Laurie Berkner! Webcast! Tonight!

Well, perhaps it's not quite as exciting as "Weird Al" Yankovic releasing his new song on iTunes days after its conception, but it's close, especially for the 3-to-5-year-old set and some of their parents, too.

Laurie Berkner will be hosting her first-ever webcast tonight at 8 PM Eastern. Go here to watch. Letters will be read, "Rocketship Run" will be played acoustically. Fun will be had (presumably) by all....

The Dorkiest Thing I'll Post All Week

I realize the week is early, and "dorky" probably covers a good third of my material here, but sometimes I get press releases that make me chuckle.

Your (and my) calendar might say that today is the first day of the month of September, but according to the folks at Sirius Kids Stuff, it's -- wait for it --
"Septem-Berkner!" Get it? Get it? Yeah, well, anyway, I laughed. Sometimes that's all it takes.

All month, the channel's featuring Laurie Berkner-related activities, including an in-studio performance. You can watch a video of "Victor Vito" here which makes me wonder if when Berkner's 60 she'll still have to play that song like the Rolling Stones are still playing "Brown Sugar" and "Satisfaction." I think I'd still rather watch Berkner.

Review: Rocketship Run - The Laurie Berkner Band

In this era when kids are supposedly growing up too fast, it isn't necessarily easy being Laurie Berkner. Even if they're not growing up any faster than their parents did, some kids born after her last release, 2002's Under a Shady Tree are already pretty much too old for Berkner.

So after a lengthy layoff reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino's after Pulp Fiction, here comes Laurie Berkner with her fifth album for kids, Rocketship Run. In many respects, the album bears the marks of someone successful -- check out the lovely album packaging, for example -- lots of major-label releases albums aren't produced with this level of care. And there are many layers to the production; suffice it to say, there are several songs with strings and orchestration in the mix.

Unlike the packaging, which looks far better than that on Berkner's first couple albums, the production doesn't always serves her well. "Walk Along the River," which Berkner first recorded for a CD accompanying her We Are the Laurie Berkner Band DVD, gets a children's chorus added to it. It's a beautiful, tiny little pop song, and the chorus just sort drags it down. There were times throughout the disk -- not always, just sometimes -- when I wished it was just Laurie and Susie and Brian (or, now, Adam) without everything else.

And while I'm kvetching, I might as well say that the album's traveling concept doesn't work all that well. It's a bit too loose to have much of an effect, and it doesn't help that the "Going on a Hunt" song -- probably the weakest song on the album -- is played 5 different times (albeit in different musical forms).

But those downsides are outweighed by Berkner's strengths -- the overall songwriting and her voice, which are undiminished here. "Mouse In My Toolbox" has got a driving chorus -- "There's a paw on my saw / and an eye on my drill / And her little tail is wrapped around my pliers" -- that will stay lodged in your brain for some time. "Five Days Old" is an obvious and worthy homage to Woody Guthrie's "One Day Old." "Candy Cane Jane" is a sweet tune that with its name alliteration and rhymes is almost as catchy as "Victor Vito." Berkner continues to write songs that are targeted to kids without so much as a wink or a nod to the parents, but still without driving those parents away.

I've also long felt that Berkner has one of the great voices in kids music, and she sounds fabulous here, especially on songs like "All Around My Room" or her cover of "Fly Me to the Moon" where it's basically her voice and guitar. She very much needs to continue to explore those kid-friendly covers of classic songs.

Credit is also due to Berkner for more fully integrating longtime collaborators Susie Lampert and Adam Bernstein into the album, most notably by including 5 of their songs on the disk. If none of them are quite as catchy as, say, "Walk Along the River," they're all good, particularly Lampert's "Pigbasket" and Bernstein's "Jump and Fly." You do feel like crediting the album to "The Laurie Berkner Band" (rather than just Berkner herself) is the right choice.

Kids ages 3 through 6 will most appreciate the music here. You can listen to a couple of the new songs at the band's Myspace page.

If there isn't a song as enduring as "We Are the Dinosaurs" or "Victor Vito" on this album, that's probably too high of a bar to set. Rocketship Run is Laurie Berkner's most consistent and ambitious album to date and should attract a whole new set of fans to her music. Here's hoping it's not another six years before her next release. Definitely recommended.

Laurie Berkner Does Have Nice Hair

Sometimes I get stuff in my inbox and don't get a chance to post until the next day. So in today's first example, I present to you Laurie Berkner's Soundcheck performance. Now, some people have spent almost as much time talking about the sponsor -- SUAVE! A Unilever brand! Plus Walmart! -- as on the show.

And so in response, I'll probably do the same. To be clear, aside from a five-second ad at the start of the full performance and a tiny logo in the lower right-hand corner and occasional glimpses of "Suave" from the rotating camera, it's definitely not a hard-sell. I'm not a fan of corporate sponsorship -- as far as corporate sponsorships go, this isn't bad.

Anyway, tracklist for the 20-minute video is after the jump. There are four videos from this week's release Rocketship Run, plus two Laurie classics. The interview, as others have mentioned, is worth watching.

1. Candy Cane Jane
2. Going On a Hunt
3. Mouse In My Toolbox
4. Rocketship Run
5. Victor Vito
6. We Are the Dinosaurs

Review in Brief: Victor Vito - Laurie Berkner

Laurie Berkner might just be the biggest superstar in kids' music. Plenty of artists can claim the hipster cred, a number of artists (or at least characters) certainly have the merchandising going on, but Berkner's the closest thing to a superstar (who's a real person) the genre has.

Which explains why I still feel the need to review a CD of hers that is, oh, 9 years old at this point. Victor Vito, Berkner's third album, was released in 1999, just about the time that the genre really started to come back. For some reason, it never became a staple in our household the way her first two CDs did, and I as I complete my Laurie Berkner review work here (for the time being), I went back to see if I could figure out why.

It's certainly not because there aren't good songs here. The title track is a stone-cold, know-it-from-the-first-spin classic. An earwormy tune, silly (but understandable) rhymes, it's one of those songs that you could retire happy knowing you just wrote that one song. But it's joined by a number of other great originals -- the simply lullaby "Moon Moon Moon," the stomp-encouraging "Boots," the quietly hysterical "The Goldfish," with its classic line, "Wait a minute, we're FISH!" Berkner also focuses somewhat on kids' feelings, as on "The Story of My Feelings" (natch) and "I'm Not Perfect." It's not easy to write songs like that which take a necessarily direct approach for preschoolers and have it not sound incredibly dull to adults, but Berkner succeeds. And Berkner's renditions of traditional songs such as "Froggie Went A-Courtin'" and "Zodiac" -- where the fat man is not from Calgary as Raffi suggested long ago, but from Tennessee -- show off her fine voice and simple but organic musical arrangements. (This may be the album that most closely shows off her debt to Raffi's path -- she is indeed a worthy successor to his mantle.)

If there's a downside to the album, is that it's too long. The album is exactly 60 minutes long, and it seems about twice as long as it needs to be. There are two pretty good 30-minute CDs (or one incredible one and one decent one) to be found here, but at an hour, there just aren't quite enough great songs or musical variety to sustain interest over the entire time. I also don't think it's quite as goofy as her first two CDs, which was one thing I always appreciated about them, but that's probably a personal taste thing.

As with Berkner's other albums, this one is targeted at kids ages 2 through 6. Samples of the tracks are all over the web. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of families have made Victor Vito a common part of their family's musical rotation. And while our family might not be among those, I'd be a fool not to recognize how many excellent songs can be found here. Definitely recommended.