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.

To make up for it, sort of, here’s a brief rundown of some of the better family-friendly books I’ve enjoyed lately. Nothing I write here will do justice to the authors’ work, but if you’re looking for reading recommendations, maybe I can point you and your kids in the right direction. Without further ado:

Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Oh, how I love this book. If I remember right, it started life as a series of posts, which gathered enough fans that Valente was able to crowdfund publication of her novel — which went on to become a New York Times bestseller.

The book’s success is richly deserved. I picked it up on a whim during a trip to our local bookstore, and was immediately drawn into the funny, exciting, scary, and downright moving tale of September, an impetuous 12-year-old girl from Omaha who finds herself whisked away on an adventure that combines familiar elements (anyone who’s read Lewis Carroll or the Oz books won’t be able to resist a knowing grin) with Valente’s marvelously unique prose.

It’s my favorite family book of the year, by far, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you have very young or very easily frightened kids, it might push the envelope a little in terms of peril and/or violence, but I only did some very, very light editing in the grimmest spots, and my kids were five and three when we read it. We all can’t wait for the sequel(s).

Wendy Mass, The Candymakers
Kids in a candy factory, all trying to win a contest…sounds familiar, right? Not to worry — although The Candymakers might have a troublesomely Wonka-esque premise, the book really just uses it as a springboard for an artfully constructed mystery with strong themes of friendship and trust.

The Candymakers uses four protagonists to tell its story, all kids with markedly separate personalities (girls, just wait until you get to know Daisy) and some sort of secret to be revealed. They come together during the two days leading up to the annual Confectionery Association Conference, all chosen as contestants in a big contest to create a new candy. If you’re already guessing that they’ll each learn a lesson about teamwork, you’re right, but Mass manages to add a few wrinkles to the formula.

This is a solid book for boys and girls from across the K-5 spectrum — my daughter loved it, and she just started kindergarten, and my wife is currently reading it to her third and fourth graders.

William Joyce, The Man in the Moon (The Guardians of Childhood)
The brief prologue to an intended series about the magical beings that watch over the kids of Earth (including Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and — you guessed it — the Man in the Moon), this book is short enough to read in a few sittings, but it sets up a whopper of a saga, and it’s packed with gorgeous illustrations.

Without giving too much away, I’ll just tell you that Joyce lays out loads of ready-made mythology here, drawing on the hokey characters every kid knows by heart to construct the boundaries of a world that has the potential to be as rich and inviting as Piers Anthony’s Xanth (although I suppose a more apt comparison would be his Incarnations of Immortality series, but whatever).

Put simply, there’s a long and epic war being waged for the children of the universe, and the lines are drawn between the Guardians of Childhood and Pitch, the King of Nightmares. Of course, it’s a story that has its scary moments, but more than anything, it’s exciting — you already knew Joyce was a fabulous illustrator with a finely tuned sense of whimsy, but it turns out he also has an amazing gift for pacing a kids’ book like an action thriller, not to mention describing fast-paced battles. In other words, my four-year-old son loves it.

In fact, we’ve already moved on to Book One of the series, Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King, which reveals the origin of the young Russian bandit who eventually becomes…well, we can talk about that later. Start with The Man in the Moon, and thank me later.

That’s it for now, but I’ve already got a Kindle queue bursting with books begging to be read to my kids, so I’m sure I’ll be back for more. Happy reading!

Confetti: It's What's for Breakfast

I get it. Confetti is colorful, and it makes people think of parties — or, if they’re like my doofus younger brother, they think of Funfetti cake (which I happen to think is a gross Pillsbury prank that an alarming number of my fellow Americans have fallen for, but to each his own).

But still. When our great corporate breakfast makers feel compelled to add colored dots to foods that are traditionally slathered in syrup, I can’t help feeling we’ve wandered into a very dark place — so naturally, when I saw that Aunt Jemima had added Confetti Waffles to her line of poor dietary choices, I couldn’t resist. It’s about time someone livened up the stupid waffle, right? It’s just a cooked batter disk with notches for collecting pure sugar. BORING. Bring on the breakfast party!

