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Rockin' or Huskin' corn?

Farmer Jason is set release his latest kids record, Nature Jams on February 7th. It will be the debut release for the brand new record label and entertainment channel, MyKaZooTV.

Farmer Jason was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule to chat with us about the new record and MyKaZooTV.

Farmer Jason: For starters the two guys running it, Rick Dobbis and Richard Ellis are really sharp, very experienced business men.  They’ve run major record companies. Right off the bat you have these guys who don’t have false assumptions about what they can and can’t do. They are very committed to bringing quality music to families. The family music industry needs a good record label. There are some, but not enough. This should help without a doubt. It’s a strong idea with lots of potential.

Dadnabbit: Similarities and differences between releasing a Jason & the Scorchers record and a Farmer Jason record?

Farmer Jason: Certainly the Farmer Jason world, in terms as creating songs as catchy as possible is the substantial difference but the energy level is about the same. The exuberance with a Scorchers record is still there with a Farmer Jason record. Let’s have fun and break some barriers.

Dadnabbit: Does having a good cup of coffee in the morning help decide if you’re going to write a Scorchers or a Farmer Jason song?

Farmer Jason: Most of the time it is project driven. I know I have a project in front of me and that’s what I write. I don’t tend to write songs all the time, I tend to write for projects so it’s not as schizophrenic as you might think.

Dadnabbit: The first Farmer Jason record was an accidental success, that had no preconceived notion about it. How do you follow it up, knowing how high you’ve set the bar?

Farmer Jason:  I think with Nature Jams, it’s the first Farmer Jason record where I have to meet previous expectations. Thankfully I have 30 years of history trying to do that w/ the Scorchers so doing it for Farmer Jason comes relatively easy.  Anything I release will be compared to the first Farmer Jason record and I’m fine with it.

Dadnabbit: The guest list on Nature Jams looks like a hip-hop record with different guests on each track.

Farmer Jason:  Some of the songs were written and then I tried to find an artist that would fit. But some were custom made. “Take A Hike” for example I knew right away would be a perfect song for Mike Mills (R.E.M.) I have know him for years and his personality. But primarily, the songs are written first then the  guests are added later on, with who I thought would fit the chemistry of the song.

Dadnabbit: How has your friendship with Todd Snider developed into him becoming a regular on Farmer Jason records?

Farmer Jason: His first show in Nashville was opening for my band in 1992. The Farmer Jason collaborative effort has really grown organically. Todd doesn’t have children. But there is something about his personality and tone of voice that connects with both parents and children listening to the records. Even little 3 year old kids get the message that is Todd Snider. It’s always a high point on the record. It’s just a spontaneous party when he’s in the studio.

Dadnabbit: How accepting were Scorchers fans to seeing you write kids music?

Farmer Jason:  We grew Farmer Jason initially via the Scorchers audience; some of them even have grandchildren now. But lots of the Farmer Jason fans have little to no knowledge of Jason & The Scorchers. It has honestly help grow the Scorchers audience. We were a cult band.

Dadnabbit: Is there a freedom to writing kids music over a Jason & The Scorchers song?

Farmer Jason:  One the great blessings of being Farmer Jason is walking into a room full of 4 year olds and having no idea what to expect. It truly is spontaneous. Being Farmer Jason allows for a much bigger artistic freedom.

Dadnabbit: How did Jason & The Scorchers end up as a guest on Nature Jams?

Farmer Jason: I knew making a guest record without the Scorchers would be a crime. I think it is a magical track. When our drummer is talking about glaciers in a Swedish accent, it is really a magic moment.

Dadnabbit: Few children’s artists’ have intros on their songs. Why have you chosen to have those on your records?

Farmer Jason:  There is always a debate about doing intros. Some people really don’t want to hear introductions after the first time. I know some kids have memorized the introductions; it’s something kids don’t seem to mind. I have always felt there should be some type of education going on in the songs and on this album I think there are some strong educational moments in the intros.

Dadnabbit: It’s becoming harder and harder to make a living music as most money is made on live shows. Has making kids’ music been financially beneficial to you?

