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    Entries in Recess Monkey (13)

    Wednesday
    Jun062012

    Radio Playlist: New Music June 2012

    Time again to update the Zooglobble radio station, covering assorted tracks collected this spring.  You can see my April 2012 playlist here.

    This playlist airs in the mid-afternoons (West Coast time), but if you can't listen in the afternoon, the tracks are scattered throughout the day, too. The listing below is in alphabetical order; the on-air play order is totally random (due to Internet music restrictions).

    "Handbone" - Big Don (Big Don's Brand New Beat)
    "Oh My Dog" - Billy Kelly (Oh My Dog)
    "Come With Me" - Dan Dan Doodlebug (Dan Dan Doodlebug)
    "May The Trail Rise Up To Greet You" - Dave Stamey (Putumayo Kids Presents - Cowboy Playground)
    "Fortunate Mistake" - Dog On Fleas (Invisible Friends)
    "I Used To Think" - Duke Otherwise (Creepy Crawly Love)
    "Your Body Is A Zoo" - Ellen And Matt (It's Love)
    "Ice Cream Sunday" - Groovy David (Kiddie Lounge)
    "Swingin' Little Duck (Alexander Calder)" - Hope Harris (Picasso, That's Who! and so can you!)
    "My Neighborhood" - Johnny Bregar (My Neighborhood)
    "I Like Summer" - KBC (Milk Money)
    "Raised By Trolls" - Key Wilde & Mr. Clarke (Here Comes Chuckers)
    "Alphabet City" - KinderAngst (KinderAngst)
    "Itsy Bitsy Spider" - Kori Pop (Songs For Little Bean)
    "Lines And Dots" - Lucky Diaz And The Family Jam Band (A Potluck)
    "Elephant Shrew" - Michael Hearst (Songs For Unusual Creatures)
    "Happy Place" - Mista Cookie Jar & The Chocolate Chips (Ultramagnetic Universal Love Revolution)
    "Rad" - Play Date (Fun Fun Records Sampler)
    "I Could See (Magically)" - Recess Monkey (In Tents)
    "give it away" - renee & jeremy (a little love)
    "Evening Star" - Steven Elci & Friends (Crayons In A Box)
    "Put 'Em Away (Featuring Marty Beller)" - Sugar Free Allstars (All On A Sunday Afternoon)
    "Benjamin Franklin" - Yosi (Benjamin Franklin)
    "Oh My!" - Your Imaginary Friend Your (Imaginary Friend)
    Wednesday
    May092012

    Kindie-Chartin': Kids Place Live's Top Songs of 2011

    Last year I reviewed the most popular songs of the year on Sirius-XM's Kids Place Live radio show.  It was an imprecise attempt to gauge the popularity of artists and songs on a national level.  Given that the show has nearly 17,000 fans on its Facebook page, its listenership is not small.

    Almost every weekend, the channel broadcasts its "13 Under 13" show, a Casey Kasem for the kiddos which counts down the week's top songs.  As noted last year, the list is not totally objective -- there is a subjective nature to the list which takes into the station's directors' sense of buzz, for example, associated with each song.  There's a practical limit to the number of times the station can play a song in a week without annoying its audience through oversaturation, a limit which may not totally reflect the demand for it via listener requests.

    Having said that, there does appear to be a rational relationship between the rankings and actual airplay.  For example, the most recent "13 Under 13" had the Board of Education's "Why Is Dad So Mad?" at #1, Keller Williams' "Mama Tooted" at #7, and Caspar Babypants' "Sugar Ant" at #14.  The total number of airplays (excluding double-counts) for the week that roughly corresponds to KPL's week, according to Dogstar Radio, was 25, 16, and 13,  respectively.

    Once again, I used the Kids Place Live Fans page as the source of my data, making assumptions regarding chart placement when Gwyneth wasn't able to record the list for the week.  I counted all songs which first charted in 2011.  (Note: some are still charting in 2012.)

    Now, all the standards and caveats from last year's effort still applies -- there are data gaps, it's not perfect, and may or may not be the best songs of the year.  But these are the songs to which, once they started getting some airplay, kids really responded to.