So here’s the funny thing: Aunt Jemima Confetti Waffles (which join the much older Confetti Pancakes, which I’ve never eaten, because I refuse to put pancakes in a toaster or microwave, and therefore cannot vouch for) are actually quasi-semi-healthyish, at least in the admittedly desperate context of frozen crap you heat up for the most important meal of the day. As the box proudly proclaims, they’re made with REAL EGGS and MILK, and despite the idiotic confetti gimmick, they don’t pack a lot of sugar (two grams per waffle) or fat (2.25 per). No high fructose corn syrup or artificial colors, either.

In fact, as much as I hate to admit it, these things really aren’t bad. Whatever Aunt Jemima does to make those confetti dots, it works — they’re sweet, but not overpoweringly so. Toast them up and eat them without syrup, and they make a decent breakfast snack. For serious! My four-year-old son, who loves sugar so much that he recently claimed we baked his big sister a birthday cake “to make me happy,” ate his plain. (Of course, he also yelled “THIS TASTES LIKE FOOD COLORING” with an ecstatic grin on his face, but whatever.)

So you win this round, Aunt Jemima — but I draw the line here. When you finally get around to rolling out Confetti Pancakes Wrapped Around Sausage on a Stick, you and I will have words.

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.

Smithsonian Folkways Music

You may not know Chip Taylor by name, but you’ve certainly heard his work. As the writer behind a tall stack of hits for a list of artists that includes Willie Nelson, Bobby Fuller, Emmylou Harris, and Waylon Jennings — not to mention “Angel in the Morning” and the stone-cold classic “Wild Thing” — Taylor has been part of rock’s DNA almost from the beginning. Now he’s moving on to a new phase of his career, as the frontman for Chip Taylor & the Grandkids.

The project is exactly what it sounds like: Taylor, guitar in hand, fronting his three grandkids. It’s an adorable idea, but it’s also a pretty terrific album, grounded in Taylor’s trademark earthy (or, as he might put it, “sweaty”) aesthetic while still filled with all the carefree whimsy and lovely harmonies any kindie fan could hope for. Golden Kids Rules is out today, and you need to hear it — but first, read Taylor’s thoughts on the album and his long, storied career.

This is a really enjoyable album, and it’s also a really beautiful idea — in theory, anyway. I imagine there must have been a few moments when trying to make a record with small children seemed like more trouble than it was worth.

[Laughs] The whole thing was totally a labor love. The whole idea at the start was to surprise their uncle for his wedding, so I wrote a couple of songs and talked to the kids, and they seemed really excited. But yeah, it’s hard to get the three of them to focus on something for an extended period of time. It wasn’t easy, but they always liked the results. It was never one of those things where they didn’t want to do it again, but it was funny watching their attention wander all over the place.

And, you know, I’m the grandfather, but this wasn’t like just going out in the field and having fun; there were times when we had to buckle down. And little Sam, for instance, would pout and not want to sing, so I’d have to sit down with her and say “If I go in there with you, will you do it?”

We did our first big performance at the Smithsonian Folkways Festival a few months ago. We’d been rehearsing, but we hadn’t performed for anyone, and every week I’d go up there for an hour to work with them. You just never know what you’re going to get with kids. [Chuckles] One comes in and she can’t hardly move, she just wants to lay on the couch. I just love them so much, and they like working with me, so that makes it easier. The good thing I did, I think, is that when I rehearsed with them, I’d get everyone in their spot and I’d pretend my band was with me, playing. I’d talk to them — “John, will you pay attention back there? Tony, let’s go. One, two…” I’d get them going like that, so the kids would get the feel.

It was good, because when we did the festival, we ended up not being able to do a soundcheck. Right beforehand, I’d told the kids, “You’re each going to have your own microphone, and you have to soundcheck on it. You do it like this — ‘testing, one, two, three; testing, one, two’…you’ll have to tell us whether you’re hearing enough of your own voice.” Then when we got up there, they only gave us five minutes to set up, and all these people were in the audience — the place was packed — and we got up on the stage, I counted off with the band, and one of the girls walked up to her mic and said, “Testing, one, two…” [Laughs]

So I told the audience, “We’re just going to do a little part of one song here — this isn’t really part of the performance yet.” So we did our little warmup, and when it was over, all the people started cheering. That was it. The girls were like, “Oh, this is what it’s all about.”

But the whole thing of working with the kids — that’s part of the fun of it. It’s never perfect. You’ve got three kids with three different personalities, and they’re all thinking about different things. Underneath it all, they all want it to be good, but it’s about working through that, and working through your own emotions. That’s the fun of it. And it’s fun to hear them talk about what their problems are: “Okay, Kate, why do you have to lie on the sofa all day today?”

