Video: "Tailfeather" - Josh and the Jamtones

Anyone who's seen Josh and the Jamtones' live show knows they are ten-ton bundle of energy. The Boston-based ska-punk-pop band's latest album, Rocksteady, is formally released August 21, but I can say that the album very much captures that live energy in the studio setting.

One of the most revved up songs from that album gets the honor of lead single and a brand-new video to go with it. It's for "Tailfeather," and I feel like there should be a seizure warning before it because MAN, is there a lot going on.

But the song's a bunch of fun, and the video, which basically animates a bunch of clips of the band performing in concert, pretty much nails their live energy. I think it's great.

Josh and the Jamtones - "Tailfeather" [YouTube]

Listen To This: "Sunshine Family" - Mista Cookie Jar (feat. Aaron Nigel Smith)

It's another super kindie duet from SoCal's Mista Cookie Jar and the Chocolate Chips. This time, for "Sunshine Family," MCJ brings in Portland's Aaron Nigel Smith for a summery jam with reggae, dub, and a bit of hip-hop in the mix.

Co-written by Mista Cookie Jar (aka C.J. Pizarro) and Smith, you can think of it as a big (BIG) I-5 duet from the the West Coast artists. (And no offense to the East Coast, but the West Coast OWNS summer.)

Mista Cookie Jar and the Chocolate Chips (feat. Aaron Nigel Smith) - "Sunshine Family" [Bandcamp]

<a href="http://mistacookiejar.bandcamp.com/track/sunshine-family-feat-aaron-nigel-smith">Sunshine Family (feat. Aaron Nigel Smith) by Mista Cookie Jar &amp; the Chocolate Chips</a>

Rocknoceros - credit: Nicole Wolf Photography

Interview: Rocknoceros

If you're going to celebrate 10 years of band-hood, as Washington, DC-area band Rocknoceros are doing this year, you may as well celebrate big time. In their case, the trio is celebrating by releasing Plymouth Rockers, the first of several albums over which they plan to record a song for all of the 50 states. (Note: status of Washington, DC is unclear, though you gotta figure that's going on the list for pure hometown bias.)

With that anniversary in mind, I interviewed the trio -- Coach Cotton (lead singer, percussion), Williebob (guitars, etc.), and Boogie Woogie Bennie (keyboards and assorted miscellany) about music pre-Rocknoceros, when they decided to go full-time, and how they're going to show Sufjan Stevens what it takes to make music about America.

Zooglobble: What are your first musical memories?

COACH COTTON: I remember listening to early rock songs alone on a stereo in my basement. Songs like "Run Around Sue" by Dion, "Blue Moon" by the Marcels, "Little Darlin'" by the Diamonds, etc. I think my first vinyl record was "Copacabana" by Barry Manilow. Or maybe "Reunited" by Peaches and Herb. My first LP was Zeppelin IV. I bet I was 6 or 7 years old at the time. Within a few years, I was listening to Beatles records with Boogie Bennie.

BOOGIE WOOGIE BENNIE: My sister and I got a stack of Beatles and Monkees records from our neighbor's garage sale. We'd pantomime along with the records for hours. I have MANY early musical memories, but I think about this one a lot because parents tell me about their kids who "play" Rocknoceros at home. It always takes me back to my living room with my sister growing up.

WILLIEBOB: I have one amusing and vivid musical memory from the year 1976, when I was 5. My brother, who was 7 years old, had purchased a vinyl 45 RPM single of the song "Carry On Wayward Son" by Kansas - a big radio hit at the time. One afternoon, our parents went out for a short errand and left him in charge (it was 1976, so nobody called the police). We had a turntable in the family room that he assured me he 1) knew how to use, and 2) had permission to do so when our parents weren't around. I was led to the family room for a listening session with my big bro. However, he was apparently unaware of the speed dial on a turntable. We listened repeatedly to the first 20 seconds of "Carry On Wayward Son" at 33 1/3 RPM, which of course made everything slow and creepy sounding - the singing at the beginning was magnificently weird. Brian kept messing with the machine, moving the needle back to the beginning, hoping the problem would work itself out. He finally gave up, angrily (kids today would say he "rage quit"), but I loved it and couldn't understand why we didn't listen to the whole thing!