    I'm presenting here the Top 13 songs of 2011, a year-long "13 Under 13," as it were.  That's mostly because the data lent itself to a nice division.  (It also makes for a nice comparison to KPL's own summary from New Year's weekend.)  And due to the data gaps, I'm presenting them in three relatively distinct groups points-wise, ordered alphabetically within each group.  So here goes:

    Top 6

    • Baron von Rumblebuss - "Did You See (What the Cat Dragged In)?"
    • Caspar Babypants - "Butterfly Driving a Truck"
    • Todd McHatton - "I Think I'm a Bunny"
    • Mike Phirman - "Chicken Monkey Duck"
    • Barbra Streisand (Llamanator Mix) - "Duck Sauce"
    • Keller Williams - "Mama Tooted"

    Notes: the McHatton and Williams songs are still charting, more than half a year after they first made the chart.

    Next 5

    • Blue October - "Jump Rope"
    • Seth Decker and the Missing Piece - "Cucumber Canoe"
    • The Fray - "Mahna Mahna"
    • Joe McDermott - "Kitty Fight"
    • Recess Monkey - "Flapjacks"

    Final 2

    • Cars 2 - "Collision of the Worlds"
    • Recess Monkey - "Grandmom's House"

    Note that Jonathan Coulton's "The Princess Who Saved Herself," which made the Top 5 list last year, would have made this list had it been expanded to Top 15.  It is without much doubt (according these lists, anyway), the most popular song of the past couple years.

    Finally, there are always some artists who don't score massive hits, but get multiple hits.  So, the top 10 artists if you look at songs which first charted in 2011, listed alphabetically, are:

    • Baron von Rumblebuss
    • Caspar Babypants
    • Joe McDermott
    • Todd McHatton
    • Mike Phirman
    • Recess Monkey
    • ScribbleMonster
    • Secret Agent 23 Skidoo
    • Barbra Streisand (Llamanator Mix)
    • Keller Williams

    Thank you for letting me indulge my inner numbers nerd just a little bit.

    Wednesday
    May092012

    Kindiefest, Schmindiefest

    Kindiefest is over, but the memories linger on.  Did we have a great time?  Yeah.  But I always come back from Brooklyn with ideas of how I wish my Kindiefest experience had been different.

    Don't get me wrong - I think Kindiefest is pretty darn great as it is; to make changes is akin to pulling a thread in a bulky sweater -- doing so would unravel the whole enterprise.  So consider these add-on suggestions, from somewhat serious to slightly less so.

    KindieCamp: There is a big opportunity for musicians who are expert in a particular area to share that expertise with others in a concentrated format, far more than a 60-minute panel or even 2-hour chat can do.

    Would it be possible, for example, to have a video camp with Recess Monkey?  Tell a dozen artists to bring an idea for a video, a camera of some sort for capturing video, and a computer of some sort for editing video to Seattle for 48 hours.  For a relatively low cost -- $1,000 per artist/band? -- the band -- known for its raft of low-budget, slick-looking videos -- could help other musicians formulate, create, and edit their own video, giving them both the fish and teaching them how to fish.

    Or perhaps Jeni and Jim and Keli from Jiggle Jam go over specific details and budgets in putting together their own music festival.  Nothing too trade-secret-y, but enough info to get musicians (or interested families) going by themselves (with a follow-up all-access pass visit to the Jam over Memorial Day weekend to see it in action).

    Songwriting weekends, app-development weekends -- there are many possibilities.  The added benefit?  Spending time with a core group of people working through the same issues you are.  Building capacity and connections.

    KindieTalk: Hey, I love the panels - and as a perennial moderator, I appreciate their inclusion.  But as a non-musician, I don't get as much out of panels on, say, breaking into TV, as musicians might.  There might be some news/big-picture value to some panels, and sometimes they generate big laughs, but I don't take much away from them.  I often spend the majority of the panel time outside in the Littlefield courtyard gabbing with musicians and other attendees (or inside chatting loudly, sometimes to the chagrin of Kindiefest organizers).  It's where I learn most of what I take home with me - what's going on with the new album, how much touring are they doing, who they're recording with.

    On top of that, the conversations at the end of the evenings on Friday and Saturday night are often highlights of the weekend for me.  They're funny, insightful, and, well, more honest than the panels, which for obvious reasons tend to avoid the warts of the business.  When I come stuffed to the gills with ideas, it's from these after-hours and sideline conversations.