Farmer Jason:  I make a living off of my music. Luckily we’ve been able to do enough live shows and make money doing it. I’m very fortunate to be able to make a living with what I love to do, playing music. Farmer Jason is the center of my career and I’ll be playing live shows for kids for as long as possible.

Dadnabbit: As you write songs for your kids, do you find yourself writing for older kids as your own kids get older?

Farmer Jason:  I think the new record is primarily written for slightly older kids 6-12 years old which is my daughters age range. You can follow along on my three albums and see me writing for older kids each time, but for the next record I think I’ll go back to more a preschool aged focus.

For all things Farmer Jason, check out FarmerJason.com

Ozomatli is not the only band on the album. Children’s music staples They Might Be Giants, The Wheepies, Rebecca Frezza and others are all featured on the album.  In addition, the album features songs produced in-house by ‘PBS Kids’. Those songs, while fine, don’t stand out like the tracks from established artists on the album.

Lots of different topics are covered on this album: Camouflage, Gravity, Vowels, Pronouns, Weather, Seeds and lots of others.

Every track is barely :60 seconds long.  So expect to see a lot of these in between shows on PBS and Sprout.

Check out the Ozomatli song Opposable Thumbs.

and the video for Pronouns

Track list for the album
1. Opposable Thumbs – Ozomatli
2. Five Senses – Ozomatli
3. Camouflage – Pbskids
4. Navigation – The Weepies
5. Matter – Steve Songs
6. Jump, Jump, Jump – Rebecca Freeza Big Truck
7. Gravity Always Brings Me Down – The Weepies
8. Nocturnal, Diurnal – Pbskids
9. Weather – Pbskids
10. Seeds – Pbskids
11. The Three R’s – Pbskids
12. Practice – Ozomatli
13. Pronouns – Ozomatli
14. Vowels  – Steve Songs
15. Share a Story  – They Might Be Giants

The album is available on Itunes and Amazon.

They’ve spawned. Satisfied with their dominance of American popular culture for a while, the Zhu Zhu Pets want more. More! This week, the Zhu Zhu Pets begin their multimedia empire in earnest. They’re going to have a float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. And on that float will be pop singer Savannah Outen, a YouTube star and Radio Disney sensation. Outen will be singing songs (with Zhu Zhu Pets and 130 hand-picked young singers) from the Zhu Zhu Pets new animated movie The Quest for Zhu, which stars a bunch of Zhu Zhu Pet characters singing familiar, kid-friendly pop and rock classics, along with originals by Outen and American Idol finalist Thia Megia. And that’s the music part of the media phenomenon: the soundtrack to Quest for Zhu.

I know, I know. Likable, chubby, CGI rodents with high pitched voices performing “What I Like About You,” “Celebration,” “Let’s Groove” and “ABC.” Yes, I know. It’s…familiar. But song choice is important. The Chipmunks, in their latest incarnation, which is what matters to you, the parent of a child, are horrible. The boy Chipmunks are smug and crass. The girl Chipmunks are sexed-up, lazy girl stereotypes. I’d much rather hear the Zhu Zhu Pets sing “ABC,” a song originally sung by children, to children, then hear the Chippettes tell their boyfriends to put a ring on it. Plus Outen and Megia have nice voices, and know their strengths: there’s nothing wrong with innocuous kiddie-pop, and something musical for kids to have of their very own.

Since the goal of the video game is “use the player’s rhythm to bring the Antarctic landscape to life. Use dance moves to stun enemies and help recruit other penguins to join the cause.” The pairing of Ozomatli is almost too perfect, they’ve been making music that has made people move for 15+ years.  This soundtrack is no different. “Get On The Dance Floor” was put on repeat after my daughter’s first listen. It took us at least 4 more listens until we could move on to the equally infectious “Flip Flap”. Not to judge, but if you can’t dance around the house to this album with your kids, you’ve got issues.

As they do with most of their albums, this one is bilingual with a mix of English and Spanish songs. “Bailar Pinguino” (Dancing Penguin) and “Mas Campana” (More Bell) are two and you better believe “Mas Campana” features some cowbell.  Even the opening track “Dynamite” goes back and forth between English & Spanish. The album is full of all original tracks, except a cover of Basement Jaxxs’ “Do Your Thing.”

