Review: Lullaby - Justin Roberts

It's been awhile since I've written a review here.  There are a number of reasons for that, most of them entirely unrelated to kids music.

A small reason for my recent lack of reviews, however, is trying to figure out how to write to music without resorting to the same phrases and frames of reference I've been using for so long.  It's hard to do the same thing year-in, year-out without feeling a little drained.  It takes effort to mix it up, to stretch oneself in a new direction.

Which brings us ("Finally!," you say) to Justin Roberts' new album Lullaby.  For the follow-up to his masterful album Jungle Gym, Roberts didn't choose to write another album of perfect pop and power-pop songs (for that, we'll have to wait until 2013).  Instead, kindie's finest songwriter stretched in a slightly different direction, writing an entire album of, well, if not exactly lullabies, then at least songs for downtime.

Roberts isn't a stranger to slow songs, of course -- songs like "Dad Caught Stars" and "Song for You" are among his best work -- but they typically serve as the dessert, not the main course as they are here.  So instead of songs about bullies or baseball, Roberts has crafted a late-night album of love songs.

Of course, that's what a lot of lullabies are, an attempt to soothe the troubled child (or adult) with a pleasant melody and words that offer comfort and the reassurance of a watching and loving eye.  And some of the best lullaby albums are those that repurpose "adult" song and reframe them as songs of love from parent to child.

Most songs here, stripped of their origin in a "kids music" album, would sound just as appropriate in a mellow, "adult music" album.  Only "A Wild One," which sounds like a lost Van Morrison track, might draw a few odd looks from listeners were it mixed in with other non-kids-music tracks.  The track itself is dedicated "for Maurice," who, based on the lyrics regarding a boy reading books before bedtime, is clearly Maurice Sendak.  It's as close to an anti-lullaby this lullaby album gets.

Key to the feelings of warmth engendered by the album are the musical styles and arrangements.  The Latin samba of "What the Stork Sent," the '70s singer-songwriter folk of "Nothing on You," the string quartet on "Heart of Gold" -- Roberts is using a more muted palette, but appropriately so.  Roberts wrote the arrangements for the album with help from producer Liam Davis, who again creates an overall soundscape that serves Roberts' songs well.

Because this is a lullaby album, I am obligated by the terms and conditions of being a kids music reviewer to state that the 38-minute album is targeted at kids ages 0 through 5, but like many of the best "non-traditional" lullaby albums, its practical age range is much broader.  The album packaging, featuring paintings by Alison Jay, is, like the album itself, elegantly (but not fussily) understated, but I don't think you're missing out if you choose to get the album on mp3.

When I was in college, I would joke that they handed out copies of James Taylor's Greatest Hits album and Van Morrison's Moondance at freshman orientation, so prevalent were they in dorm rooms and apartments.  I still get some warm, fuzzy feelings when I occasionally pull them out.  Lullaby gives me those same sort of feelings, and I can see it unironically being part of parents' non-kids-time listening rotation.  I expect the album to be part of many families' relaxed afternoons, evenings, and late-night feedings.  Different tempo, same great songs.  Highly recommended.

Review: Can You Canoe? - The Okee Dokee Brothers

I know, I already reviewed the album for NPR.  But it's always good to get a few more words in.

***

It could have been -- it should have been -- a gimmick.  The Okee Dokee Brothers, the Minneapolis duo of Joe Mailander and Justin Lansing, heading down the Mississippi River in a canoe for a month, just the two of them, with the goal of producing an album's worth of river/exploration songs by journey's end.

But the resulting album, Can You Canoe?, exceeds all expectations in its breadth and scope, its heart and humor.  Their take on the traditional "Haul Away Joe," featuring The Band's Garth Hudson, tempts me to pull out every synonym for "joyful" in my thesaurus -- boisterous, rousing, or, perhaps most appropriately given the nautical theme of the album, buoyant.

