Intro to Kindie: Rebecca Yorn Alison

One of the appealing features of the kids music world is what I've found to be a relative openness to new voices. That concept applies to musicians, of course, but also to those of us who interact with musicians, be it technicians, concert folks, or writers.

A somewhat newer voice in the kids music world is Rebecca Yorn Alison. She jumped into the kids music world more than four years as the founder of the kids music website Kids Can Groove. More recently, she's started booking shows for some of her favorite kindie bands as Little Cloud Management.

But like many people who find themselves drawn into a musical genre whose popularity hasn't fully reached the mainstream (we're trying!), she's first and foremost a fan. So I thought she'd provide another good perspective in our ongoing Intro to Kindie series in which folks provide a list of songs that introduce kids music to people who are unfamiliar with the genre. The list (and Spotify playlist) she provides tends toward the new (that They Might Be Giants isn't even formally released until later this week), but, as I said... new voices!

I love to “talk” music and was so excited when Stefan asked me to share my Intro to Kindie Music story.

My foray into kids’ music happened when my daughter Emily was just a year old. At the time, we had a fairly traditional family music collection: a few nursery rhymes, Raffi and Sesame Street. They were the sweet background of our early days as parents, but we were in need of a little variety.

Then my husband discovered two albums: Here Come the ABCs by They Might Be Giants and Kidzapalooza Vol.1. Skeptically, I gave each one a listen. I couldn’t believe it was “kids’ music.” These bands that play music for adults were engaging in linguistic experimentation, channeling their creativity into meaningful lyrics for kids. The compositions had an adult style and appealed to our daughter. It was not at all what I thought kids’ music was “supposed” to sound like. I was truly floored!

We stumbled upon the indie pop melodies of Lunch Money, lyrical hip hop mastery of Secret Agent 23 Skidoo and pop-punk-rock of The Not-Its! I started searching for kids’ Indie music (before I knew that it was fashionably called “Kindie”). We found the electro-pop of The Pop Ups, and mealtime was happier when Ralph's World came on. The sweet, hip folk sounds of Elizabeth Mitchell filtered in followed by The Okee Dokee Brothers’ bluegrass odyssey. Our music collection just kept growing!

I felt like I’d struck gold and had to share my treasure. But when I started talking to other parents about what they were listening to, I got a lot of bewildered faces and some eye rolls. More than once, I was asked, "Yeah, but is the music any good?"

That’s when I launched Kids Can Groove, a blog that introduces new music to other music lovers who have kids. I immersed myself in this genre by hosting my own concerts and starting a booking agency called Little Cloud Management.

Over the past 6 years, I’ve seen music serve an important purpose in Emily’s life, as it has for me. She’s become emboldened in her own creativity and more confident in herself. Her fears have been quelled and friendships made stronger. Her imagination has been ignited and expanded, and she has learned about all kinds of subjects even before entering school. And none of the quality has been forfeited. Though we have always exposed Emily to music in both adult and kids’ genres, I like the peace of mind that comes when spinning a CD or downloading a playlist geared towards families. I don’t run the risk of realizing a little too late that "Kitty" by the Presidents of the United States of America is definitely not as innocent as it sounds (nor as I remember it being). That actually happened!

The world can be big and confusing and scary for kids as they try to navigate through developmental changes and social-emotional challenges. (I feel the same way as an adult!) Music specifically geared toward kids, offers an understanding through language that is spoken in just the right amount of words, syllables and images.

My Intro to Kindie list includes songs that encompass these qualities. You’ll also find songs that initially got us hooked, and newer ones that continue to provide endless hours of purpose and entertainment. Creating a final playlist for this process was way more painful than I initially imagined. In addition to listing songs that have been family repeats, I chose to sprinkle in a few bilingual songs as they have also made their mark in our music collection.

Freeze Tag - The Not-Its!

Ladybug - Frances England

It Makes You Feel Good - Renee & Jeremy

A Cookie As Big As My Head - Lunch Money

Q and U - The Bazillions

Omnicorn - They Might Be Giants

Pockets Full of Joy - Lucy Kalantari

Hold On To Your Dreams - MIsta Cookie Jar & The Chocolate Chips

L-O-V-E - Josh and the Jamtones

Nightlight - Secret Agent 23 Skidoo

H2O - Moona Luna

Vroom - Todd McHatton

A Frog Named Sam - Ben Rudnick and Friends

Red Fox - Pointed Man Band

Spiders Under My House - The Jellydots

Bill - Ratboy Jr.