If Ozokids is anything like what they feed our ears on Happy Feet Two: The Videogame, parents and kids are in for a real treat in 2012.

If you are on spotify, you can listen to the album here.

Track list:
1. Dynamite
2. Get On The Dance Floor
3. Flip Flap
4. Bailar Pinguino
5. Go Crazy
6. Are You Ready?
7. Scatman
8. Your Hand In Mine
9. Penguin’s Life (feat. Lil P’nut)
10. Do Your Thing
11. Happy Bird
12. Mas Campana

It’s not every day that a kids record comes to your desk with a song called “River of Blood.” Of course, the song is about your circulatory system, and the chorus is catchy all get out. “The River of Blood keeps on flowin’ / The River of Blood keeps on going.”

Musically, the band displays a mix of old school traditional music of ragtime, blues, jazz, swing and numerous others. “The Golem” is a klezmer-style song that will have you singing “Listen to the big feet go bum! bum! That’s the sound of the Golem when he comes” at random parts of the day. The chorus is so good, it gets stuck in your head after the first listen.

Songs about Abigail Adams, Marie Curie and Sacagawea are other topics included on Strange Dees, Indeed. Ever heard of Phineas Gage before? Neither had I, but that didn’t stop the Dees from writing a song about him. Cliff Notes version: He survived an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain’s left frontal lobe.  Like I said, not your typical kids’ music fare.

Strange Dees, Indeed is different, unique and impossible not to fall in love with.

This album is geared towards older kids; most of the lyrical content will fly over the head of kids under four years old. Curious about how these songs came about and interested in helping educate your kids on the topics covered in the songs? Read with your kids, straight from the band, plus lyrics right here.

Buy the new CD, straight from their site. Listen to the tracks below.

Even by the relaxed standards of kindie rock, the Deedle Deedle Dees are wild, woolly, and wonderfully eclectic, a hard-rocking crew of roots musicians who just so happen to record music that makes sense for a family audience. Once I saw them leading a crowd through a rousing singalong of “Tub-Tub-Ma-Ma-Ga-Ga,” I was hooked forever. Here, listen:

Needless to say, I’ve been waiting on tenterhooks for the Dees’ new release, Strange Dees, Indeed, and it does not disappoint — it’s a rollicking blend of history and hooks unlike anything you’ll hear anywhere else. Truly, these are strange Dees…but strange isn’t bad. In fact, in this case, it’s so, so good.

I’ve been idly talking to Lloyd Miller of the Dees about doing an interview for months now, and we finally got around to setting aside 15 minutes for a chat about the new record last week. Here’s what was said:

Aside from the fact that the new album was produced by the mighty Dean Jones, what made Strange Dees, Indeed different from your last record?

I think this record sounds more like we do as a real band. At night, we do shows that aren’t for kids — we do klezmer, and swing, and R&B, jazz, all sorts of stuff. We get pretty raucous. I talked to Bill Childs before we started recording this album, and one of the things he said was “I think the last two records were good, but they don’t really capture your live feel.”

So that’s what we were going for, and I think we got it for the most part. Not only the live sound, but the wide range of sounds we have. Songs like “The Golem” and “Mayor LaGuardia’s Stomach” — we’ve been wanting to get at those sounds for awhile now. There are a lot of different flavors in there that weren’t in the past.

I’ve heard from a number of artists that they feel a greater freedom to be eclectic for the family music audience, but you guys take that to a completely different level.

Yeah, we get bored really quickly. And Dean was good for that approach, too, because we built a lot of these songs in pieces, and he came up with a lot of new sounds. It opened up all these different options besides your standard bass, guitar, drums, and keyboards.

Well, it isn’t just musically. You cover a lot of lyrical ground that’s off the beaten path, too.

Yeah. I mean…the songs on this album have been the result of a lot of different projects we’ve been involved in over the past two years. School writing projects as well as this series of monthly variety shows we’ve hosted. Each of those shows had a different theme, so I’d write songs for them — topics like, you know, bike safety and folklore. Not everything was written that way, but these are sort of a mashup of the best of everything we’ve come up with lately.