“Well, Peepaw, this is what I did today…”

“Well, you have to get through that, my dear.” It’s that wonderful back-and-forth where you have to work things out together.

I know you’ve said you didn’t come from a musical family, and I know that — at least according to some of what you’ve said in other interviews — you originally didn’t even intend to be a musician.

Well, what it was — I didn’t come from a musical family, at least insofar as my mom and dad didn’t play any instruments. But they loved the arts. We loved going to movies, listening to singers like Bing Crosby and stuff like that. So it was floating around the house, but what really got me going was when my parents took me to a musical in New York — My Wild Irish Rose. I didn’t want to go, but they couldn’t find a babysitter — I was seven or eight years old. All I remember feeling is that when I heard the music start — heard that orchestra start, right up against it, watching those people create that sound — I got a real buzz. It was like when you fall in love for the first time and you don’t want anyone interrupting your feeling. That was it. We had an hourlong drive back home, and I didn’t want my parents to talk. I just wanted to keep feeling that feeling, and I knew I wanted that to be my life. That’s always been a part of me, and all of my career decisions have been based on that feeling.

That’s what it was like for me when I discovered country music for the first time. You know, it was the sadness that I liked. The warm thing that…the pedal steel playing, you know? I never liked that clicky, poppy stuff. On this record with the kids, we did a song called “Quarter Moon Shining,” and that carries some of that tone. Same with “Magical Horse.” It’s got an honest kind of thing to it. That’s the way I talk to the kids about music, and they love it.

Do you see some of that ambition starting to take root in your grandchildren?

You know, these days, there are so many things kids do. Every minute of the day, they have some activity that they’re going to, and they usually like all of them, but I don’t know if they have enough time to think about what they really want to do. I don’t know that they know that yet, and I don’t know that they’re given a chance to know. Their lives are so filled.

It’s all healthy — swimming, basketball, soccer, band, and all that good stuff. But do they love one more than another? I don’t know. They sure do love performing, though. They love the applause, and the idea that they sounded good.

You’ve seen the best and the worst of the music industry, and you got started at a relatively young age. Is there a limit to how big you’re willing to let this project get?

I don’t have concerns about it. I see such beautiful things in these kids, and they aren’t spoiled by this kind of attention. I’m not worried. Every once in awhile, my wife or the kids’ mother will say something to the effect of, “I don’t want them to grow up like so-and-so young star,” but I can’t see that happening. I know we want to keep doing it. Lately, whenever we’re together, singing or just kind of fooling around, when something silly happens I’ll start writing a song about it. I’ll start to sing, but I’ll leave lines open for one of them to add something, and before you know it, we’ll have a song. They love doing that, and if we get the chance to make another album after this one, it’ll include more co-writing. What a wonderful thing that is.

I think for a lot of artists, it might be frustrating to be so identified with one of your earliest, simplest songs…

You’re talking about “Wild Thing.”

Right. But you seem to have used that simplicity as a lesson, particularly on this album.

Well, I’m a simple guy. [Laughter] When I was younger, the songs I liked the most were the ones that just got to the heart of things. I never liked clever ones at all. Anything that sounds too worked-on, I don’t like. The early country singers, and guys like Elvis — they were just singing with real emotion. So when I started writing, you know, my first hits were for Willie Nelson, Eddy Arnold, the Brown Family, and Waylon — I wrote for people like that before I started rockin’. “Angel of the Morning” might have a few more chords in it, but it has a very honest movement. It just goes where it goes. I felt a chill when I wrote it — it was just a feeling.

And that’s “Wild Thing” — it’s just a feeling on tape. And you can play it anywhere. I remember being in this little town right above Milan, sitting near this mother and her two young kids, and I started playing that groove — the kids were bouncing back and forth. Looking at me and grooving. There’s a magic to that. I never look at it as a lesser song — it’s one of my most powerful songs.

Those chords are elemental. Putting them together must have felt like discovering fire.

It’s the way the strum goes. It’s a sweaty kind of thing — I like sweaty songs. To me, that’s one of the better ones. I loved all those covers of it. Jimi Hendrix totally got it.

It’s a song that has everything it needs, and nothing more — and I think being hardwired into music at that fundamental level might make you uniquely qualified to record music for kids.

