wears a number of hats, and so it's just as likely that the intrepid Google-r will eventually find their way to this interview because they're fans of Velasquez's band Pistolera, the Spanish-language band she founded in 2005.

Or maybe you grooved to "Cheerleader," the leadoff single from SLV, the band featuring Velasquez and multi-instrumentalist Sean Dixon.

So there are a lot of reasons to listen to Velasquez, and I'm offering you one more -- the interview below, completed while Velasquez was on tour, and in which she talks about starting her musical life as a reluctant keyboardist, the impact of songwriting on her life, and the different audiences she plays to.

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Zooglobble: What are your first musical memories?

Sandra Velasquez: I was forced to play piano as a child. So my earliest musical memories of are being forced to practice and playing piano recitals in lace dresses.  I begged my parents to let me quit piano, which they did when I was 13. I bought my first electric guitar and started taking lessons immediately to learn all my favorite Nirvana, Hendrix, and other rock songs. Incidentally, the first band I played in when I was fifteen was as a keyboardist. We mostly practiced instead of gigging. Those were wonderful years because we were so naive in our freedom.

What inspired you to form Pistolera?

I moved to New York City the day after I graduated from music school in 1999 and spent that first summer completely in shock of the lack of Mexican and/or (more importantly) Chicano culture.  I always said that I had I stayed in California I would have just played in a rock band. I started Pistolera out of a longing for trucks driving by with accordion melodies blaring out of them, for taco shops with banda music leaking out of the kitchen. But of course being a rocker at heart, Pistolera was always a blend. Latin music with rock attitude. 

How did the birth of your daughter inspire Moona Luna?

I could have never started Moona Luna without my daughter. I would not have known what to write about! I am the kind of songwriter that writes from personal experiences. I can't make stuff up. 

What have you enjoyed about writing songs for Moona Luna as compared to writing them for Pistolera?  What has been more challenging?

Writing for Moona Luna has taught me that at the end of the day I am a songwriter. Not just a songwriter for Pistolera, or for one demographic. I enjoy writing songs. I'm addicted to melodies. Writing a good song can be challenging no matter who you are writing for. Some songs flow out easily and others you have to work on, put aside, and work on some more. I did find that giving myself a theme for the second Moona Luna album (Vamos, Let's Go!) helped me write.

Has your songwriting for families changed as your daughter has grown older?  As you've grown older?

Now that I have multiple bands I have found that the songwriting just changes with time regardless. There is a the perception that I as the songwriter change the music, but lately I have been feeling like it's the music that changes me. I grow through the music.  It is all equally valid and growth-inducing. 

This may be difficult to answer, but are your Moona Luna audiences mostly filled with families for whom English is a second language, or are they more families for whom English is their primary language?

It really depends on the show. We did a residency in Santa Barbara where we played for underprivileged communities and most were bilingual if not mostly Spanish speakers. This may sound sad, but going to concerts at $15 a pop tend to be less accessible financially to families who do not speak English. When we play free city parks concerts in New York City the non-English speakers tend to be the childcare workers.  This has been my experience. 

Are there gaps that you see (in terms of musical styles, subjects, audiences) that "kindie" doesn't serve well enough?

Kindie audiences, or more specifically, kids, don't tend to favor dark or slow music in a live show scenario. This is just my experience with my own 7-year-old daughter. She likes upbeat music. I do too, but I also love slow, moody, minor and diminished chord music. This is why it's great to have multiple projects because it's hard to satisfy all of my musical cravings with just one band. If I just did Moona Luna I would feel more like an entertainer. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but I don't always feel cheery -- do you? It would be unsatisfying for me if my only musical experience was to put on a happy face and dance. I have many moods and thankfully, three bands to express them all. 

You recently released a song -- "Together" -- with Secret Agent 23 Skidoo.  Are there other musicians you and Moona Luna would love to work with?

I loved collaborating with Skidoo. I heard his voice in my head when I wrote the song so I was pretty happy that he agreed to do it. I really love Lori Henriques' new album. She would be fun to collaborate with. 

You have lots of ongoing projects going on -- Moona Luna, Pistolera, your solo album -- what's next?

At the moment I am really focused on SLV, which in the beginning was billed as my "solo project" but it's not really that, though the band name is my initials! It's really a new band and an equal collaboration with my drummer Sean Dixon, who is the drummer for the experimental electronic band Zammuto. (Check them out!). Since we recorded and released an EP with Meshell Ndegeocello in 2013, we have been working on our debut album. It's been over a year and I'm happy to say it's done and the first music video is filmed. It will come out this spring and you can expect to see us on tour this summer. I've started a new Moona Luna album too and hope to escape the cold of NYC and finish the songwriting part of it in February somewhere warm.

