Video: "Banana Bread" - Caspar Babypants

You can view Caspar Babypants' song "Banana Bread" (from his new album Away We Go!) as an ode to that wonderful baked treat, or perhaps as a metaphor for life and value of being flexible. Either way, I think you should watch the brand-new hand-animated video for the song. Bananas wearing top hats for a song co-written by Chris Ballew and his dad (!). If the Beatles were ever to have written a song about banana bread, this would have been it.

Caspar Babypants - "Banana Bread" [YouTube]

Top Kids and Family Podcasts (September 2016)

Sliding in just under the wire, it's time for a September look at the nebulously-ranked world of podcasts. This month's list differs slightly from last month's list of top-ranked kids and family podcasts. For the most part, the order is the same, and the rankings of these particular podcasts within the "kids and family" charts in the iTunes and Stitcher kids and family charts are generally in the same range as last month.

On the downside, none of the podcasts here ranked within the "all podcasts" chart, which is a change from past months, when they sometimes did. But the number of podcasts on one of the two lists ticked up to 29, an all-time high, up from 22 in June.

As always: this is a blunt instrument, combining pure rankings from two fairly opaque charts, and for a variety of reasons has only marginal value as a measure of quality. (Results compiled from Top 100 podcasts on iTunes and Stitcher "kids and family" charts on Wednesday, September 29, 2016. Podcasts that appear on both charts are listed with numbers; remaining podcasts only appeared on one list.)

Two other reminders:

1. If you're looking for a list that has most (or all) of these podcasts, check out my comprehensive list of podcasts for kids.

2. If you're interested in the future of podcasts for kids, you might be interested in Kids Listen, a grassroots organization of podcasters and folks like me interested in helping high-quality audio for children thrive. We're looking for other interested folks -- producers or otherwise -- to join in!

With that out of the way, let's get to the chart.

1. Stories Podcast

2. Brains On

3. Radio Adventures of Eleanor Amplified

4. Storynory

5. Tumble

6. Story Time

7. (tie) The Cramazingly Incredifun Sugarcrash Kids

7. (tie) Story Pirates

9. The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd

Others (listed alphabetically): 1001 Classic Short Stories and Tales, Activated Stories, Bedtime History, Book Club for Kids, But Why, Children Stories and Joyful, Children's Fun Storytime, Ear Snacks, Family Folk Tales, Grimms' Fairy Tales, Little Stories for Tiny People, Molly and the Sugar Monster, Official Adventures in Odyssey, Podcast Kid, Porters Podcast, The Secret Diaries of Tara Tremendous, Short & Curly, Spare the Rock Spoil the Child, Sparkle Stories, The Story Home, That Story Show

Monday Morning Smile: "Vote for Jim Gill" - Jim Gill

As you're aware, usually these Monday Morning Smiles are not kid-music-specific, but when I saw this video from Jim Gill, I knew that this movement-based song would be perfect for this morning of the first presidential debate of 2016. It's a bit of "Vote for Jim Gill," the title track from his brand-new album, and it's tailor-made for playing during the ad breaks in tonight's debate.

It even includes a baby-kissing politician. Seriously -- couldn't be more appropriate for this evening's event.

Jim Gill - "Vote for Jim Gill" [YouTube]

Video: "Superhero" - The Laurie Berkner Band

It's September 23, a very busy day for Laurie Berkner. Her new album Superhero is released today, featuring a bunch of brand-new original songs and duets with folks like Ziggy Marley, Kira Willey, and Brady Rymer. (You can read more about the album in this interview with Berkner.) She's launched a Kickstarter project to bring 5 concerts featuring her to hospitals and special needs schools. Berkner is donating her time, so the Kickstarter money will help pay for all the other stuff -- sound crew, travel costs, etc. (You can donate CDs to hospitals, get signed CDs, and superhero capes, among other cool swag.)

One of those things would be enough for a Friday morning, and two is a lot, but why not do a third thing? So Berkner's debuting her video for the album's title track today. The song's got a zippy, catchy chorus and features cute kids wearing capes. That's enough for me and probably the nearest preschooler.