Wisconsin Poncho - Gustafer Yellowgold

Rainbow - Wunmi

Tickle Monster - Vanessa Trien and the Jumping Monkeys

Mr. & Mrs. Sippy - The Okee Dokee Brothers

Sally, Can I walk You Home? - Robbie Schaefer

The Shark Fighter- The Aquabats!

It’s All How You Look At It - Brady Rymer

Tres Ratones - Lucky Diaz and the Family Jam Band

My Dog Steve - The Hipwaders

Food Calculator - Alphabet Rockers

Forever Young - Andrew & Polly

Poong Nyun Ga - Elena Moon Park

Monday Morning Smile: "That Thing You Do!" - The Wonders

If you have a certain affinity for pop music, you probably have an idea of what the perfect pop song is.

For me, "That Thing You Do!" is one such (rare) example. It's by The Wonders and... what's that? You've never heard of the wonders? That's because they, er, don't actually exist. Rather, they're the band at the heart of the 1996 movie That Thing You Do!, directed by Tom Hanks (and featuring him in a supporting role). The movie tells of the rise (and fall) of The Wonders, creators of the titular song. Unsurprisingly, the song appears many times in the movie, and here's the beauty of it -- it never gets old.

In reality, the song was written by Adam Schlesinger of the great power-pop band Fountains of Wayne, and featured lead vocals by Mike Viola of the the band The Candy Butchers. Of course, in reality, the song hit the Billboard charts -- not as high as in the movie, but reaching #41 on the Billboard Top 100.

But ignore all that, and just listen with the family...

The Wonders - "That Thing You Do!" [YouTube]

Video: "L.A. Christmas" - Andrew & Polly and Mista Cookie Jar (World Premiere!)

The 2015 Christmas and winter holiday season is nearly upon us and while I generally really try to limit my coverage (and own personal spinning of Christmas tunes) to after Thanksgiving, this new video and song from Los Angeles-based Andrew & Polly along with fellow L.A.-based musician Mista Cookie Jar is too groovy not to peek under the Christmas music tree a little early.

The song is called "L.A. Christmas" and while it does feature some "la's," the "L.A." in the title stands for "Los Angeles," and the song features some nice harmonies and MCJ -- the Paul F. Tompkins of kids' music for how he appears on just about everything -- helping with some rhymes. As for the video, well, let's just say the video features Christmas lights on a tree. A palm tree.

The song's one of four on Andrew & Polly's Other Days EP (available on iTunes and elsewhere). Anyway, I'm happy to world-premiere it -- enjoy, regardless of whether it's 25 degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius where you are...

Andrew & Polly and Mista Cookie Jar - "L.A. Christmas" [YouTube]

Listen To This: "Pretty Little World" - Michael and The Rockness Monsters (World Premiere!)

There will always be a need for simple pop songs for pure pop kids, and I've got one such song for you today.

The song's called "Pretty Little World," and it's a single from the upcoming 2016 debut album from Michael and the Rockness Monsters titled, well, Michael and the Rockness Monsters. Which is just a long way of saying that it's the first album meant for the general public from Michael Napolitano, founder of the Preschool of Rock. The New Jersey/New York-based program provides music classes and birthday parties for, um, preschoolers (and younger ones).

In any case, this song is gentle with a spirit of wonder. Also, it features bells. I love the bells. If you want to grab a copy of the single for your very own, you can do so on iTunes and Amazon. Or just stream the rainbow goodness below.

Michael and the Rockness Monsters - "Pretty Little World" [Soundcloud]

Review: Mi Viaje: De Nuevo Leon to the New York Island - Sonia De Los Santos

Sonia De Los Santos - Mi Viaje: De Nuevo Leon to the New York Island album cover

We are in at least the third wave of Spanish-language kids music. The first wave was a narrow but very deep wave, for the most part consisting of Jose-Luis Orozco and Suni Paz, who each have been making music and releasing records for roughly forty years. (They're still doing so.)

The two of them (separately) made their folk music, often with little more than their voices and guitars, but in the late 2000s, the second wave swept through. This second wave was considerably broader, but also far more shallow. This was because most of the music was designed with the idea of teaching Spanish to English speakers in mind. This led to literally dozens of Spanish-language albums featuring simplistic lyrics and, often, music to match. There were exceptions, of course -- Dan Zanes' ¡Nueva York! from 2008, his attempt to translate his age-desegregated music to a non-English idiom and capture in music the vibrancy of the Latin culture in New York City was the most notable -- but mostly they proved the rule. I don't know how successful these albums were in teaching Spanish, but the fact that such albums aren't released much these days suggests that there isn't much of a market for them, educationally or musically.