Photo credits: Shervin Lainez (Sandra Velasquez), M. Sharkey (Moona Luna)

Review: Question Bedtime - MC Frontalot

It's an open question whether "nerdcore" is a larger or smaller niche than "kindie," but almost by definition "nerdcore kindie" is smaller than either, and with Question Bedtime, MC Frontalot (who coined the term "nerdcore") has essentially created the first nerdcore kindie album.

Question Bedtime is the Brooklyn-based rapper's sixth album, and first for families, and instead of addressing subjects like video games in his songs, he's gone back in time to fairy tales from various cultures.  But rather than straight-up retellings, he's often given them a twist.  Goldilocks and the Three Bears becomes "Gold Locks," featuring rapper Jean Grae as the titular character, who rather than being scared of the bears, is a bear-eating hunter.  "Start Over" features a conversation of sorts between the Big Bad Wolf and a chorus of girls who aren't exactly buying his version of events with Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother.  Nor does he limit himself to more familiar fairy tales you've heard hundreds of times - "Wakjąkága" features the title character who, well… just read Frontalot's lyrics, and you'll understand that it's not common.  Besides "Start Over," I also particularly liked "Shudders," whose retelling of the story of the youth who went out to learn what fear is (and is really more about fearlessness) is a useful song in an album that features stories that kids have, at points, shuddered at.

One listen to a handful of songs (or reading those lyrics above), and you'll quickly gather that this is not an album for your favorite preschooler.  Not that it's inappropriate or a Joseph Campbell treatise, mind you, just that his dense wordflow and his refusal to dumb down the darker themes of the stories are going to appeal more -- and, really, mean more -- to a significantly older audience, probably ages 9 or 10 and up.

I liked Question Bedtime, but it demands close attention if the listener is to get the most out of it.  (And close attention is hard, no matter if you're 6 or 36.)  The more you like dense hip-hop wordplay, the more you'll like this, and that's not what every kids music family is looking for.  But if you've read this far, and thought, "Hmm, that sounds kind of cool," then I think it's definitely for you.  Recommended.

Note: I received a copy of the album for possible review.

Review: Raise Your Hand - The Not-Its

Like their fellow Seattle kindie musicians Recess Monkey and Caspar Babypants, The Not-Its have settled into a nice groove, delivering a new album consistently every 12 to 18 months since bounding onto the kindie scene in 2009.

And like Recess Monkey before them, the pop-punk quintet has begun to hone their songwriting skills so that by the time they got around to releasing Raise Your Hand, their fifth album, last summer, listeners could feel confident of hearing a nice little playlist of pop nuggets inside.

In that regard, the album does not disappoint.  "When I Fell (The Scab Song)" is power-pop punk at its finest, with the next track "Motorcycle Mom" just as ear-wormy.  And "Haircut" has that appropriately '80s hair-metal sheen for a song about a kid who just wants his (or her) hair to remain wild and untamed.  Even the songs that I was just fine with, a song "Funniest Cat Video" or the title track, inevitably have some sort of musical hook or distinctive production that make the song worth hearing.

As with many of their previous albums, there's a blend of earnestness and sophisticated attitude to the song lyrics -- "Funniest Cat Video" is about the narrator trying (and failing) to make a funny cat video for YouTube, while "Nose In a Book" is all about how awesome reading is.  The references in "Hey 80's" will go straight over the 6-year-old heads (and straight into their 38-year-old parents' heads), while songs like "Bee's Knees" and "Echo" tackle their subjects (bees' environmental fragility and love equality, respectively) with directness.  As an older listener, I wouldn't mind hearing the band tackle some of their more "serious" subjects with a little more of the irreverent attitude they display on their less serious subjects, but that could be the preference of the adult who has heard far more kids music than the vast majority of parents ever will.

Raise Your Hand is most appropriate for kids ages 4 through 9.  And as has become expected with Not-Its albums, the design, from Don Clark, is once again top-notch.  I realize that in the age of Spotify, album designers are probably an endangered species, even in the kids music world, but the CD ain't quite dead yet.  You can stream the entire album here.

As I hope I've made clear, Raise Your Hand is a solid collection of songs, radio-ready pop candy for the first-grade masses.  Families who are longtime fans won't be disappointed and while I might recommend its predecessor KidQuake! as the best introduction to the band, that's just personal preference as opposed to any demonstrative difference in quality.  The quality continues.  Definitely recommended.

Note: I received a copy of the album for possible review.