The Laurie Berkner Band - "Superhero" [YouTube]

"Long Live the Wildcards, Misfits & Dabblers" -- seen from the Burnside Bridge, southeast side

Practice For The Rest of the Year: XOXO 2016

At the risk of losing most of my readers for this secular kids' music site, let me kick off this essay about a conference about the intersection of the internet and creativity with a story about church.

(That's me, #offbrand since 2002.)

The church I occasionally attend devotes a not insignificant portion of its Sunday service to having attendees offer up their celebrations and concerns to the congregation. As a relative newcomer to the long-established congregation, I find a lot of it not all that relevant to me -- I don't really know you, let alone your son whose wife just had your fourth grandchild -- but one day a member of the staff put that part of the service into perspective. She said, "we are open and welcoming in here on Sunday as practice for being open and welcoming in the world the rest of the week."

I thought about that idea of practicing how you want to be or act a lot during my trip up to Portland, Oregon a couple weeks ago for the 2016 edition of the XOXO Festival. The festival is an "experimental festival, shared workspace, and online community for independent artists and creators working online." I attended a couple years ago, and when organizers Andy Baio and Andy McMillan said that the fifth iteration of XOXO could be the last (and that there would definitely be no XOXO in 2017), I threw my name into the attendance lottery. I am no Darius Kazemi, but my name popped up in the lottery regardless, and so I found myself once more attending a festival not entirely sure whether I belonged.

As I was doing two years ago -- and will likely be doing in the future should XOXO ever return in some iteration -- I work a day job that is neither technology- nor artistically-based with steady middle-class pay. My only real relationship to the art-and-technology aims of XOXO is this website and its affiliated work and working with people who are trying to figure out how to make more and better podcasts for kids.

Lucy Bellwood at XOXO 2016 - "The Internet will not give you what you want."

One of the (perhaps unplanned) benefits of XOXO is that it is a conference that attracts people like me, people who don't entirely fit in. As I mentioned more than once in conversations that weekend, if XOXO were a typical "industry" conference (be that tech, the arts, or any field-specific conference), there would be a clear pecking order, with "stars" on one side (probably hidden away in a green room, flown in just for their specific talk) and the rest of the attendees on the other. But because of the cross-domain nature of XOXO, it was entirely possible to have conversations with people and have all the parties think of everyone else, "Wow, they're doing something really cool." It also meant that there would be cases where people famous in a particular field would be anonymous in some settings. It leveled the playing field a bit and made it a little easier to be open and welcoming.

Dinner! (A double scoop from Ruby Jewel Ice Cream)

Before some thoughts about life and one's relationship to the world around them, I should briefly mention ice cream. I have thought deeply about ice cream and my relationship to it and I am unreservedly pro-ice cream. (Waves hello to Salt & Straw, Fifty Licks, and -- shown here -- Ruby Jewel.) I have been privileged enough to attend conferences held in hotels and while I find that the food at such conferences has generally been better than their reputation might suggest, I preferred the setup at XOXO, in which a curated list of some of the best of Portland's food carts were stationed right outside the conference for attendees to pick and choose. Yes, we paid for those foods, but the variety (and probably the quality) was better. Also, there was ice cream. And donuts.

Putting the final piece on our Beasts of Balance sculpture

There were more than enough ways to keep the brain engaged after the stomach was full. As in previous years, XOXO ran a festival at night which included tabletop games, an arcade, storytelling events, and film and animation screenings. Those events ran concurrently on the two nights, so it would have been impossible to see and do everything, but some of the highlights for me were hearing a live (and brand-new) episode of Mike Rugnetta's Reasonably Sound, a brand-new episode of Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou's Every Frame a Painting series, successfully balancing all the beasts in the Jenga-in-reverse-for-the-digital-age game Beasts of Balance, and playing Illimat, a card game designed by Keith Baker and the Decemberists, with some of the Decembrists. Also, on Sunday night we got to dance to Dan Deacon, which I can't recommend highly enough, having done it myself a few times.