To me, all great music is about feeling. It comes from me as the writer, but it also comes from the people you’re performing with — and for me, that’s the beauty of this album, is coming together with the energy of the kids. That’s what this represents. Their performances are wonderful, and the musicians who worked with us aren’t playing down to kids — these are soulful players, and they’re just playing songs.

For as long as the human race has been able to hear music, we’ve wanted more. And once upon a time, we quenched that thirst by picking up an instrument — or gathering around someone else who had one — and making music happen.

Over time, we learned to develop technology that helped us satisfy our craving — and as more of us learned to use radios, record players, tape decks, CDs, mp3 players, and smartphones, and grew accustomed to a world in which music was never more than an arm’s reach (or the click of a button) away, the further we drifted from that innate urge to create. For a lot of us, music has become something we’re meant to passively consume.

I don’t think it’s supposed to be this way, and neither do a growing number of artists dedicated to reconnecting families with the joy of making music for its own sake, including Nerissa and Katryna Nields. The veteran folk duo recently released All Together Singing in the Kitchen: Creative Ways to Make and Listen to Music as a Family, a book/CD package with something for homestyle musicians of all ages, and they were kind enough to take a few minutes out of their busy promotional schedule to talk to us.

I talk to a lot of artists who express the ideas you’ve written about here. This book seems to be part of a movement.

Nerissa: Yeah. Well, that’s a nice bit of serendipity for us. One of the things we say in the book, and it’s absolutely true, is that it wasn’t until I was a teenager that I heard the recorded versions of a lot of the folk songs I’d grown up with. My dad did have a turntable, and he did play a lot of music, but he was playing what he wanted to hear — ’70s country LPs he’d bought, and occasionally classical music. Mostly, the songs we knew, we knew because he played them on the guitar. That’s how we learned them. That’s how you make a song your own, by passing it down through the oral tradition, rather than making a recording out of it.

I have a lot of respect for recording, too — obviously, we’re recording artists. But in terms of raising kids, I think it’s so wonderful to make a song your own. And that’s kind of what we do in all realms — we’ll take a beloved folk song and change the words, and encourage the kids to make their own versions.

Katryna: Observing art can be a transformative experience, but making art is almost always a transformative experience. And I think people are starting to realize that again. I mean, a ukulele…you can pick one up and really know how to play a song in probably three months. That’s an exciting and liberating gift that it seems like people are beginning to rediscover.

I think my favorite story from the book is the one about the woman who inherited a mountain dulcimer and didn’t even think about learning how to play it until a random stranger suggested it — and then watched as music became a huge part of her child’s life.

Nerissa: Isn’t that amazing? I think it’s so inspiring.

It’s inspiring, but it also speaks to this weird disconnect we’ve developed in our relationship with music, where we can have an instrument literally in our hands and not think about playing it. Do you have any thoughts as to how we got to this point?

Katryna: Well, there was a time when the only way you could hear music is if you made it yourself. Even when we were kids, we had a turntable, but even then, it was a little bit of a cumbersome thing to put it on the turntable, get up and change it after 22 minutes or whatever it was, and in our cars, we had AM radio, and that was it. Now, it’s easy to carry a million songs around. You can see someone not wanting to learn how to play an instrument because all you need is an iPod.

Maybe, though, the pendulum is swinging in the other direction. I know that when I go to singalongs now, people often like to have iPads in the room so they can have the lyrics and chords handy. The marriage of that technology with the simplicity of the guitar is such a cool thing to see.

Nerissa: I do think that our relationship with technology tends to move in a wave pattern. It takes a few leaps forward and we all go whoa, and then we catch up and make it our own, and then it leaps forward again. I think we’re in a catching-up phase right now. I think it would be interesting to chart the ebb and flow of folk music’s popularity against the technological tide — I wonder if one has anything to do with the other.

I often think about an old quote from Pete Seeger where he talked about being ambivalent about making albums, because he was worried that he was sort of tacitly encouraging people to be passive. We take recorded music for granted now, but at the time, it was a real decision for an artist to make, and I think it’s still thought-provoking.

Nerissa: For me, the two things definitely went hand in hand, because I remember being really daunted, as a teenager learning how to play guitar, by the things the Beatles were doing. I think it all depends on the attitude you take, and hopefully, what we’re giving people with this book is a “yes you can” attitude.