That’s a great way of writing for an album.

I was nervous before we started, because I didn’t know what kind of kids’ record it would be. There isn’t really a big singalong number like “Nellie Bly.” I mean, kids like these songs, and they listen to them, but they don’t fit into that same sort of mold. Finally, I just accepted that these are the songs we’d written, and the songs we like. The band was really more excited about recording these songs than we’ve ever been going into an album.

My landlord is Roy Nathanson of the Jazz Passengers, and he was one of the first people I played it for. Within the first five seconds of “Phineas Gage,” he said, “This is already better than your last record. No one’s gonna buy it, but this is art. You know, Lloyd, this is not a kids’ record.” And I was like, “Yeah, I know.” And he said, “No, but that’s good!”

I want to circle back around a couple of things you’re talking about here. First, I think Bill had some sage advice for you, because the Dees have a live energy unlike anyone else on the kindie scene. It’s almost aggressive in a way.

That comes from a lot of places, including the people we play for. Last year, we played at the Many Hands release concert, and there were a lot of other artists there — you know, people like Dan Zanes and Elizabeth Mitchell. It was more of a folky vibe. We went up there and we were screaming in everyone’s face, and I realized we might need to pull it back a bit. [Laughs] We also play for a lot of crowds in New York where we’re seeing kids who are part of violence prevention programs, and they’re looking at us with our ties and wondering what we think we’re doing.

So we’re always having to prove ourselves in a way, and I’m always trying to figure out what to bring to a certain show. When we’re in a New York public school, the energy definitely has to be very high and very aggressive, just so they know we’re a real band.

There’s a bravery there, as well as in the subject matter you cover. I’ve often wondered how much blowback you get from parents who might not be comfortable with the topics you cover or the energy the band puts out.

I dressed up for Halloween this year, and people were surprised, because I don’t normally do it. I explained that it’s from my earliest days of performing for kids, when the slightest difference in my appearance could freak them out, because they expected me to always be a certain way. You know, even a hat could upset a child — “It’s okay, honey, that’s still Lloyd.” We did our first Halloween show with facepaint and costumes, and maybe it was a little scary or edgy for the kids.

But since then, no one has said anything along those lines. I definitely have…because so much of the work I do is singalongs with little kids, I definitely feel like no matter what kind of writeups the Dees ever get, people still like me as the guy who does the singalongs. There are certainly people who like the Deedle Deedle Dees, especially teachers and librarians — that market really goes for us. But in terms of the sort of high-end kindie parent market, parents come to our shows, and I can tell they wish I was sitting on the floor. I really have yet to find the commercial outlet for what we do. If I was smart, what I would do all the time would be birthday parties and singalongs.

I think that’s a struggle for a lot of kids’ artists. How do you balance the market against what you really want to do?

Definitely, but that struggle doesn’t come across in the Dees’ music. I started thinking about this question while I was listening to Strange Dees with my kids, and after “The Golem” came on, I had to spend a few minutes explaining Jewish history to them. It’s one thing to be educational, but these songs are conversation starters, and I get the feeling that that makes some parents uncomfortable — particularly now, when so much children’s entertainment is soft and round and perfectly bite-sized.

I personally have always liked stuff that invites me to do more research. As a young music fan, I was always the kid who’d get into Led Zeppelin, which sent me back to Willie Dixon, and so on. To the point where I was like, “Oh, you listen to Zeppelin? That’s lame. Listen to this.” It’s the same with songwriting. I never want it to come across like “Let me tell you the whole history of this.” People tell me that would be good because it would help kids with tests, and that’s a valid thing, but it isn’t really where my talent lies.

I want to get kids excited about history and other academic areas, and if they want to take it further, we have suggestions for books they can read. But I don’t want to be that guy who stands up there and lists things off. People are always telling me I should write a song about, you know, the state capitals. Maybe I will.

It’s much more interesting, I think, to be dropped into the middle of the story and be invited to figure out the rest on your own. But that’s decidedly not the norm. People seem to expect things that are more easily digestible in bite-sized chunks, and this doesn’t really fit that mold.