I mention these fun and games not to make you jealous if you weren't able to attend but as a reminder to myself about the importance of, well, fun and games. It is no less important to find time to enjoy the experiences that give you pleasure than it is to find time to work on things that give you meaning. (Self, remember that.)

The heart of the festival is still the conference itself, which features 16 speakers who have made a living in some way from using the internet. One way in which the Andys I think model the "practice" behavior is in the composition of the speaker track. Two years ago, 6 of the 16 speakers identified as women (and 10, or 11 really, as men); this year, that order was reversed, with women holding 11 of the 16 speaking slots. If you are committed to seeing a tech world in which women aren't given a second-class position, then you have to commit to changing the corner of the world which you control, and that's something which is worth noting and commending. (That's only a small portion of how the Andys have listened and improved -- see: child care, non-alcoholic beverages at events, I could go on and on.)

I found almost all of the talks to be compelling and with something to noodle on during and after the talk -- they will be released online and I encourage you to check them out when they're available -- but at the risk of giving short (OK, no) shrift to some compelling speakers, I want to touch on just three.

Slide ("The Internet Will Not Give You What You Want") from Lucy Bellwood's 2016 XOXO talk

The first was the concluding talk on Saturday from Portland comic artist and illustrator Lucy Bellwood. What I remembered most from her talk is probably unfair to her -- it's her admission that she only got off of Food Stamps this year. That admission was part of a larger talk about the difficulty of knowing how to value oneself, from the perspective of an artist. How do you do the thing you love, and how do you put a price on it? She didn't offer any specific answers (other than perhaps a wish that people would put a higher price on creative output), but what resonated with me, besides the honesty in admitting financial difficulties, was the centering of the question of what it means to have a good life and the tension between living your intentions and simply making ends meet when creativity is a big part of your life. It's not that Bellwood's approach is the right or the wrong approach, but it's certainly the right question.

If Bellwood was forthcoming in admitting her financial balancing act, writer/illustrator/artisanal pencil sharpener David Rees took financial transparency one step further Sunday morning, as he outlined his income by year for more than a decade. Rees has had a series of successes, including hosting his own TV show, Going Deep with David Rees. Despite all that, in his presentation Rees claimed never to have earned more than $100,000 in a single year. From one perspective, he appeared to be doing better than Bellwood, but in many ways his talk was just as dispiriting as Bellwood's -- if someone can host their own TV show and still not make more than an average engineer -- then it really does seem like there's a tension between creative output and financial security that will be hard to resolve.

And that's where the final speaker on Sunday, designer Frank Chimero, suggested a frame of reference that doesn't magically unlock financial riches for talented artists like Bellwood, Rees, or the other creators that graced the stage at the conference and festival, but does offer a different view. Chimero referenced an interview with Krista Tippett, in which she notes the complications from conflating "vocation" with "job":

I’m very committed and fond of the language of vocation, which I think became narrowly tied to our job titles in the 20th Century. Our vocations or callings as human beings may be located in our job descriptions, but they may also be located in how we are present to whatever it is we do. It may be that your job at any given point is to make the income to feed your family. That is noble, too.

That's a little bit more than what Chimero referenced in his slide, but I think it further drives home the point Chimero made in his talk. Creators need to work together to figure out how to help each other thrive. That's been an animating principle behind XOXO, and will continue even if there's never another XOXO-related physical gathering.

But creators can also consider what they do creatively outside the context of how much they earn for their creative work. That's not an argument for giving away their creative work for free -- in fact, I'd argue it's exactly the opposite. It's recognizing that creative work has value in and of itself, before any assignment of market value. Viewed in that way, the creative work can have significant value to the creator. The question then becomes, how do I create a life which allows me the time and energy to create, viewing the act of creation as a vocation I'm committed to, rather than a job I need to extract value out of.