What tipped you over the edge from someone who liked making music to someone who wanted to make music as full- or part-time career -- what made you change directions?

COACH: My desire to perform was present very early on in life, but manifested itself through sports more than music. The idea to make music a career blossomed when I struck upon the idea to entertain families, and subsequently formed Rocknoceros.

BOOGIE: I always wanted music to be my full-time career, probably since I was 9 years old (seriously). I’ve been very lucky to have the opportunity to do it.

WILLIEBOB: Parenthood and entertainment-related work don't mix too well; all the jobs are happening while your own kids are home from school or asleep at night. So I didn't think I'd have any chance at a music "career" until sometime after my daughter grew up. Coach and I somehow kept up a part-time rock band through our early days of juggling kids and jobs, and though we worked hard on music it wasn't a money maker - I remember the emotional chafing I'd feel whenever friends or family used the word "hobby" to describe what we did.

In an unusual turn of events, in 2004 my big break came when my daughter's mom got married. She and her husband offered to take an extra share of the responsibilities related to child care, financially and logistically, so that I could commit fully to music and build something from the ground up. I jumped at the chance. Their kindness and generosity allowed me to start over as a private teacher while I pursued professional gigs, taking the risks I couldn't afford prior. This all led to Coach starting Rocknoceros with me, which afforded a work schedule that allowed me to continue being an active dad to my precious girl. My life changed completely for the best, and the extended family is still going strong.

What did years of playing for adults teach you about playing for kids?

COACH: Kids don't get drunk and ornery. Just ornery. And at some point or points during every show, no matter how well or poorly the band is performing, the entertainment becomes incidental to the audience. People of all ages tune in, tune out, and tune back in. Ideally, then, the band will be compelling to hear whenever folks tune back in to the performance.

BOOGIE: Years of playing for adults eventually brought me to study with jazz pianist Wayne Wilentz. Wayne expanded my harmonic vocabulary exponentially AND he showed me why they call it the GREAT American Songbook. Long story short: playing for adults eventually taught me how to write better songs.

WILLIEBOB: I discovered that I could be myself on stage for both adults and children alike - with appropriate moderation of language and electric guitar volume, of course! When we first started I was self-conscious and felt I had no talent for the kind of performance I assumed kids needed to see - colorful, zany, over the top... I have a comparatively mellow personality and no acting experience, but I play good songs with all my heart, and that was enough for my part in the band to get things rolling. Along the way, we have developed little stage-y things that arguably make a modest "act," but they are natural extensions of our everyday selves.

What inspired you to make an album with state songs (Plymouth Rockers)?

COACH: I was partly inspired by Sufjan Stevens, partly inspired by the song "THE UNITED STATES of AMERICA" on our first record, and partly inspired by a need for a subject matter that would provide ample writing opportunities over an extended period of time.

BOOGIE: We’ve been talking about it for a long time. I can’t remember when the idea started. It may go all the way back to our song “The United States of America” from the first CD. IF it does go back that far, then I can say (because I had the original idea for that song) that the idea can be traced back (through a twisted path) to Animaniacs. But, regardless, the real push for “a song for every state” has been spearheaded by Coach Cotton, and, as usual, I have no idea what motivated him.

WILLIEBOB: The need for inspiration itself! Some combination of American pride and a love of Big Idea type projects.

Did you find that it got easier or harder as you wrote songs inspired by states? Meaning, did you figure out how to crack that creative nut, or did it become harder to come up with unique takes on states?

COACH: The challenge of writing lyrics for state songs remains consistent, and only a little different than the other educational tunes we've written. Writing lyrics that contain facts but don't feel like work to read is my goal as a lyricist, and that goal is uniform throughout my writing process for Rocknoceros. Whether writing about a color or hygiene or a state, I try and make the words fun, funny, and informative. And sometimes deep.

BOOGIE: I LOVE writing songs. I think I could probably write an album’s worth of songs about light bulbs.

