Review: The Bottle Let Me Down: Songs for Bumpy Wagon Rides - Various Artists

Chicago's Bloodshot Records is known for for their insurgent country, or some other name for music that sounds like country but sounds nothing like Nashville. With their 2002 compilation The Bottle Let Me Down: Songs for Bumpy Wagon Rides, Bloodshot could easily have staked their claim to "insurgent kids music." (Or, even more marbly-mouthed, "y'all-kid-ternative.")

With a broad range of "adult" artists (from Alejandro Escovedo to Freakwater to Nora O'Connor and Steve Frisbie -- partner in Frisbie with Justin Roberts accomplice Liam Davis) and a collection of both kids' classics and originals, it's hard to summarize the 26-track, 63-minute album. But the one word that keeps coming back to me as I think of the CD is fun. On many kids' albums from "adult" artists, you get the feeling that the musicians are deigning to play this "kids' music," and it shows in a song that, well, isn't much fun to listen to. Not here -- the musicians are having fun playing these funds, and it shows. The Waco Brothers' spirited take on the folk classic, "The Fox," and the Asylum Street Spankers' punked-up bluegrass version of "I Am My Own Grandpa" shows no signs of "well, let's make a track for the kiddies." They're making tracks that any music fan would appreciate, kids not excluded. The Cornell Hurd Band's original "Don't Wipe Your Face On Your Shirt," is an amusing plea for respectability most parents will relate to, while Escovedo's live version of his "Sad & Dreamy (The Big 1-0)" (with the chorus of "I'm the big 1-0 / Candy just doesn't taste as sweet anymore") will ring bells with the tween set.

Like you would expect from an album produced by an "insurgent country" record label, many of the tracks are not sanitized. Carolyn Mark's fun retelling of "The Three Billy Goats Gruff" doesn't sand off the rough edges of the story, for example, and Devil in a Woodpile's swampy cover of Mississippi John Hurd's "Funky Butt," is just what you might expect from the song title. And while most tracks stay safely on the parental side of appropriateness, Robbie Fulks' "Godfrey" (about an sickly, unemployed magician) and Freakwater's inneuendo-filled "Little Red Riding Hood" are probably way on that other side. The parents themselves will probably like those songs while thinking repeatedly, "Should I fast-forward? I should probably fast-forward. Right? Tell me I'm right."

Some of the tracks are appropriate for kids as young as three, though the album is appropriate for kids who are as old as 10 as well. You can hear samples at any major online retailer.

In the end, this is a solid album with no weak tracks. Your kids won't even know that they're being exposed to a great collection of bands and songs, they'll just love these energetic renditions. And so will you. It's probably the best compilation of adult-musicians-doing-kids-music out there; its status as a minor classic (or even a major one) is deserved. Highly recommended.

British Kids' Music Scene Not Much More Than Belle and Sebastian

While the old saw about the awfulness of British cuisine may no longer be valid, perhaps the new saw is the awfulness of British kids' music

Well, according to one Times of London writer, who bemoans the state of British kids' music, while lavishing very evasive praise on the new Belle and Sebastian-curated compilation Colours Are Brighter.

While I really don't like the goal of making sure he "can take pride in the songs [his] kids like," I love the idea of creating a "back-story" to certain non-kids' CDs to get them more interested in the albums. In addition to praising Elizabeth Mitchell fave Vashti Bunyan and giving a backhanded compliment to They Might Be Giants, he also puts The Sippy Cups on his Small Ages-esque mixtape for kids.

Oh, and dude, "Furry Happy Monsters" is right here.

I should also note that the Colours Are Brighter website is now offering a free "Go Go Ninja Dinosaur" mp3 along with a "Jackie Jackson" game (which proves to me how old I am, 'cause I failed miserably at it).

News: Stephin Merritt To Release Kids' Music CD, Tour

Someone who's both a reader and reviewee of this site pointed out this Pitchfork article from late yesterday which notes that Stephin Merritt (through his side project the Gothic Archies) will be releasing a CD to accompany the Lemony Snicket books. The Tragic Treasury: Songs from A Series of Unfortunate Events will be released Oct. 10 (not 13th as in the article) and include 13 tracks, one for each book in the series (previously released on the audiobooks), plus 2 new bonus tracks.