I wanted to talk about that message. Reading it reminded me of a time in the ’90s when I was talking to a producer about the way newly affordable recording technology had led to an explosion in self-released albums, and his response was that everyone thinks they have a right to make music, but they’re wrong.

Katryna: Well, that’s just commerce getting in the way.

Nerissa: I wouldn’t even say it’s commerce — I’d say it’s ego. I have a writer friend with whom I had a similar conversation in the early aughts, when self-publishing was starting to take off, and they had the same basic response. But good work rises and falls on its own merits.

Katryna: And also, the idea that every reader and every listener…I mean, is Lou Reed a good singer? I don’t know. But there are people who are moved beyond words by what he does, and how tragic would it have been if he’d decided he couldn’t sing and just not done it? It’s silly to think there’s a good and a bad when it comes to art. Some of the most moving recordings I’ve ever heard have been by complete amateurs.

I think when you invite this kind of stuff — writing, drawing, singing, crafting — into your life, what you’re doing is instilling a love of creativity in your kids. And no matter what their job ends up being, they will have that as part of their vocabulary. This way of not seeing the world as a boxed-in, linear thing, but something full of possibilities.

Nerissa: Right. The benefits of having music in your life are well-documented, but they bear repeating. It really pays dividends in terms of how it shapes the brain, and the heart, and the soul, in ways that are incalculable.

Katryna: I think one of our main theses with this book is the idea that by using music, you’re forging connections with your children that will hopefully remain throughout your family’s life. Some people do it by watching baseball with their kids. For us, it’s been music — that’s been the glue. It’s created pathways for us to communicate, and to remember that we’re from the same world. That we can be helpful to each other.

If your kids love Caspar Babypants‘ music as much as mine do, you’re doubtless already familiar with the work of his wife, artist Kate Endle. Not only has she been responsible for each Caspar Babypants album cover, she’s also a busy Etsy shopkeeper and thriving illustrator of children’s books like Trout Are Made of Trees and Bella and the Bunny.

Now, Kate and Caspar are expanding their partnership, and the first fruits of their labor are here: Bunny Rabbit in the Sunlight, a beautiful, simply written bedtime story, and My Woodland Wish, the tale of a girl who wishes she could play with the animals in the woods around her house. Both books come with a URL where you can download an mp3 to go with the story.

Both books are fairly similar, in that they focus on the outdoors, feature stories built from easy-to-understand rhymes, and include plenty of lovely Endle artwork. The main difference between the two is that Rabbit in the Sunlight is a board book, and the shorter of the two — it’s the kind of thing you’ll pull out before bed for your favorite toddler — while My Woodland Wish offers more of a full-fledged narrative.

Their differences are less meaningful than their similarities, however — both books capture the peaceful, gentle spirit of Caspar Babypants’ music, and feature some of Endle’s loveliest work. I took the books out on a Sunday morning when my kids were running wild, and they calmed right down, eagerly identifying animals on the pages and absorbing the soothing rhythm of the stories.

Both books have been beautifully assembled by Sasquatch Press, particularly Bunny Rabbit in the Sunlight, which was printed with a really pleasant-looking matte finish on the boards. They’re affordably priced — you can own them both for less than $25 through Amazon — and they come with some wonderful free music. Don’t miss the chance to help support a pair of talented independent artists (and give your family a couple of great gifts in the process).

The flagship animated franchise for Disney Junior, Jake and the Never Land Pirates has earned impressive ratings for the network since its February debut, and it’s easy to see why: It’s colorfully animated, with reliable Disney storylines revolving around adventure, teamwork, and friendship, and it draws on a venerable studio franchise without totally cashing in on its most popular characters.

It also boasts a pretty incredible voice cast, with talented voicework vets like Jeff Bennett (who plays Mr. Smee) rubbing shoulders alongside live-action stars like Madison Pettis, Ariel Winter, Colin Ford, and — yes, you’re reading this right — David Arquette as a talking parrot. (The list of recurring cast members is even more eclectic and/or impressive: Tori Spelling, Lisa Loeb, Adam West, and Sharon Osbourne have popped up in the cartoon cove.)