WILLIEBOB: It gets harder for me personally, but that is a good thing. We all try to avoid repetition with our lyrical and musical choices as the project moves along. What started as sort of "encyclopedic" songwriting that crams a state-load of facts into a short lyric has become a lot more fluid. "I've Got Friends In New Jersey" isn't about the state in a factual way, but still represents (to me anyway) an attempt to capture something very Jersey-like about the young person in the lyric.

Sufjan Stevens said he wanted to make albums for all fifty states and famously never got past two albums. What makes you think you can succeed where he failed? ;-)

COACH: Sufjan actually admitted after he made Illinois and Greetings from Michigan that he had no intention of writing an album for each state. Rather, it was a gimmick to generate press. I was kinda stunned at that admission because his persona seems contrary to such a ploy, but we all gotta make a living, right? While making an entire album for each state is a monumental task, writing a SONG for each state seems pretty reasonable.

(Here's Sufjan's rejection, though he's a little dodgy (per usual) about his true initial intent. But I read somewhere, a few years after Greetings from Michigan was released, that his 'project' was a ruse. I was dying to hear a follow-up to the first two installments, only to have my fanboy dreams crushed.)

BOOGIE: See the previous question. Plus, I have two other guys to pick up the slack.

WILLIEBOB: Hehe :) Well, I would think that 50 songs is more manageable than 50 albums, but that's still a lot of songs! My answer is: We are just crazy or simple enough to believe we can do it. Eventually...

After ten years of you doing this together, at least half of this full-time, what’s the secret to a happy (band) marriage?

COACH: Trust.

BOOGIE: Sappy but true: friendship. I’ve known Coach since I was 5 years old(!) and Wiliebob since I was 15.

WILLIEBOB: Master Boogerton knows of what he speaks. Friendship.

What one thing (song, concert, whatever) are you most proud of with Rocknoceros?

COACH: I'm proud of many of our songs, most... if not all. I'm proud that we've lasted 10 years, and that we've played close to 2,000 shows. And I'm proud that we've inspired children to love music, and grow up to play music themselves.

BOOGIE: I’m proud to be introducing kids to music. As I said in the first question, it is kind of nice to think that kids “playing” Rocknoceros in their living rooms might be inspired to spend their lives making music.

WILLIEBOB: It might not count as one specific thing, but a constant source of pride for me is the endurance of this band's appeal to audiences around where we live. We're not a nationally famous band, but we are clearly some kind of D.C. area institution by now, and it was all built on our songwriting efforts.

What’s next for the band?

COACH: We're going to write an album for every state in the union. KIDDING!

BOOGIE: 10 more years.

WILLIEBOB: Maybe that "nationally famous" thing, but it'll only come to pass by doing it our way, like Frank sang it.

Photo credits: Nicole Wolf Photography

Video: "Groove" - Lori Henriques (World Premiere!)

Summertime... and sometimes all you want to do is relax with a cold beverage and a bit of shade from the sun.

Your kids, of course, often have an entirely different idea.

For the latest video from Lori Henriques' excellent How Great Can This Day Be album, Henriques melds the two concepts. In the video for "Groove," a very jazzy dance song, her brother (and director here) Joel Henriques slows down the juvenile dancers and puts a filter on them so it seems all so... relaxed. Very apropos for this world premiere video.

Lori Henriques - "Groove" [YouTube]

Review: All Kinds of You and Me - Alastair Moock

I think Alastair Moock is the rare artist for whom taking on Free To Be... You and Me, the classic 1972 album and book from Marlo Thomas, would be a safe choice. That's because Moock's last album was Singing Our Way Through, the celebrated and Grammy-nominated album Moock recorded while he and his family helped his daughter Clio fight leukemia. The album sang to kids and families going through tremendously difficult times with grace and even a little bit of humor.

But still, yeah, just about anything would seem lighter after that. And with Clio's leukemia in remission, for this latest album, All Kinds of You and Me, Moock turned instead for inspiration to that 1972 classic which celebrated gender individuality, equality, and neutrality. That album inspired him (he speaks to it most directly on "You and Me") and now he's trying to pay it forward.

