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.

Review: No! (Deluxe Edition) - They Might Be Giants

There may be better kids music albums released since the turn of the (twenty-first) century, there have been better-selling ones as well, but a pretty strong case can be made for saying that No! by They Might Be Giants is the single most important and most influential kids music album of the past decade or so.

Yes, today's kindie superstars like Dan Zanes, Laurie Berkner, Justin Roberts, Ralph's World, and more had all released an album (or more) for families before TMBG's first album foray out of the world of pints of beer and into the world of half-pints of milk.  And other artists like Trout Fishing in America, Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer (and many others preceding them) had been releasing albums for years.  But I think in terms of cultural impact (and, as a result, the impact on the genre itself), nothing matched that of the yellow-covered collection from Brooklyn's rockers.

The band is celebrating the tenth anniversary of the album's summer 2002 release with a deluxe edition of the album, adding on 7 bonus tracks, including one newly-recorded expanded version of a TMBG classic.  (More on that in a moment.)  It's easy to look back and say that the move into kids music was an obvious one for the band -- their songs often had a playful melodic sense and even though many of their songs had a darker undertone, some of their biggest hits ("Birdhouse in Your Soul," "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)") were completely kid-friendly.  But at the time, lots of people wondered exactly what the band was thinking, reaching for a kids' audience.

It was only after the album outsold their previous release (Mink Car, for adults, and released on September 11, 2001) that the band -- and the rest of the musical world -- realized that this was a genre that held much more financial and creative potential.  As the band's fans (like me) had grown up and become parents, the selections of kids music available to us were limited, and even more limited in terms of their sound.  With No!, the band thrust into some small part of the mainstream the idea that musical sounds for kids could be every bit as broad (and loud) as that for adults.

No! begat the band's deal with Disney, which yielded three excellent albums and lots of visibility for the band.  It also launched dozens of albums by musicians with names small and large.  No matter how long their creators had been working on them, I don't think TV shows like Yo Gabba Gabba! or Jack's Big Music Show or Imagination Movers get greenlit without the Brooklyn duo showing there was a market for this music and parental attitude.  I don't know if it is "cool" to make music for kids (and I don't really care personally), but it is no longer uncool and for an industry that is still often image-based, that is a not insignificant victory.

As for the album itself, it's so embedded in my brain (and the brains of my family), that trying to listen to the album again and listen critically after literally hundreds of spins is difficult.  My original review of the album, originally written nearly a decade ago, and one of the first posted to the website nearly seven years ago, while clunky in its narrative, still hits the key points: somewhat restricted instrumentation, skewed world viewpoint, and some excellent songs.  In retrospect (and after listening to maybe a couple thousand kids albums since then), one of its strongest aspects is the lack of any overt lesson songs.  It's not quite "no hugging, no learning," but the album's chief virtue is its own inquisitiveness and adventurousness, rather than any message within any specific song.

As for the bonus tracks, none are essential save one, a newly recorded version of "Alphabet of Nations."  This is a track, sharp listeners will note, that didn't make an appearance for another 3 years, on the album's follow-up, Here Come the ABCs.  No matter -- the Johns have taken their song, barely a minute long in its original form, and recorded the 2:30-version they play live.  More countries, even more fun.  The other six tracks are live versions of songs, some from No!, a couple from other albums.  They're good tracks, but none are essential -- feel free to download "Alphabet" and any of the other tracks whose samples move you.

That assumes, of course, that you already have the original.  If you don't, I'm not entirely sure how you've found your way to this site (or why you've read all this way).  If you don't, finish reading this paragraph and go get the thing.  Because in addition to being a culturally significant album, it's also a damn good one, too.  Inventive and witty, with no small amount of danceability.  Most days I'd argue it's not TMBG's best kids' album, but there are also days when I think that it is.  That's no small bar to leap.  I'm reading too much into this, but the fact that the next to last track on the original album is essentially kids' music's "A Day in the Life" makes No! the Sgt. Pepper's of kids' music.  Highly recommended.

Note: I received a copy of the album for possible review, as well as offered the opportunity to premiere tracks from the album.