So here we are in the third wave, I think. What are the features of the third wave? I think they're threefold:

1) An expansion of the sound from guitar-based folk music to encompass not only traditional music from a wider range of Spanish-speaking countries, but also shinier pop and rock sounds.

2) The diminution of interest in the song as explicit Spanish-language teaching tool. There are still songs and albums for which that's a more important point, but they tend to be much better songs, which makes any educational point go down much more smoothly.

3) The choice to write songs in Spanish just because it happens to be the best language for telling the story of the song. Much as a musician might choose a particular genre, they can choose a language as well. Here in the United States, of course, English is usually the default option... but it's not the only option.

It's in this third wave that we find Sonia De Los Santos, who brings us Mi Viaje: De Nuevo León to the New York Island, her first solo album for families. Over the course of twelve tracks, De Los Santos sings about her journey ("viaje") from her home in Monterrey, Mexico to New York City. For the most part, the journey isn't literal, but rather a journey in song. Unsurprisingly, since De Los Santos first came to attention to the kids' music world when she joined Dan Zanes' band back around the time of ¡Nueva York!, Zanes plays an important role -- his Festival Five Records is releasing the album, and he and his band appear on several track. ("Tan Feliz," a De Los Santos original, has a very Zanes-ian folk-rock sound.)

But this is not another Dan Zanes album, which allows De Los Santos to put her own mark on the style of family music Zanes popularized. Setting aside the language difference (98% of the lyrics here are not in English), De Los Santos travels the Spanish-speaking hemisphere to dip into a broad series of styles.

As I live in the Southwest United States, and have for the better part of thirty years, perhaps I gravitated to the sounds most familiar to me, those of Mexico, the sons with sizable bands of stringed instruments (jarana and requinto, for example, which are versions of guitar). So "La Golondrina" ("The Swallow," another De Los Santos original) and album closer "Monterrey" appealed to me.

But it's definitely a broader tour than that as she records songs from Venezuela ("Luna y Lucero," or "The Moon and Star"), Chile ("Indeicto Dormido," featuring a distinctive pan flute sound), and Cuba ("Burubndanga," with Caridad De La Luz aka La Bruja helping out on vocals). She sings a lullaby, "Txoria Txori," in a language I've never even heard of before, let alone heard, Euskera, which is from the Basque region in Spain. She even translates a couple English-language songs into Spanish, most notable Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land." Here, it becomes "Esta Es Tu Tierra," building from a single voice to a large chorus, and in its translation and structure, it's an artistic choice that is both subtler and bolder politically than anything else you're likely to hear on a kids' record this year.

The cumulative effect is indeed that of a journey, but I wish De Los Santos had been even more of a guide. De Los Santos' voice and the musical arrangements convey a fair amount of the songs' emotional and lyrical content, and she provides some brief comments in the liner notes, but there are no lyrical translations attached. (The website has some, but not all, translations as of the time of this writing.) I think, therefore, that some of the impact of the album will be muted for, say, the 5-year-old kid who doesn't happen to speak Spanish.

This will be an increasingly interesting choice for artists in the future -- do they make albums featuring non-English songs explicitly for an audience of primarily English speakers, or do they craft the albums for the target non-English-speaking audience and hope the English speakers come along for the ride? I think that artists are going to come down on both sides of that question, and continue to wrestle with what they're trying to do.

The 41-minute album is most appropriate for kids ages 4 through 8. You can listen to "La Golondrina" here. As with most Festival Five albums, the physical album packaging is lovely -- it's definitely an album worth considering getting a physical version of.

Mi Viaje is an engaging album, and De Los Santos has succeeded in her goal of having listeners understand her journey from Mexico to New York City. A Spanish-language kids music album might seem like a niche record, but as De Los Santos and others in this third wave of Spanish-language kids music of the past couple years have shown, it can speak to a fairly broad audience. Definitely recommended.

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

Review: Rise Again Songbook - Peter Blood and Annie Patterson (editors)

Can singing together change the world?

On its surface, the answer is "no," but the act of singing together produces a lot of other changes that might nudge the world into a better place, particularly in how we deal with people we meet.