I totally recognize the privileged position I'm making this argument from, and that my status as a middle-class person with health insurance (not to mention all my other privileges as a straight white male) whose creative output is an occasional side project could make this a facile argument. But I really believe that approaching the creative process as a calling rather than specifically a job might help some artists think what it is that feeds their soul, and how they can fit that into a life that feeds their bodies as well.

Andy McMillan and Andy Baio banter at the end of XOXO 2016

I was interviewing a couple kids musicians this week -- OK, it was Andrew and Polly -- and they mentioned that putting together one 20-minute episode of their fabulous Ear Snacks podcast takes 65 hours or more of effort. That's a crazy-expensive episode if you judge it by the cost of their time when they write music for films or TV shows. But the duo has, for now, decided not to try to charge money for it, feeling like doing something like putting ads on it or changing it in order to attract some sort of sponsor, would diminish its value. They've made a decision that it has more value to them unpriced and unaltered from their vision. It's a choice they can make from a privileged position, and their approach might mean they may never make more Ear Snacks after this season (because, c'mon, 65 HOURS AN EPISODE?!), but they've committed to living out their calling, at least for the moment.

So thanks, Andy and Andy, for the opportunity to attend a festival which helps people think about how the internet is changing our creative lives, and what that means to our entire lives. I suspect you would both view the analogy to church a little distasteful, but to the extent that you're helping a lot of people think about how they can relate to individuals and society as a whole, and their place within society, I think XOXO has done a lot of what church at its secular best can do. Creative life on the internet is often still a scary and unpredictable place, but I think you've helped carve out a community that will continue to seek a path forward to make it less scary and more predictable for everyone.

Interview: Amy Lee

I will admit that Amy Lee was not high on my list of artists I expected to release a kids' album, but after doing this for fifteen years, I probably shouldn't have been, given the long list of artists who have dipped their toes into the kindie pool.

Of course, the idea that Amazon Music would be a thing, much less the entity releasing Dream Too Much, Lee's entry into the kids music world, would have been fanciful fifteen years ago as well.

So let us accept that the co-founder and lead singer of Evanescence has brought her powerful voice to bear on songs about bees, ducks, donkey, chickens, and more. The album was inspired in part by the birth of her son Jack, whose toddler brain came up with lines like "monkey in the band" and "muffins are sleeping" that found their way into the title track. Dream Too Much the album is available to Amazon Prime members for streaming and the rest of the world to purchase on September 30, but you can read a few thoughts from Lee below on growing up, song inspirations, and his son's favorite instrument.

Zooglobble: What are your first musical memories of growing up?

Amy Lee: You know, one of the things that had a real impact on me as a little girl was Fraggle Rock. I used to watch it before school when I was 6 or 7. I have realized, seeing it again as an adult, how awesome and musical it was. There was an original song in just about every episode, and there was so much depth and creativity in it. Jim Henson is one of my all time heroes. Even as a kid, what's always attracted me to music most is when it digs into your soul and makes you feel. My first favorite songs were by Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, The Beatles, The Temptations, Whitney Houston, Jeff Healey....

How did you go about choosing the songs for Dream Too Much?

Well all of the originals were totally inspired by my 2 year old son, Jack. I was writing those songs before I knew I wanted to make an album just naturally, to connect with him. Then it became this fun, elaborate project, and my mission was always making music I thought he would love. Most of the songs we chose to cover relate to my childhood memories and my family. "Rubber Duckie" and "Goodnight My Love" are both songs my dad sung and played to all of us kids when we were young, many times. I wanted to get a good recording of my dad doing those for us all to have forever, that was the original reason that my father and I got together to record this year.

What your musical hopes and dreams for your son?

I just want him to follow his heart and do what makes him really happy, whether that's music or not. Of course I would LOVE for him to grow into a musician and take an interest in that. Music is a huge part of my life so it would be really amazing to share that interest. He already seems to have rhythm, if that's even possible. Maybe its just a toddler thing but he absolutely loves drums and percussion. Hitting stuff and making different sounds. I love it!

Photo credit: Drew Reynolds