In its boisterousness, "Haul Away Joe" is probably more the exception than the rule on the album, with songs tending more toward the contemplative, such as "Thousand Star Hotel," or "Small and Simple," featuring Elizabeth Mitchell.  The opening title track is the gentle invitation to exploration that serves as the throughline of the album.  What happens on the river doesn't stay on the river -- it sticks with you for a long time.  And it's not so much the big things as it is the small, such as the animals and bugs (see "The Bullfrog Opera" and "Rosita").  And while there's certainly a time and place for solitude in nature, one often needs companions to make that exploration work, a theme emphasized by "Haul Away Joe" and "Along for the Ride," which features Rachel Loshak.  Producer Dean Jones does a nice job directing traffic and filling out the Brothers' Americana sound.

Justin and Joe didn't actually canoe down the river by themselves -- they had a couple other folks along helping out and filming a DVD with interviews and music videos packaged with the CD.  There's nothing essential about the DVD -- if for whatever reason you prefer the digital mp3s, you and your family can probably get along with out it -- but it's certainly a step above most bonus DVDs.  (Most of the footage is now available on the band's YouTube channel.)

The album is most appropriate for kids ages 4 through 9, but the album approaches Dan Zanes and Elizabeth Mitchell territory in terms of its being truly suitable for all ages.  Can You Canoe? is wide-eyed in the best sense, and easily one of the best kids albums of the year.  Highly recommended.

Review: Adventures of Chicken Weebus (Volume 1)

For a variety of reasons, it takes me longer to get to story reviews.  I apologize, therefore, that I didn't write this review three months ago.  My bad.

So let me introduce to you Chicken Weebus, a plucky little chicken -- more like a chick, really -- whose adventures in The Town There are the funniest audio plays you and your family will hear all year.  Chicken Weebus is the brainchild of husband-and-wife producers Karl Hirsch and Lauren Proctor.  Adventures of Chicken Weebus (Volume 1) collects the first four stories they wrote and recorded with a fine cast of talented voice actors, and it's a great way to amuse your kids (and maybe you) for more than an hour.

Trying to explain Chicken Weebus too much would be to diminish the slightly absurd joy and probably make it sound dorkier than it really is.  Think of Chicken Weebus as akin to a slightly-less-worldly Kermit the Frog -- the straight man (albeit with a dry sense of humor) amidst a large cast of characters, many of whom are, like, Gonzo or Animal, crazy in their own little ways.  It's that interplay between the nasally Weebus and the rest of the town (like Officer Longneck, the slow-talking cop, or the self-important narrator) that makes these plays so much fun.  Each story does have a lesson for the listeners to learn, but it's doused with sufficient cheese sauce that the broccoli is easily digested.  And the characters break the fourth wall and have just a tiny bit of knowing attitude just enough that the age range for these stories goes up higher than you might think.  My favorite of the stories is "City Chicken, Country Chicken," but there isn't a weak link.

The stories are most appropriate for kids ages 4 through 10.  You can preview the four main stories on the CD -- and download the entire first story for free -- here.  You can download the stories; the CD also includes interstitials not available for download -- they're funny, though not essential.

Adventures of Chicken Weebus (Volume 1) is a smartly-conceived and well-produced set of audio stories.  Funny, smart, and knowing without being smart-alecky, I can see these stories becoming a well-loved part of many families' car trips and lazy afternoons.  Bring on Volume 2!  Highly recommended.

Review: Mr. Diddie Wah Diddie - Randy Kaplan

I will admit that when I first heard about Mr. Diddie Wah Diddie, the latest album from Los Angeles-based (usually) Randy Kaplan, I was somewhat skeptical.  There was so much that could have gone wrong with this project - a troubadour recasting famous blues songs into kid-friendly complaints. ("Randy-ized," it was called.) And with a centuries old blues man offering sandpapery-voiced commentary? Oh, so much could have gone wrong.