    Add to that the fact that there are tons of people I would have loved to have had conversations with and didn't, or people who might have wanted to catch up with me and didn't, and it contributes to a feeling that there was a lot more I could have spent time with.

    Is it possible to have a conference that doesn't consist, you know, of anything that a conference typically has - panels, keynotes, name tags?  Can you have a conference with a big gaping hole at its center?  Probably not.  But I could probably definitely fill 48 hours just talking and listening one-on-one and in small groups.

    KindieSing: As nice as it was to hear 10 artists on Saturday night and 8 on Sunday afternoon, the downside was the artists -- more so on Saturday night, not so much on Saturday -- didn't get a lot of time to play, to settle into a groove.  And the audience was similarly short-changed.  I've never been to a performing arts showcase, one of those two- or three-day affairs where bookers from across the country watch acts perform, aside from Kindiefest, which is a shorter version of that.  And it strikes me that extending the length would make it less likely that other artists would spend as much time listening, singing, and dancing along.  It's one of the great joys of the conference dedicated to making music for kids (and families) that the artists in the audience often act as joyfully as the kids they normally play for.  So much harmony and clapping along.

    MindyFest: Someone e-mailed me after the conference asking if Sirius-XM Kids Place Live's Mindy Thomas could be assigned to every panel next year.  I totally agree.  Mindy is a hoot and a half, and not only on my panel when she spent most of the time audibly wondering whether she should say something, then saying it.  She's a genuinely nice person who bears the burden of being the person everyone wants to talk with lightly and with good humor.  So why not make it all Mindy, all the time?

    KindieFelt: I just want to echo what Jack Forman and I said before we introduced Hand Aid's "Felt Around the World" (thanks, Kindiefest organizers!) -- next year, a panel of puppets.  Tell me you wouldn't pay to see that.  Conference gold, my friends, conference gold.

    Monday
    Apr302012

    Red Eyes and Nemeses: Kindiefest 2012

    There are relatively few benefits of living on the West Coast from a Kindiefest perspective.  It's a long plane flight, which means reduced flexibility in choosing how you get to Brooklyn, how long you stay, and what you do when you get there.

    One advantage, however, is that you get a 5-hour flight.  That's not so great when you're going there anticipating the conference (or when you have to do it on a red-eye as I did this year).  But when you're flying back, it's a lot of time to sit and think about all that you heard during the weekend.

    It is hard to overestimate just how much listening one does at Kindiefest.  There are the panels, of course - those are more typically geared toward musicians, but if you are more broadly interested in how one carves out a career as kids musician, a non-professional musician can find nuggets of things to ponder.

    Besides the panels, there is all the music.  The showcase performances on Saturday night, the public festival on Sunday -- it's more than 7 hours of music in total, from all sorts of genres and all around the country.

    And depending on your personality or need, you can spend more time than either of those just listening to others in one-on-one (or more) talks. Conversations are two-way, of course, but as a member of the media who isn’t looking to do interviews but meets a lot of artists who want to say ”hi” or tell me about their album plans or just introduce themselves, I do a lot of listening then, too.  It's enough to make you want to see a museum or go out for a run on Sunday morning, neither of which I got to do this year.

    What did I do at this year’s Kindiefest?  Well, I got into Littlefield, the conference's home for the past 3 years, about 12:15 PM Saturday after the aforementioned red-eye, so I missed the keynote on Friday night and the post-talk schmoozing.  Which meant there was even more schmoozing to do in the limited amount of time I was there.  I did a lot of it -- seeing old friends, like Jeff and Dave and meeting folks I had previously known only through the magic of the Internet (hi, Jeff Giles!). I also talked with a lot of musicians and booking artists and PR folks.  I don't think I talked with every single one of the 350 or so record-setting number of attendees, but there were times when I felt that I did.  The only way I know I didn't is that there were folks that I wanted to talk to whom I realized on the flight home I didn't.

    Late in the afternoon, I moderated a lively panel on The State of Kindie, a free-flowing discussion on all things kindie music.  An hour-long discussion is way too short to even scratch the surface of the various topics covered, such as what's improved over the past 10 years (too much to mention), what concerns still remain (sometimes a lack of diversity in audiences), and whether or not the Grammys matter.  On top of that, people gave their one piece of advice to artists.  (Mine had to do cooperating and competing, out of which the notion of nemeses -- that one person who brings out the best in you in competition -- took hold.)  If this description sounds dry, I assure you the panel itself was not, as the panelists were funny and engaged.