Kids Songs About Dogs

It's been awhile since I've done one of these themed lists, but as has been the case with much if not all of the material here over this site's 10+ years of existence, this list is personally inspired.

We lost our older dog Duke earlier this week after a brief fight against a tumor, and shortly afterward, Lunch Money's "I Want a Dog" ran through my mind.  As someone who came to dog ownership later in life, I can't say that I ever went through the stages of pleading the song's narrator goes through ("I would name him Caspar…").  But singer Molly Ledford's wistful voice seemed appropriate for my (and our family's) emotional tenor.  "Duke" (or "Titus," the name of our other, much younger, dog) seems like a suitable name as well.

So here's list, though I'm sure I've left one of your favorites out.  Won't you help out?

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Lunch Money - "I Want a Dog"

Raffi - "Doggone Woods"

Dwight Yoakam - "I've Got a Dog"

Billy Kelly - "Oh My Dog"

fleaBITE - "Dogs' Day Out"

Duplex - "Dog With a Sweater On"

Bunny Clogs - "3 Dogs and a Pancake"

Dan Bern - "Clark the Dog"

The Nields - "Dog on a Ball"

Heidi Swedberg and the Sukey Jump Band - "My Dog Has Fleas" [OK, that might be a bit of a stretch]

The Primate Fiasco [and many others] - "Doggy in the Window"

Pete Seeger - "Little Dogies" [again, that's a stretch, but, c'mon, Pete Seeger!]

The Thinkers - "Walk Your Dogs"

Laura Veirs [and Peggy Seeger] - "Little Lap Dog Lullaby"

Kira Willey - "Black Dog in the River"

Dan Zanes and Friends [and many others] - "Walkin' the Dog" [once more, a stretch, but, y'know, "Walkin' the Dog!"]

Laurie Berkner - "The Great Big Dog"

Caspar Babypants - "My Flea Has Dogs"

Caspar Babypants - "Dog Gone Gone Dog Gone

Johnny Bregar - "Blue Dog"

Key Wilde & Mr. Clarke - "I Had a Little Dog"

They Might Be Giants - "Hot Dog!" [see above re: "a stretch"]

Split Lip Rayfield - "The Weasel, Bean, Frog and Dog"

Parachute Express - "Me and My Dog"

La Kabala [and many others] - "Underdog"

Dick Cavett - "My Dog Is a Plumber"

Peggy Seeger - "Little Brown Dog"

Bears and Lions - "Good Boy"

Jamie Broza - "I Like Dogs"

Jamie Broza - "I Want a Dog"

The Hipwaders - "My Dog Steve"

Jesse Olsen Bay - "Doggy in the Diner"

Michelle Campagne - "The Little Blue Doggy"

Jefrey Au Go Go - "Peter the Pushy Puppy"

Owen Duggan - "Puppy Dog Jig"

Mr. David - "She's a Good Dog"

Sandra Boynton - "Dog Train"

Nat Johnson - "Dog"

Django Jones - "Smallest Breed"

Billy Jonas - "What Kind of Dog Are You?" [again, stretching this a bit…]

Barry Louis Polisar - "My Dog's Name Is Cat"

Human-Tim + Robot-Tim - "Hey Little Doggie"

Andrew and Polly - "When You're a Dog"

Duke Otherwise - "Dog Without a Tail"

Ralph's World - "Puppy Dog"

Ralph's World - "A Dog Named Bruce"

Hullabaloo - "Diamonds and Dogs"

Tom Freund - "I Walk the Dog"

DidiPop - "Wonder Dog"

Steve Weeks - "My Dog Ate My House"

Brian Vogan - "Gray Dog"

Justin Roberts - "Every Little Step"

Interview - Suz Slezak

Suz Slezak may be best known as an integral part of the indie-rock-folk band David Wax Museum with her husband David Wax, but with the solo release next month of Watching the Nighttime Come, the singer and fiddler steps out into a new role, that of gentle lullaby artist.

Watching the Nighttime Come successfully balances many challenges with lullaby albums -- sonically interesting without being distracting, making old songs sound new (and vice versa).  Slezak, who's handling preorders for the album via PledgeMusic, chatted via e-mail about her musical upbringing, creating an integrated musical and family life as a musician, and all you really need to have when touring with a baby.

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Zooglobble: What are your first musical memories?

Suz Slezak: It's hard to say what my first musical memories are since music has been so integrated into my life since such an early age. Here are a few:  demanding piano lessons at age three when I found out my brother was going to start taking them; listening to my favorite record, "Seven Little Rabbits," on the record player; playing the piano with a pacifier in my mouth; singing rounds in the car with my whole family; hearing fiddles and banjos through the walls of a tent while camping out at an annual old time festival down the road from my house in Central Virginia. 