No doubt Peter Blood and Annie Patterson, the editors behind the Rise Again Songbook, strongly agree. Musicians and songleaders, the two of them in 1988 edited and published through Sing Out! magazine Rise Up Singing, a collection of 1,200 songs. (The fact that no less than Pete Seeger wrote the introduction was a leading indicator of the book's acceptance in the folksinging world.)

Now the pair are back with Rise Again: A Group Singing Songbook, a sequel featuring another nearly 1,200 songs for singing alone or (presumably preferably in the eyes of editors) with others. The late Pete Seeger contributed a preface this time around and Billy Bragg the foreword. Assuming three minutes per song, that's another 60 hours or so of singing. (Better bring your throat lozenges.)

We purchased the original Rise Again (the 15th Anniversary Edition) more than a decade ago, and while I can't say that it's led to nightly rounds with the family, neighbors, or strangers passing by on the street, we do dip into it occasionally. So while I don't know if I'm the followup's primary audience, I'm certainly more predisposed than the average American to find value in Rise Again.

The basic structure of both books is to include lyrics and chord changes, along with some basic songwriting credit and recording history, but not to include melodic notes. (You can see part of a sample page here.) This is an eminently reasonable decision -- only a small percentage of the population can actually read music, and if you're trying to choose songs to sing, you're probably going to gravitate to familiar melodies for which you don't need the music. It does mean that folks like me (who can read music) who love exploring unfamiliar songs need to turn to Spotify, YouTube, the CDs by Patterson and Blood featuring basic melodies, or the public library to learn the songs, but that means turning away from the pleasures of diving into the book. (But again, I'm probably in the minority here.)

In both books, the songs are organized by theme. Some themes are fairly obvious and well-defined -- "Faith," "Seas & Sailors," "Travelin'" -- while others are a bit more nebulous (and also reflect the desire for social justice that in part was the animating impulse behind these books), such as "Earthcare," "Peace," and "Struggle." (There are also sections specifically for kids under age 8 and lullabies.) While it's possible that a reader could find a song of interest thumbing through individual sections, or guess in which section a particular song might nestle, they're far more likely to use the Titles index in the back.

Because readers are likely to turn to these books to sing familiar tunes, the differences Rise Again has compared to its predecessor are not insignificant. I haven't done a statistical analysis -- it would take some time to tally up the results from 2,400 songs -- but it feels like I know considerably more songs in Rise Up Singing than in the new book. There are more public domain songs, more songs that have been around for generations, centuries even. The comparative lack of familiar songs isn't a problem in and of itself, but for me there are just fewer familiar songs.

On the flip side, however, Rise Again features way more contemporary artists than the original book did, and not just because the original book came out in 1988. Here's a partial list of artists just from the first page of the Artist Index in Rise Again who aren't in the equivalent index in the 1988 book: Adele, Rani Arbo & daisy mayhem, The Avett Brothers, The Band, Billy Bragg, Garth Brooks, Jackson Browne, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Johnny Cash, Tracy Chapman, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Cliff, Bruce Cockburn, and Coldplay. I'm not going to recognize every song by those artists, either, but that's indicative of a book that's trying to reach a broad audience that might not necessarily have copies of Peter, Paul & Mary albums in their iPhones.

(As an aside, there are also some familiar kids music names -- besides daisy mayhem, familiar names like Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer, Bill Harley, Peter Alsop, Jay Mankita, John McCutcheon, The Nields, and Barry Louis Polisar appear in the book.)

A couple technical comments, one positive, one a suggestion for improvement. First, the positive: these are spiral-bound books, which aids greatly in its use -- it lays flat anywhere, and you can even fold it around so you only see one page. The suggestion for improvement? Add a ukulele chord chart to go along with the guitar chord chart on the last page. The ukulele is an incredible sing-along instrument, and deserves to be a part of this book as much as the guitar.

So would I recommend Rise Again? From a sheer familiarity standpoint, I'd probably recommend Rise Up Singing before this new book as I think that even with another quarter-century's worth of songs included in Rise Again, for most folks I think they'll find the original has more songs they'll be able to sing. But there are certainly enough songs that have seeped into the national consciousness in this new book that it'd keep your family occupied for months if not years to come. And hopefully it's not too much to ask that this be an ongoing project, that this become a trilogy another quarter century from now. I'd definitely recommend Rise Again as I do think in its small way it could change the world, one singalong at a time.

Note: I was given a copy for possible review.