Review: My Cup of Tea - Heidi Swedberg

On her first album Play!, Heidi Swedberg gave us a celebration of the ukulele, playing (for the most part) simple songs designed to get uke-enthusiasts to play along.  The songs and arrangements were playful to be sure, and definitely more than somebody strumming the ukulele, but its ambitions were modest.

Move forward three years, and her follow up My Cup of Tea reveals Swedberg's true ambition -- to be the vaudevillian Dan Zanes of family music.  Yes, that cover photo, with family and friends playing roles of Civil War reenactors, Frida Kahlo, and barechested strongmen (to name a few), is a nice visual complement to the album's contents.  From the Jazz Age zip of the original title track which leads off the disk with a good dozen instruments and nearly as many voices to Swedberg's vocally dramatic take on Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussycat," if you're looking for an album with a single, distinctive groove, please move along.

The songs here are varied, and not in the "one song reggae, one song rap" approach that kids albums sometimes take.  After that Edward Lear song, the traditional folk tune "Little Birdie," perhaps the simplest song on the album, segues into the uptempo Panamanian tune "Al Tambor."  And while on a lot of albums, "Duermete," a Spanish lullaby, might be the album closer, Swedberg's duet with Cesar Bauvallet subtly turns into a Cuban-tinged raveup.  It's in these wild leaps from song to song that Swedberg and her collaborators -- primarily Daniel Ward and John Bartlit -- shine instrumentally.

Of course, given the wide-ranging musical interests, not everything succeeds -- there is no love lost between me and "Boogie Man," which takes a cheesy boogie theme and cranks it up to the point of clicking fast-forward.  And while I liked her more dramatic takes on "The Owl and the Pussycat" and "Istanbul" (made famous once more by distant cousin John Linnell in They Might Be Giants), some listeners might be put off by that musical playacting.  YMMV.

In true Zanes-ian fashion, there is very little here that could be pegged at a specific (non-adult) age range, so I'll call it ages 3 and up.  You can hear a sampler here.

You can appreciate My Cup of Tea  as a straight-up album of music from folk and world traditions played with verve and imaginatively arranged.  But I think you'll get more out of it if you think of it as a variety show without the banter, skits, and sponsor thanks.  In fact, somebody please get Ms. Swedberg a gig hosting her own variety show, pronto.  Signed, the Universe.  Definitely recommended.

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

Itty-Bitty Review: Frog Trouble - Sandra Boynton

I'm a Sandra Boynton fan from way back, mostly for her simple and brilliantly funny illustrated books for young (pre-)readers, but also for some of her albums of family-friendly music.  She's tackled Broadway, rock, and retro on previous albums, and for her fifth collection of songs she's gone Nashville.

On Frog Trouble, Boynton and her musical partner, the arranger Michael Ford, offer up another dozen songs of often surreal and animal-based nature.  Take the unreliable narrator of "Frog Trouble" (or don't), or the meta-approach of "CopyCat"  (I think you can probably guess how a song with that title gets meta).  But a number of the songs, some of them the album's strongest, play it mostly straight -- Alison Krauss' lovely take on "End of Summer Storm" and Ryan Adams performing "When Pigs Fly," which takes that absurd premise and turns it into something beautiful.

Of course, the key for Boynton and Ford is finding the right artists for the songs.  They return to Krauss and Mark Lanegan, who've sung on previous Boynton albums, and many of the other choices are inspired, if not always totally country -- I'm not complaining that Ben Folds ("Broken Piano") and Fountains of Wayne ("Trucks") are on the disk by any means, and Brad Paisley is a good sport on "CopyCat."  Also: Kacey Musgraves singing anything is a good thing.  It's most appropriate for kids ages 6 and up.  You can find the 34-minute album anywhere and also in book form should you desire whimsical illustrations and sheet music.

One need not be a country fan to enjoy Frog Trouble ; a kid-like sense of humor and occasional taste for the absurd will suffice.  It's my favorite Boynton-Ford album.  Definitely recommended.