And that’s been my struggle ever since the band began. I’ve always thought we were doing really good work, and been frustrated by the fact that it seems like people would rather hear traditional children’s songs, or songs about more traditional children’s subjects.

How much thought, if any, have you given to what might come next for the band?

There are a couple of things I’m batting around. One is sort of a personal history project — you know, on this record, we have “Mayor LaGuardia’s Stomach,” where our guitarist Ari listens to his grandmother tell her story. I’ve thought about doing a record that’s all that kind of thing. Maybe people who are more well-known, like Abigail Adams, but songs based on those personal stories. Collecting them in that way.

You’d be the Studs Terkels of kindie!

Right, right. One of our fans is one of the founders of StoryCorps, and I’ve talked to him about legal stuff — how you clear those rights to people’s stories. We’ve also talked about doing an Old Testament record, which might sound crazy. But Chris, our multi-instrumentalist and my main partner in the band, is a church choir director. That’s his day job, and he’s always bemoaning the fact that all the music that’s published for children and free for use is pretty bad, so he’s always using older public domain stuff, and he’s forever after me to write some songs in that vein.

I think the Old Testament stories fit pretty well in the vein of the Dees. We can approach them as tales. We also did a few traditional songs for Scholastic a few years ago, and they didn’t put their legal team on it until after the recordings were finished, and they figured out there were some unplanned publishing fees and they shelved our stuff. They’re there, and this would build on that. I don’t know if we’ll do either of those things, but they’re the two ideas that appeal to me the most right now.

The Chickadees, thankfully, are not that kind of kids’ music. It’s a passion project from singer/songwriter Mary Karlzen (who had a great album come out in 1995 called Yelling at Mary) who, has followed the career path of other indie rock cult faves Dan Zanes and Ralph Covert and gone into kiddie entertainment. Karlzen’s approach is more than just good music kids can call their own—the Chickadees (a fairly clever name, as the band is entirely female) profess an environmentalist message. All kids are inherently environmentalists; they love animals and they love being outside. Pop culture and entertainment can help solidify those feelings, and that’s what the Chickadees aimed to do with their second album, The Froggy Hop.

It’s a pleasant country folk romp, a good fit for songs about being outside. The Froggy Hop has two main themes: how animals are amazing (“Tiny Little Caterpillar,” “Animal Babies”), and save the planet, kids (“Planet Protectors,” “Reduce, Recycle & Reuse”). A little didactic? Sure, but you can’t be subtle about important stuff with pre-schoolers. In that regard, the Chickadees are like Rage Against the Machine, except friendly, approachable, and concerned more with pollution than Zapatistas.

Photo by Alicia J Rose

The family entertainment market is so saturated with artists venturing over from the “grown-up” music world that I’m not sure there’s any such thing as an unexpected candidate for a kindie record anymore — but having said that, I have to confess I raised my eyebrows when I found out about Tumble Bee: Laura Veirs Sings Folk Songs for Children.

Part of the young, Pitchfork-approved crop of neo-folk artists who have helped breathe fresh life into the traditional music scene over the last decade, Laura Veirs is actually a perfect fit for a record like Tumble Bee, which sits public domain favorites like “King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O” and “Jack Can I Ride” alongside newer family-friendly numbers like “Jamaica Farewell” and “All the Pretty Little Horses.” The warm fragility of Veirs’ voice has often acted as a softening agent in albums like Year of Meteors, which add icy textures and hard angles to folk forms, but here, it’s cut from the same weathered cloth as the music.

I love Tumble Bee, in other words, and I think your kids will too. Veirs offered her perspective on the album during our recent conversation — here’s what we talked about.

One of the big differences between the kindie scene and the broader pop marketplace is the way covers albums are received. Outside this little bubble, they’re usually something an artist does to fill out a contract or kill time between new material, but it’s still a really vital tradition for family artists.

You know, I can tell there’s a stigma attached to this record already, with friends of mine who don’t have children. Their eyes will glaze over and they’ll be like, “What else is going on?” There’s definitely a divide there. And in doing our research for this, I felt the bar…you know, there’s mediocre music everywhere, in every style, but I think the bar is often set lower for children’s music. Or it’s just aimed at really young children, so it isn’t as interesting to adults. In fact, it can be annoying.