What made you want to make music for a living?

Honestly I was well into my twenties before I thought making music for a living was a real possibility. I knew I wanted a life that was interconnected -- I wanted my kids and my partner and my work to all be intertwined.  I also wanted a creative job that included travel and community.  So I feel very lucky that through playing music, all those things have become a reality.

Your new album grew out of a collection of lullabies you'd recorded for friends who were having babies -- what were some of the songs on those handmade CDs and how did you record those?

That first collection was made in one evening in a tiny studio in Somerville, Massachusetts. I recorded everything myself: the vocals, the fiddle, the harmonies, the fiddle harmonies, and a simple guitar part too.  Some of the songs included "Tender Shepherd," a favorite childhood round; "Ubi Caritas," a chant from the ecumenical community in France called Taize where we visited as kids; some of my favorite fiddle waltzes; and "Say Darlin' Say," a traditional song recorded with my first old time band, Mill Pond Nine. 

Besides recording it in a studio, how did writing and recording Watching the Nighttime Come differ from those early lo-fi recordings?

The main difference is that this new record was really a collaboration between myself and two amazing producers, Josh Kaufman and Nate Martinez. The first recordings were really just me, my fiddle, my guitar and an engineer pressing play. Watching the Nighttime Come has textured electric guitar and synth sounds, ambiance from a simple percussion set up, and playful woodwinds and harmonica. It's got David's voice in there plus gorgeous harmony vocals by Lauren Balthrop. And half of these songs are written by me, so it's exciting to have them come alive.

How did becoming a mother yourself affect the recording?

Oh gosh. Well, being pregnant was one of the reasons I finally hunkered down and made this happen. I knew my time would become less my own once the baby was born, so there was a pressure of getting it done before she arrived. However, after the first session in the studio when I was six months pregnant, we realized we were getting into a bigger project than we'd originally thought and knew we needed more time to work. So when our daughter was just a few months old we traveled by train back to Brooklyn and, between naps and nursing breaks, finished the record. I think becoming a mother also puts a new spin on the significance of making music, especially recordings. I love that my daughter and maybe even her children and grandchildren will be able to listen to them one day and imagine me singing to them -- which I am!

Your PledgeMusic video shows you giving a video tour of the David Wax Museum's touring van.  Did you pick up pointers from touring with a child before starting the fall 2014 tour?  What did you learn while on the tour?

We are so lucky to know a small but growing posse of touring moms. The person we owe a great deal to, however, is Rhiannon Giddens of the Carolina Chocolate Drops.  She has been an inspiration to me for several years, not only traveling with two kids, but even using cloth diapers on the road! She taught us that you really only need two things: diapers and the carrier. The rest you can do without.  Coincidentally, Rhiannon is releasing her own solo album  (with the renowned producer T Bone Burnett) on the same day (February 10).

Anais Mitchell is another touring mom who advised me before Calliope was born and reminded me how flexible little ones actually are. And I'll never forget  an article I read about Ani DiFranco who said touring was actually easier in many ways than being at home since you have a whole host of helping hands when you're on the road. And I've found that same thing to be true. Not only does the baby nap well in the car, but there are plenty of loving arms to hold and entertain her any time of the day or night.  We call the band members her Runcles (Road Uncles) and they've been a big part of her life.

And of course we couldn't do this without the amazing help of my dad who retired last year and comes on most of our tours to watch the baby. He's named himself Nanno (a male nanny) and puts up with smelly green rooms, late nights, and long, long drives for the good of the family band. 

What's your favorite song (or two or three favorite songs) to sing to your daughter?

You know, I end up humming to her more often than actually singing, which means I'm making up new tunes each night. But one of my favorite songs is "Didn't Leave Nobody But the Baby" that Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch and Emmylou Harris made famous in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. It's got such a great soothing, rocking rhythm to it. The words are a little sad though, so I've been making up my own more baby-friendly lyrics. 

What's next for you?

Well, my main project, David Wax Museum, is putting out a new album later in 2015, so we're gearing up for another couple years of touring with that record.  So that's the realistic next step. But we're often fantasizing about ways to spend more time in L.A. and Mexico. And I'm always trying to figure out how to make more fiber art.  But for now, I'm looking forward to my "Sweet Love and Lullabies" tour to release Watching the Nighttime Come. We'll be playing shows in New York, Boston and Northampton on Valentine's Day weekend.

Photo credits: Jo Chattman