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

Review: Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers - Trout Fishing in America

Let us begin this review by noting the long history of Trout Fishing in America.  Formed in 1979 out of the ashes of another band, Keith Grimwood (bass, AKA the short one) and Ezra Idlet (guitar and banjo, AKA the tall one) have made folk-rock together as a duo for nearly 35 years, including more than 20 years of family music releases.  Not to mention many hours (weeks? months?) of between-song banter That, friends, is a long career, one that the duo shows no signs of wrapping up.

Their new album Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers is in many respects similar to prior releases of theirs.   Goofy wordplay and joy in rhyme?  The title track is for you, as is their version of Emily Kaitz's "To Be a Wood Bee."  Songs from songwriting workshops done with kids?  Please check out "Zoo Wacky Zoo" and "It's Not Mud" (the latter featuring Chris Wiser and Rob Martin from the Sugar Free Allstars).  Just plain odd? "Meow, Meow, Meow" serves as your English-Feline dictionary.

While I've always appreciated kid-centric narrative approach that TFIA takes, I've never been a big fan of most of the songs that have come out of their songwriting workshops with youth -- I think the two such songs here are the album's weakest tracks.  Far stronger, at least from a narrative perspective, is "The Late, Great, Nate McTate," featuring a strutting bass line and a perfectly captured character study of a timeliness-challenged person.  It's a song that makes me very much want to hear the full 2009 musical the band wrote the songs for (P's and Q's: The ABCs of Manners) on which it first appeared.

I can't finish this review without a special shout-out to "Don't Touch My Stuff!"   The song was inspired (if that's the right word) by the burglary of the band's van in 2012.  The not-at-all concealed anger and frustration (albeit leavened with humor - "Hey! what's wrong with our CDs?!") makes me feel it's not quite a kids song, but then again, it's the sort of raw emotion that's rare in music for families, and in that regard I like it.

The 36-minute album is most appropriate for kids ages 5 through 9.  You can hear three of the songs at the band's homepage.

Any band with as long a career as Trout Fishing in America has had clearly understands what their audience wants, and the band is comfortable in what they're offering musically, occasionally wandering down paths just because they're amused by doing so.  Longtime TFIA fans won't be disappointed by Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers  and newcomers will find the album a good introduction to the band, its music, and its sense of humor, not to mention a number of songs worth putting into your family music rotation.  Recommended.  

Review: Are We There Yet? - The Verve Pipe

When "adult" artists decide to dip their toes into the kiddie pool (or jump right in), typically their music isn't too far removed from their adult stuff.  Think of They Might Be Giants, or Barenaked Ladies, for example, or even Dan Zanes or Elizabeth Mitchell -- while the topics might be different, the sound isn't unfamiliar.

Which is what makes The Verve Pipe such an interesting case.  If your only picture of the band dates back to their grungy mid-'90s hits "The Freshmen" and "Photograph,"  their two goofy and endearingly earnest albums of kids music, including the recently-released Are We There Yet?  will make you wonder if you're correctly reading the artist name on the album cover.

You are.  And the silliness and tenderness shown on their first album, 2009's A Family Album, continues here.  If the first album was more evenly split between silly and sincere, the mix tends more toward the silly on this new album.  My inner "Weird Al" Yankovic approves of this shift, with "Scavenger Hunt," a spiritual and lyrical sequel to "We Had To Go Home," kicking off the album with a singalong (if quick) chorus, an amusing list of hunt requests, and a gratuitous shout-out to a '90s boy band that I won't ruin further by mentioning.  Songs like "I Didn't Get My Note Signed," "I'm Not Sleeping In ('Cuz It's Saturday)," and "My Principal Rocks" ("That's when I saw a picture on his arm / Inconceivable, a tattoo on my principal / Who's playing in a rock and roll band.") have a similar tone, with a slightly incredulous narrator faced with slightly outlandish results of familiar situations.