My favorite songs on the album are the ones that wear that desire to honor the album and its impluses lightly. "It Takes All Kinds," which leads off the album, is an infectious song about a boy who wears a dress, a girl who loves worms, and a cat who drinks wine. It's a song about acceptance, but the chorus -- "It's me, it's you, it's us, it's true / It's life, it's fine, it takes all kinds" -- doesn't hit the listener over the head with the message of you should accept others. Generally, the idea of "should" is far away from the album's lyrics, which is to its credit. "Kenya Imagine?," which could have become a very "should"-filled song about thinking of others around the world and how everyone has the same needs, reaches its apex when Moock and Jennifer Kimball sing "Love!" repeatedly (a dozen times, to be precise) -- it's a reminder, not a command. And "Everything's Upside-Down But Me" is another strong track in which the title is not really a metaphor - it's a most Shel Silverstein-like song.

Moock gets strong assistance with his folk-with-a-hint-of-rock from 75% of Rani Arbo & daisy mayhem, with producer Anand Nayak playing on many tracks (and duetting on the horn-aided "All in a Day"), Scott Kessel, and the always-welcome Rani Arbo providing vocals on a number of tracks.

The 45-minute album is most appropriate for kids ages 5 through 9. You can stream the entire album here. (And for those of you still buying your music in the physical format, always nice to see album art from Key Wilde.)

Unsurprisingly for an album born out of an acute medical crisis, Singing Our Way Through was an album intensely focused on the here and now. With the medical crisis past, with All Kinds of You and Me Moock turns his attention to the world his daughters will grow up in. At its best, the new album features the same grace of its predecessor with a level of high spirits that encourages others to envision the same world Moock sees for his daughters. I think Marlo Thomas would be proud to hear it. Definitely recommended.

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

Review: Hot Air - Recess Monkey

I've come to think that the biggest risk Recess Monkey takes is the opposite of most bands' risk: rather than waiting too long between albums, the Seattle trio's insane level of productivity offers its own perils. Producing an album a year (if not more) like clockwork might almost make listeners think of the albums as interchangeable cogs rather than unique creative expressions.

With their new album Hot Air, the band has released one of their more stylistically varied albums. With song subjects -- or at least titles -- loosely grouped around an airborne topic ("Lighter Than Air," "Paper Airplane," "Head in the Clouds," to name just a few song titles), the band covers broad distances (see what I did there?) musically. From the soft-rock of "Lighter Than Air" to the Beatlesque tunes of "Paper Airplane" (White Album) and "Head in the Clouds" and "Morning Sun" (Sgt. Pepper's) to the XTC ripoff (lovingly, I'm sure) "Thunder & Lightning," there are many approaches, and in a more sophisticated way than the "buffet" style kids albums sometimes employ. "Oh Lando" might be viewed as a shameless (and spoiler-filled!) courting of the Star Wars fanboys and fangirls in their retelling of The Empire Strikes Back, but there have been much worse attempts. There isn't a single song that's the can't-miss hit of the summer (and "First Things First," though it may be popular in concert, wears out its welcome quickly to the adult listener), but on the whole it's yet another solid collection of tracks that will appeal to varying degrees to a wide sector of the kids' music world.

The 39-minute album is most appropriate for kids 4 through 8. The album comes packaged -- for those of you who still buy albums -- with a DVD that ties the songs on the album together into a movie -- a series of music videos, really -- about a boy who grows up to enter an air race with a homemade balloon and encounters a penguin... OK, does the story really matter? (Not really.) It adds value and so your preschoolers might enjoy it, but it's not essential to enjoyment of the album.

To go back to the opening question, yes, I think there's a chance that Recess Monkey's rock-solid consistency and productivity has led to folks -- including me -- to take their music for granted. As much as it feels weird to me to say this, I kind of wish they'd take a year off just to see how it affects their musical output -- and their fans' reactions to a longer-than-normal recorded absence. Regardless, Hot Air is definitely recommended.

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