This past weekend, Alastair started recording his first-ever album of kids' music -- or family music as he (and Dan Zanes) prefer to call it. It's going to be a mix of Alastair's original tunes and some covers of songs by American folk/blues greats like Woody Guthrie and Mississippi John Hurt. He played me some of the rough tracks last night, and I think it's going to be a great album -- the kind that adults will enjoy, too. Or at least not be driven insane by. (Of course, I'm somewhat biased.)
My sweetie's album aside, I think it's fair to say that we're in the midst of a children's music renaissance right now, and for this I am incredibly grateful. I truly feel for parents of the late eighties and early nineties, who had to sustain their children on an empty-calorie musical diet of Raffi, Hap Palmer and Wee Sing. There are just so many more options out there now -- the Putumayo albums, the former-rock-and-rollers-turned-kid-peformers albums (Dan Zanes, They Might Be Giants, etc.), the rediscovered digitally remastered special edition 70s classics albums (We've got Free to Be You and Me and The Point on CD), and the retro-cool rediscoveries (the Johnny Cash kids' album), to name only a few. I'm excited to check out more of these as the girls get more and more into listening to music.
But I'm also increasingly interested in identifying songs that aren't really "kids' music" per se, but that the girls like. We've hit on a few big winners so far: One is "Gone Gone Gone," from Raising Sand, the Allison Kraus and Robert Plant collaboration album. I really dig this album, and this song in particular. Plant lets a little bit of that old-time Zeppelin wailing rip and it makes me ever so slightly weak in the knees. It's also got a really good driving beat. When I play it in the car for the girls, I do this sort of dorky air-drumming and sing "boom boom boom, boom boom boom," along with the percussion. It caught on quick with Elsa and Clio, who started doing their own little air-drumming move and began referring to the song as "Boom boom" and, later, "Chicka boom." (A little cross-media confusion there.) Actually, they started requesting this one so much that I actually did get a little sick of it. Almost.
A more recent discovery is "Big Girls Don't Cry" by The Four Seasons. If you've been reading this blog for a while, then you already know that I am a serious, unrepentant Dirty Dancing fan. Well, this weekend on the way home from Maine, I put the soundtrack on because I was in the mood to sing along to something. When this song came on, Clio piped up: "It's a big girl song!" I asked, "Do you cry?" and she said, "No, I not crying." After it was over, she asked to hear the "Big Girl" song again. It may be a little early to say, but I predict that this one is going to be a big hit. Actually, a lot of stuff on the Dirty Dancing album has kid-friendly potential, ironically. There's "Be My Baby," for one (It's got a baby in it!). And "Stay," which features the line "Your mommy don't mind...and your daddy don't mind..." (Never mind what it's really about! It's got a mommy and a daddy!) I think it's probably advisable to stay away from "She's Like the Wind (Through my Tree)" -- but that has nothing to do with whether or not it's appropriate for children. More like whether or not it's appropriate that the song exists.
We've also got a couple of rad mix albums that friends of ours have put together for the girls, featuring such excellent non-kid-specific songs as "Octopus's Garden," "Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music, "Que Sera" sung by Doris Day, and "If You Want to Sing Out" by Cat Stevens. I'm planning to push these hard with the girls in the near future. I'm also thinking I need to go through my iTunes and make a giant playlist called "Kids' Songs that aren't really Kids' Songs." Or something slightly shorter. Any recommendations for songs to include? (Especially those that play into my personal predilection toward showtunes and 60s/70s music...?)
