I've never been a big Jack Johnson fan. Didn't dislike him, but just found his folky-guitar-based music too... languid for my tastes. As a result, I didn't necessarily have high hopes for his work on the soundtrack to the movie Curious George.
I needn't have worried. The Curious George soundtrack is a solid album of (mostly) children's music that appealed to me and will appeal to the kids.
The songs most likely to be enjoyed by adults and kids simultaneously are the ones where the band shakes off its (to put a negative spin on it) lethargy and really gets moving. The "3 R's," which rewrites "3 Is A Magic Number" into a celebration of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle," is a full-out jam that is destined to become a classic children's song recording. "Jungle Gym" and "Upside Down" are a couple other songs that move briskly and entertainingly. (The cover of the White Stripes' "We're Going To Be Friends," like the movie itself, polishes off the sharper edges of the source material. It's OK, but not revelatory.)
Johnson had to walk a fine line between entertaining his adult fans and engaging the young viewers and listeners. When Johnson throws his adult listeners under the bus to focus on the kids, he's written some great children's songs. "The 3R's" and "The Sharing Song" are superb examples of this. On other tracks such as "Upside Down" and "People Watching," Johnson neatly straddles that child/adult line with lyrics that can be read on multiple levels. (And, indeed, "Upside Down" is getting played on all kinds of different stations.)
Where the album fails slightly as an album is with the slower, more wistful tracks. "Wrong Turn" is a lovely song, and in the movie itself, it works quite nicely. But lyrics like "And I would like you to know / Although it seems sad to say / This was only the worst hour of my day" do seem a bit heavy for the youngest kids. A couple other tracks fall into this category.
Reading back on this review, the tone is a bit harsher than my overall feelings about the album. It's a good album with a few great kids' songs, and unless you dislike Jack Johnson's music, you're going to like this album. It's best for kids 3 through 7 and it's available darn near everywhere.
And as for your kids, well, if they're anything like my daughter, they'll say, upon first listen of the CD at home, "Hey, that's the Curious George music!" When I asked if she remembered it from the movie, she said, "No, we heard that at preschool!" I have a feeling her classroom isn't the only one with a copy...
Mary Had A Little Amp was originally released waaaaaaay back in, er, October 2004. OK, it really wasn't that long ago in the cosmic scheme of things. But if it's not quite the paleozoic era to the current mesozoic era, it does seem like it comes from a different time.
The big thing about the current wave of kid-comps (kids' music compilations) is that the CDs tend to be composed of songs recorded specifically for the CD. It's not a hard-and-fast rule, mind you, and some of the songs on those CDs aren't specifically "kids music," but, more often than not, when the artist or band went into the studio, they had a pretty good idea of who their audience was going to be. Or, at the very least, the track listing makes some sense.
Not so with Mary Had A Little Amp. The songs here seem to have been compiled as much by the artists' affinity for for the album's benefactors (proceeds go to support preschool education projects) as by the appropriateness of the songs. "We Walk," for example, is a perfectly kid-safe song from R.E.M. (or at least as far one can tell in Michael Stipe's earlier, mumblier phase), but its appropriateness for a kids-music album is somewhat remote. You can count Moby's "Anchovie" and "Sing Along" (the Blue Man Group along with Dave Matthews) as songs whose lyrics are reasonably kid-safe, but probably not of much interest to kids.
Which isn't to say there aren't some stellar tracks on here, they just tend to be the ones that are more suitable for a kids-comp. The Dixie Chicks' cover of "The Rainbow Connection" is almost worth the price of the CD by itself -- sweet, with sufficient banjo to make fans remember the original. Jack Johnson turns in an early, laid-back version of "The 3 R's," revved up later on the Curious George soundtrack. Madonna's "Little Star" is surprisingly good and Rosanne Cash's "How To Be Strong" is by far the best original.
The album is probably best-suited for kids ages 3 through 9, though I doubt any kid will really get into the whole CD, there's such diversity in age-range here. You can hear snippets all over the internet and here.
With an overall mellow mood and a collection of slightly older stars, this collection might make a good gift for your older sibling who had a child of their own a little after you did. While it's a decent lineup of artists, compared to some of the more kid-centered (and rockin') compliations that followed it, Mary Had A Little Amp is, well, a little unplugged.