    The showcase was even more crowded this year, with 10 different artists taking the stage.  The number of artists meant that the performances themselves were shorter than in past years.  There were way too many (and probably too brief) to adequately give them all justice in a review, but a handful of memories from the evening:

    -- Renee & Jeremy captivating the audience with their chilled-out lullabies (not to mention Chris Ballew joining in on their version of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Give It Away).  For those of you wondering if the duo sounds as good live as they do on record, the answer is an unequivocal "yes."

    -- Speaking of Chris Ballew, I was so glad to see Caspar Babypants play live.  As you might expect give how long he's been performing, he's very good at holding an audience's attention with nothing more than a voice and a guitar.

    -- Lori Henriques playing a solo piano set, including a great new song, "Dinosaur," which was great as a kids' song about a dinosaur and also as a metaphorical song about a relationship breaking up (that was, to be clear, my interpretation and not -- I checked -- Henriques' intent).

    -- Mista Cookie Jar put on an energetic performance with Ava Flava, the youngest performer of the night, rapping and singing.  All that and a roller-skating backup dancer.

    -- Elska's performance, which between the music (electronic), costumes (sewn), and songs (fanciful), was the most eclectic and unusual of the night.

    -- It is always good to see Dan Zanes perform; this time he eschewed his ”Friends” for a different set of friends, the Latin band Bomba Yo.  There was a 20+ (er, 10+) minute song featuring one of the band's female members dancing in front of the stage, then the pink-tutu-ed Sarah Shannon of The Not-Its joining in, then other women, then Chris Ballew, Rudy Trubitt - even I ended up joining in (shyly) near the end.

    On a related note, I must say (again?) that one of the things I will always love about the Kindiefest showcase is that there is nothing like an audience of musicians for crowd harmonizing and fill-in hand-clapping.  Does my harmonizing, fill-in hand-clapping soul good.

    After the showcase and some chatter at the venue, a large group of us went to a bar a couple blocks away and continued the conversations we'd all been having all day.  Artists, media, bookers, etc. -- while I learn stuff from the panels, I learn much more from these informal conversations.

    I woke up too late and was moving too slowly to be able to take a jog through Prospect Park, so instead I went to see Recess Monkey play at 92Y TriBeCa.  I realized I hadn't seen them play live in a couple years, so I got to hear some newer tunes, including 3 off their upcoming album.  They are a fine-tuned machine playing live at this point.  They are, I would note, the model of the new kindie band.  Skilled musicians and songwriters, talented at more than just music (note how many videos they make), and always seeking new opportunities to have their music heard (they're playing with a circus, for cryin' out loud).  They are good nemeses for other musicians to have, though it's hard to curse them.

    I skedaddled back to Brooklyn for the public showcase. Again, too many bands (and I missed Apple Brains, SteveSongs, and almost all of KBC Kids), so I'm not going to provide individual comments, but I will note that the hard work of publicity for the event paid off.  What was often a somewhat lightly attended event at least early in the afternoon in past years was completely packed when I walked in around 12:45.  Good to know word got out.

    Why do I spend so much time talking about an industry-only conference, you might ask, particularly if you're not in the industry.  It's because this is one of the most significant events of the year and what transpires here leads to stuff you’ll end up enjoying for years to come.  Plans are hatched, songs are written, connections are made that will lead to some awesome experiences for kids and their families.  I'm sure I know but a small amount of everything that results from this gathering of artists, but even if you never come to Brooklyn, this weekend matters.

    Hats off to the organizers, thanks for asking me to join y'all again.  Totally worth the red eyes.

    Tuesday
    Apr102012

    Video: "Lemonade" - Recess Monkey

    In Tents album coverRecess Monkey's new circus-themed album In Tents is out on June 19, and they're really gearing up the promotional process.  Last week brought the video for "The Dancin' Bear," and this week's it's a video for the zippity-doodah sound of "Lemonade" (not to mention a preview copy of the album in my mailbox). Besides featuring some highfalutin' words like "dehydration" and "upsell," it also features lemon puppets with googly eyes.  I'm pretty sure you can never go wrong with lemon puppets with googly eyes.

    Recess Monkey - "Lemonade" [YouTube]