It's not that bandleaders Brian Vander Ark and Donny Brown are entirely cut-ups -- ballads like "Great Big World" and (especially) album closer "All Grown Up" are unabashedly encouraging and tender, and if all eleven tracks were like that, it'd be too much, frankly.   But scattered among songs like "You Can Write A Song" (which features background vocals by Jack Forman and Drew Holloway of Recess Monkey and another entirely unexpected and sly tribute to another musician familiar to the music-nerd parents of the album's target audience), they provide a nice contrast.

The 36-minute album is most appropriate for kids ages 5 through 9, and most appropriate for your wisecracking first grader on your Friday night family sitcom. 

In preparing to write this review, I gave some of The Verve Pipe's post-"Freshmen" music a spin, and I'll say that hearing it helped me bridge the gap between that mid-'90s music and this new music -- it was shinier, slightly less... angsty.  One thing that can be definitely said about Are We There Yet?  is that the band fully embraces its role of class clown with songs that will put smiles on the faces of all but the most curmudgeonly of listeners.  Fans of A Family Album  will find this every bit as winning, and even if you're not a big Verve Pipe family of fans, you'll enjoy a lot of this new effort.  Definitely recommended.

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

Review: The World Is A Curious Place To Live - Lori Henriques

Who are the inheritors of the edutational mantle passed on from Schoolhouse Rock ?  While the crunchy pop purveyors of, say, the Bazillions have distilled a handful of lessons into 3-minute songs whose chord structures and arrangements would fit on any AAA radio station, who took the less-poppy and more obscure route that some of those songs from 40 years ago took?

Lori Henriques, that's who. 

Her 2011 kids music debut, Outside My Door , was one of those "unlike any other CD" CDs for which the phrase actually fit.  A mixture of 1970s piano jazz, Broadway exposition, Sesame Street , and, yes, Schoolhouse Rock , the album eschewed pop-rock for jazzy explorations of birthdays, twins, and more subjects of kid-concern.  It was smart without being snooty (yes, she rhymed "goat turd" with "awkward").

On her new disk, The World Is A Curious Place To Live, the Portland, Oregon-based Henriques even more fully embraces her inner Schoolhouse Rock  nerd.  From the album title, which isn't so much descriptive as it is sage advice, to the songs within, which deal with topics scientific, mathematic, and linguistic.  In fact, the 35-minute album can even be thought of as 3 separate and sequential EPs on each of Henriques' obsessions.

The first EP, featuring the most scientific songs, includes the album's strongest songs.  With its celebration of curious people both famous and close to Henriques' orbit, the opener "Curiosity" features a bouncing chord accompaniment and her evident delight in the wordplay. (For good measure, Henriques throws in a scat line or two.)  On songs like "Crunchy Privilege," you can hear why she cites Cole Porter as an influence.  And while Henriques having fun moving her fingers quickly to match the lyrics, the two strongest tracks on the album are "When I Look Into the Night Sky" and "Dinosaur," two  ballads.  The former, an ode to wonder and amazement, is based on "Saint James Infirmary" and has a lovely video to match.  The latter is wholly original, simultaneously an honest-to-goodness love song for a dinosaur and a wry recounting of millions of years of evolution ("We've still got the ants / And they're still crawling round on our floor").  I can't see this playing on too many radio stations, but it so totally nails that combination of earnestness and nerdiness that's one of kindie's most appealing strains.

The other two EPs-of-a-sort are fun, but don't quite reach the heights of the preceding songs.  The counting songs are brief and for the most part meld familiar classical melodies with skip-counting lyrics for numbers 2 through 6 ("Counting by Six is Sublime" to me works best).  The language songs include a Norwegian travelogue ("When in Norway") and, appropriately for Henriques, a wordsmith at heart, a celebratory ode to words themselves ("Vocabulary").

As on her debut, the only accompaniment is Henriques' piano, which she nimbly plays.  The age range may differ by section -- older kids probably won't find the number songs as interesting as the language and science ones -- but there's a sweet spot between the ages of 5 through 9.  Henriques has joined Justin Roberts and decided not to have her latest album streamed on Spotify, but you can stream samples on iTunes.  And, as with her debut, the album packaging from her brother Joel Henriques is lovely.