So I’d say those friends are probably thinking I went and made one of those goo-goo, ga-ga records, but I didn’t. I wanted to make something parents could enjoy with their children — or without them, really, but maybe that’s too much to ask. It’s really more of a covers record than a kids’ record. I think a song like “Prairie Lullaby” is strong enough to capture anyone’s attention.

We tried to do these songs in our own way, but we realized some of them have been around for 500 years. I can see how some people would say, “Oh, I’ve heard this.” But not all of them — some songs were technically traditional, but we found them in places like Peggy Seeger’s Animal Folksongs for Children — so we were familiar with the words, but had maybe never heard them in those arrangements. Just from a folklore perspective, doing that research was a lot of fun.

You’ve been pretty prolific as a songwriter so far. What made you want to take this detour into covers now?

Well, I have an 18-month-old, and when I was pregnant I toured with him — both in the womb, and after he’d been born. So after that was done, I felt like I needed to catch up on sleep [laughs], and I’d also made the choice to cut back to part-time music. I’d block out four-hour days in the backyard studio, and that’s how we made this album — four hours at a time, which took awhile.

So there was that reason. I felt like I’d just created this human being, and toured my ass off, and I needed to recover myself in some way and just relax with music. I enjoy songwriting, but in some ways, it’s much harder work. I didn’t feel like I quite had the juice for that.

You spent some time in China when you were younger. Did that affect your relationship with American folk music at all?

Well, that was a long time ago, and although I was obsessed with learning Chinese, I never really became enmeshed in the culture, so to speak. If anything, I think it was more a question of having a lot of Buddhists in my family, and I’m not a religious person, per se, but there’s something about that philosophy that appeals to me as a musician. I like music that has a lot of space, and that toys with the fantastical surrealist aspects of life, and I think there are interesting parallels there.

If being outside the U.S. has affected my relationship with American music, I think it’s probably happened because I’ve toured Europe a lot — I’ve really dedicated a lot of time over there, and gotten a lot of really positive feedback because of it. I hear their perspective on America while I’m there, and how a lot of them are horrified by things like healthcare, the military, the school system — but they’re fascinated by our music, and our overall culture. And they should be, because it’s awesome. African-American rhythms, Irish melodies, the birth of rock ‘n’ roll — they don’t have that melting pot.

And we also have these vast wildernesses, these huge untouched tracts of land. I grew up doing a lot of camping with my family, and I think that has probably had a bigger influence on my music, as well as my lyrics.

What was your research process like when it came time to decide which songs you were going to cover on the album?

We listened to the whole Harry Smith folk anthology, which we’d done before, but never with something like this in mind. We listened to a lot of Neil Young, which didn’t make it onto the record, as well as a lot of friends of ours — like Karl Blau, who wrote the title track. Harry Belafonte was a biggie, as well as Peggy Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger…you know. My husband has a ton of albums — he’s obsessed. Sometimes I felt overwhelmed, so he did the bulk of the searching.

You did a stint on a major label (Nonesuch), and now you’re releasing albums independently again. Is Tumble Bee part of an overall plan, or are you just taking things as they come?

I run my label with my friend now, which has been great. I mean, I’m so grateful to Nonesuch for giving me a springboard into bigger budgets and real promotion, because I had no audience in this country when I signed with them. But financially speaking, it’s much better to have my own label. It was a risk — it might not have worked out that way, but it has.

We’re just going to run this label, hopefully put out some other artists’ music, and I’ll make another album. I’m working on that now. I may make another record for kids at some point — I think it’s been super fun, stigmas aside. Hopefully, I can add to the perception that this kind of thing can be as artistic and valuable as any other kind of album.

Right on time for Halloween, the funky boys from Oklahoma are back with a funky rendition of the classic Ghostbusters theme song done by Ray Parker Jr. The video comes courtesy of http://newsok.com/ Weird. Is traditional media finally paying attention to the kindie music scene?

Enjoy!