Merritt and Snicket (who looks suspiciously like author Daniel Handler) will be making musical appearances in bookstores across the country in October and November.

Merritt is a prolific artist (he's a man whose Magnetic Fields group once released a triple-CD album entitled 69 Love Songs -- the title described it perfectly), so I'm curious to see how he'll do with the discipline imposed by set texts.

Follow-up: Link to Nonesuch's album page, stream of 3 songs from the album.

More follow-up: Kelly at Big A little a has a link to an... odd Stephin Merritt - Lemony Snicket interview in the Guardian.

Review: The Sunny Side of the Street

I work with someone who has a goal of learning something new, however small, every day. In that spirit, what I learned from "Getting To Know You," the opening track on John Lithgow's third album for kids, The Sunny Side of the Street (2006), is that his last name is pronounced as rhyming with "Miss Go" rather than "Hoosegow," which is how I'd always heard it in my head. So that, however small, was what I learned upon first listen.

What I knew already going in, and what the album shows repeatedly, is that Lithgow is a fabulous performer. His theatrical background is perfect for these songs, written for vaudeville or musicals in the '20s and '30s. On the best tracks, such as "Baby!" or "Ya Gotta Have Pep," Lithgow lets loose with theatrical abandon (I love the "whampa..." Lithgow unleashes in the middle of what has heretofore been a very mellow duet with Maude Maggart on "Baby!"). Lithgow has a sweet duet with Sherie Rene Scott on the closing track "Lullabye In Ragtime." The tunes are a nice selection of familiar and less-well-known, and the frisky orchestration is stellar, making the songs sound, while not modern, not 80 years old, either.

Downsides? Well, the duet with Madeleine Peyroux on "On the Sunny Side of the Street" (which I had hopes for) never really gels. It's interrupted by a bunch of kids, which is akin to asking Monet to paint some pretty cathedrals and then having some 7-year-olds from Rouen come in to make some improvements to the canvas. The kids chorus is fine, and in some cases gives Lithgow somebody (or many somebodies) to play off of, but my favorite tracks are those where the kids don't appear. And while some of the less-well-known songs are a joy to discover ("I Always Say Hello To A Flower"), others are much less interesting ("I'm A Manatee.")

I'm gonna peg this album as being of greatest interest for kids 3 to 7, though obviously most of these songs were originally written for adults and people of all ages. You can hear samples of the 37-minute album at the usual online suspects and see Lithgow's antics in the video for "Ya Gotta Have Pep".

The album will not change the mind of anyone who doesn't care how bright the lights are on Broadway -- if you are a rockist, you will not like this. Lithgow has recorded some fabulous renditions of these tunes, however, and while it's probably not going to be your favorite album, it's definitely worth trying at least once. Think of it as learning something new, musically at least.

Listen To This: Ben Fairfield

"Listen To This" is my brand-new category for music that doesn't really fit a review format but deserves a mention. I'm going to inaugurate it with music from Ben Fairfield, an artist out of Hawaii who, he says on his website, was inspired by the NPR story that drew many of you here. (I am sure that it was Justin Roberts and Brady Rymer who inspired him, not me or Melissa Block.)

Fairfield's music is acoustic guitar-accompanied folk-pop covering such kid-friendly topics as dogs, penguins, and homework. Lyrically, he's got an environmental/ecological bent, so if your kids interested in that, these tunes are perfect. He's not above silliness (his conversion of Shel Silverstein's "The Homework Machine" into song) or sweetness ("Goodnight"), though. (The friendliness of the first track, "Hello," may, however, puzzle some kids who've had Stranger Danger drilled into their heads.) The combination is somewhat a combination of Johnny Bregar and Jack Johnson. (Those are just the two artists whose musical and lyrical concerns struck me as familiar here.)

As a collection of songs, it doesn't work quite as well because of the relative same-ness of approaches, but the individual tracks are pretty strong. Try listening to "Hello," "It's Men That Try To Run the Universe," and "Goodnight" for a representative sample.

And drop him a line and tell him to get the CD pressed and to start working on the next batch of songs pronto.