But I was willing to give it a shot because Kaplan is one of kids music's top storytellers with significant depth in musical sources of inspiration, and I figured that if anyone could make these re-done stories worth listening to, it would be he.

Luckily, I was proven correct.

OK, I can't say that I found the overarching narrative conceit -- the century-plus-year-old bluesman "Lightnin' Bodkins" introduces many of the songs and tries to find Kaplan his own "blues name" -- very interesting.  In fact, when I listened to the album, I pretty much always skipped forward to the next track.  Parents in control of the car's CD player or the iPod may do the same.

But that's only because the songs in between those interstitials are so much more interesting.  Yes, the songs are "Randy-ized," which ironically means they've tamed down, not made more inappropriate.  So "Timeout Blues," which turns the classic chorus "In the Jailhouse Now" into "In the Timeout Now," is all about a rabble-rousing kid.  Kaplan is one of the top 2 or 3 kids music storytellers working today, and like other talented storytellers, he draws from a deep well of pint-sized frustration and pique.  And what better channel for expressing frustration and pique than the blues, such as in "Ice Cream Man Rag," which bemoans an ice cream truck that never stops at the narrator's house.  There are other more straight-ahead songs whose double-entendres (if Kaplan cracked a knowing smile while encouraging kids to shake their things -- eggshakers -- in "Shake Your Thing," I couldn't hear it).  And near the end of the album, more pensive songs like "Move to Kansas City" don't really sound jokey or silly at all, with songs like "Way Down in Arkansas" and "So Different Blues" remarkably tender and sweet.

Kids ages 3 through 8 will most appreciate the album, which is available at all the usual suspects (and on Spotify as well).  I'd also highlight the understated musical accompaniment, most notably the gentle finger-picking guitar work of Kaplan (assisted by his producer Mike West).

Yes, Mr. Diddie Wah Diddie has its origins in a somewhat jokey concept, but the final result transcends that limitation.  Ignore Lightnin' Bodkins, ignore the idea that your kids might get a basic education in the forefathers of the blues (unlikely), and just enjoy with your kids a solid collection of bluesy stories from one of the best storytellers around.  Definitely recommended.

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

Review: Spicy Kid - Lunch Money

One of the weird upshots of the rewiring of the relationship between musicians and cultural curators is that they're often friends.  Sure, they could have always been friends in the real-world sense of things, but with the advent of Facebook, the number of "friends" available has increased exponentially.  The cultural curator breed of "critic" is dying rapidly while "blogger" (for lack of a better term) has displaced the critic at the top of the music food tree, and while I'm not sure that critics were ever more "objective" than bloggers, my perception is that bloggers are more advocates for music they favor.  This unsurprisingly leads to more friendship-based exchanges online.  And, for someone raised in the world of the "critic" and who got into this music-writing business a decade ago in part because there seemed to be few critical distinctions when it came to kids music, it definitely feels different.

Which brings us to Spicy Kid, the fourth album from South Carolina band Lunch Money.  The band is led by singer and guitarist Molly Ledford, who writes indie-rock melodies and arrangements circia 1992 in a voice that would be called wry if she didn't find it so hard to hide her general amusement and wonder.  Ledford and the band are billing this as their album about parenthood, and that's what prompted my discursion above.

You see, Molly is a "friend" of mine on Facebook (along with 300 other kids'-music-related people).  If you're not a friend of her, you might hear a song like "S.P.E.L.L.," about the well-known parental tactic to hide information and think she's giving her kids too much credit ("When you s-p-e-l-l in front of me / You're calling attention to the words / You're putting me on alert / It's either bad news or dessert").  But Ledford has posted too many status updates indicating that her kids are sharp cookies (and spicy kids) that unless she's the James Frey of autobiographical kindie rock, these are very much inspired by real life.  And that true life dimension lends the songs additional resonance above and beyond the plain text of the lyrics.