I think the thing I love most about The World Is A Curious Place To Live  is that Lori Henriques clearly practices what she sings, offering up celebrations of the world outside of ourselves.  Her jazzy-pop-by-way-of-Broadway-and-Carnegie-Hall is still unique in the world of kids music and worth being curious about.  Definitely recommended.

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

Review: Turn Turn Turn - Dan Zanes & Elizabeth Mitchell with You Are My Flower

Has there ever been a more high-profile collaboration between kids musicians than that of Dan Zanes and Elizabeth Mitchell?  The giants at the start of the kids music movement -- Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Ella Jenkins, Raffi -- don't appear in person on the others' albums.  And while collaboration is now the norm in kindie, with Mitchell especially as well as Zanes appearing on other artists' records, there is essentially no precedence for Turn Turn Turn , the brand-new album from the two kindie superstars.  (Aside from a Laurie Berkner duet with Mitchell on Berkner's holiday album, there's really nothing.)  It's as if Lady Gaga and Katy Perry teamed up for a new release, or maybe it's the kids music equivalent of Watch the Throne.  (And, not only that, the duo's touring together, too.)

All of which is to say the expectations for this album were probably pretty high in a lot of quarters, including this one.  So it took me a few listens to fully appreciate Turn Turn Turn, an album essentially recorded in a long weekend.  For those of you expecting the full-band musical travelogue experience of most of Zanes' Dan Zanes & Friends albums or the lush, mellow lo-fi indie folk-rock of Mitchell's albums with husband Daniel Littleton, daughter Storey, and friends as You Are My Flower, the sound is different.  That unadorned cover album photo, which looks like it could've been taken fifty years ago, is a pretty good pictoral representation of the music within.

The majority of the tracks are renditions of traditional songs, some of which will sound familiar to fans of both artists' previous work.  For example, "So Glad I'm Here," which Mitchell memorably recorded on You Are My Sunshine, here gets a funky banjo treatment.  I prefer the first treatment, easily one of my top five favorite Mitchell tracks, but I appreciate the attempt to mix it up.  Other songs will sound familiar just because they move in the same circles the artists have traveled in before -- the sea song "Sail Away Ladies" would've fit on Zanes' criminally unknown Sea Music, while "Raccoon and Possum" could have been recorded (differently, in all likelihood) by Zanes and Mitchell on many of their previous albums.  Mitchell fans may miss, however, the more modern not-obvious-until-recorded cover choices (Velvet Underground, Allman Brothers) on her previous albums.

There are six original tracks as well.  With "Honeybee," Mitchell's lone original, a gentle song with nifty wordplay that could easily be a lost Woody Guthrie track, she reminds the listener that for all her gifts as a song-interpreter, she has songwriting gifts, too.  (Don't hide them under bushel basket, Elizabeth!)  Zanes contributes five new songs.  I particularly like "Coney Island Avenue," a strutting, hand-clapping stroll through a local neighborhood -- a prototypical Zanes song.  "Now Let's Dance" is his best (and successful) attempt at a sing-along folk-dance tune, while "In the Sun" is a dreamy, mid-afternoon nap of a song that's probably the best actual duet here, a nice blend of their voices.  (Though "Shine," the closest thing to a modern pop song on the album -- though it's not very close at all -- is a close second.)

Suggesting an age range for Dan Zanes albums (and, to a lesser extent, Elizabeth Mitchell albums) is a fool's errand, so while it's not an album focused on toddlers and infants, kids of all ages should enjoy it.  As noted above, the instrumentation mostly eschews the fuller-band sound of DZ&F albums and fuzzy lo-fi rock of YAMF albums for a more restrained folk sound; look at that album cover again -- mandolin, guitar, tambourine, and ukulele.

Once you get past your preconceived notions of what this album should sound like (including this review), I think you'll find that Turn Turn Turn offers up many enjoyable moments.  There are a handful of dance songs for fans of Zanes' dance parties and some songs that showcase Mitchell's warm yet crystalline voice.  But the album's biggest strength is that this album of two of kindie's biggest stars features those musicians getting together to play songs humbly and joyfully.  Highly recommended.

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