What I find remarkable about the album is that she hits the topics of parenthood in a way that honors both the parents' and kids' perspectives.  The album's title track celebrates spicy kids without denying the feeling of frustration such kids can produce in their parents.  "Awake" is nominally about a child sneaking down the hallway to see if her mom is awake, but it also works from the perspective of a parent sneaking down the hallway to see if his son's awake.  And while there are songs that are as strong expressions of a parent's love for a child as you'll hear this year (see: "Translator," which is pitch-perfect), it's the empathy of both perspectives that helps it avoid mawkishness.  It's like the album is from everybody's favorite Aunt Molly.  Which isn't to diminish the role of her band (which now officially number four in total as the former trio has added Russell Ramirez on trombone), who give Molly's words room to breathe, except when they need to rock out.  Just that it's Aunt Molly's house.

The album will be most appropriate for kids ages 3 through 7.  You can hear the album on the band's music page.  Also, as usual, I love the design and layout of the band's album packaging, courtesy of Ledford's husband and bandmate, Jay Barry.

If Spicy Kid works in a slightly minor key, less a celebration of parenthood than a diary, that doesn't mean it's less joyful than any of its predecessors, and fans (or fans-to-be) of those predecessors should be every bit as enamored of this new album.  As for me, I'll hope that Ledford one day writes the book (non-fiction or otherwise) that chronicles life as a parent (or a kid) that's so obviously somewhere inside her waiting to be written.  Consider it advice from a friend, Molly.  Highly recommended.

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

Review: Little Seed - Elizabeth Mitchell

Here's my ugly Woody Guthrie secret: I never much liked Woody Guthrie's music.  Not the songs themselves, just their presentation on record.  Neither of his two albums for kids he recorded in 1947 and released in 1956 -- Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child and Nursery Days -- get much play in our house.  To my ears, it almost sounds like Woody was just rushing to get these recorded, and nobody would suggest that these 65-year-old recordings of Woody and his guitar are sonically gorgeous.

The songs themselves, however?  Those are great.  They just needed someone to give them a little tender loving care.

Who better than Elizabeth Mitchell, possessor of one of kids' music most gentle and empathetic voices?  In the decade-plus she's been recording kids' music, she and her husband Daniel Littleton have consistently been one of the best interpreters of songs, drawing both from the folk tradition as well as more modern tunes (Velvet Underground, anyone?).  Each of her previous albums have included versions of Woody Guthrie songs and now on Little Seed: Songs for Children by Woody Guthrie she mixes those versions with some newly recorded tracks for what is now an essential Guthrie-related album, a nice tie-in to the bigger Woody 100th birthday celebrations.

The seven new tracks here are every bit as good as the five that have come before.  "Bling Blang," quite possibly my favorite Woody kids' song, gets a sparse backing arrangement of little more than banjo, ngoni, and knee slaps that is quietly and intensely joyful.  ("Why, Oh Why?," almost certainly my least favorite Woody kids' song -- and that's being generous -- is almost tolerable to me.)  I love Clem Waldmann's percussion on "Rattle My Rattle" and the simplicity of Mitchell and Littleton on "Merry-Go-Round," reminiscent of those lo-fi afternoon recordings on You Are My Flower lo these many years ago.

These songs are most appropriate for kids ages 0 through 5, though kids raised on Mitchell's recordings (ahem) will enjoy them beyond kindergarten.  As alluded to above, five of the tracks on the twelve-track album are previously released and on a 29-minute album, that's no small percentage, and really its only downside.  (The mp3 version on Amazon, currently just $4.99, may be an acceptable compromise, though that would be mean forgoing the as-usual excellent physical packaging from Smithsonian Folkways.)

Longtime Elizabeth Mitchell fans will love the new recordings on Little Seed, and if you're a newcomer to Mitchell's music for families, it's a sweet half-hour introduction to the kids' artist most visible folk interpreter.  She does right by Woody Guthrie.  Definitely recommended.