As cartoons go, Jake is fairly unremarkable, although its blend of bold color lines and swashbuckling adventure certainly puts it a cut above the sort of franchise cash-in it could have been. Jake (voiced by Ford), Izzy (voiced by Winter), Cubby (Jonathan Morgan Heit), and their pet bird Scully (Arquette) spend their days foiling Captain Hook and Smee’s ineffective plots, earning gold doubloons for teamwork along the way, with musical interludes as they go. The storyline beats will be familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a cable cartoon, but it’s all smartly done and extremely enjoyable for the target demographic.

This DVD set culls seven episodes from the first season’s 20-episode run, which seems unnecessarily chintzy, but to make up for its lack of comprehensiveness, Yo Ho, Mateys Away! bundles in a seven-song soundtrack CD and an “official pirate eye patch.” The patch is about as cheap-looking as you’d expect, although I suppose Disney deserves credit for making them out of fuzz-lined pleather instead of plastic.

All in all, you get about three hours of Jake and the gang for your $14.99, plus some music and the patch — not a bad investment for your next long car ride, and worth a spot in your family DVD library if you live with fans of the show.

I don’t know about you, but for me, 1994 doesn’t feel like it was all that long ago — so seeing The Lion King roar back to theaters (where it’s been Number One for an impressive two weeks) and make its Blu-ray debut seems a little…premature somehow. But hey, that’s what happens as you get older: time speeds up, and you can’t help grading nostalgia cash-ins on a sliding scale.

No matter which scale you use, it’s hard not to give The Lion King an A. The last hurrah from the New Golden Era team that brought us Disney hits like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin, it does everything Disney movies are supposed to: it tells a universal tale of loss and redemption, set against breathtaking animated vistas, using unforgettable characters and heart-tugging music. Nearly 20 years later, if someone says “Hakuna matata,” you’re going to think of Timon and Pumbaa. For a latter-day Disney film, that speaks volumes.

Of course, The Lion King has also been merchandised to death; in fact, it’s never really gone away, thanks to direct-to-video sequels, a long-running Broadway musical, and a TV spinoff, to name but a few of the many, many tie-ins. It’s always easy to be cynical about everything Disney does, but when they’re bringing back a movie that’s barely old enough to vote, that cynicism feels more appropriate.

Be that as it may, Disney has also earned a pretty incredible reputation for its Blu-ray reissues, and The Lion King is no exception. If, like me, you were a little worried that they might have lost their touch after plopping out the awful-looking Fox and the Hound reissue pack earlier this year, you can rest easy — The Lion King stands tall next to other spotless Blu-rays from the vaults.

The picture is appropriately incredible, rendered brilliantly via a 1080p AVC-encoded transfer that fills the screen with rich colors across the spectrum. You’ll have to drop it into slo-mo and squint to spot any imperfections, and why would you want to do that when you can just sit back and soak it all in? With the volume turned up, of course, so you can hear every bit of the huge, finely layered DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 surround track.

When you’re finished revisiting the film, you’ll have heaping helpings of bonus features to dive into, both on the disc — which includes an audio commentary, a pair of new behind-the-scenes documentaries, deleted and alternate scenes, and interactive image galleries — and a streamable “virtual vault” containing nearly two hours of material held over from previous DVD releases. Like other Diamond Edition titles, The Lion King also comes with DVD and digital copy discs; unlike most others, this one bundles in a 3D Blu-ray disc, just in case you’ve gone crazy and sprung for a compatible TV and player.

At the moment, the whole thing will set you back $25 at Amazon, which probably seems like 25 too many if you already own the movie on DVD. But if it isn’t already part of your library, you know the drill — this is the version to own. Plan accordingly.

For fans of the band, Practically Ridiculous offers more of what you love: eclectic, full-bodied arrangements, quirky lyrics, and the reliably adorable vocals of Ms. Jimmy herself, singer Ashley Albert. Ashley was kind enough to take a few minutes out of her day to discuss songwriting, the ins and outs of being a kindie performer, and what the heck took so long between albums. Read on!

So what’s cookin’?

You have a new record coming out.

I do! Have you heard it?

I have. And my daughter, who is five, already knows the words to “Bonfire.”

Really? You know, someone else told me the same thing, and I was a little worried that “Bonfire,” of all the songs, was going to be sort of the least popular. That one is really special to me.

I’m guessing you thought the underlying message of the lyrics might go over some heads.

Yeah.

And the first time I listened to it, I thought the same thing — and so did my wife — but our daughter just latched onto it, and she keyed right in on those lines about being strong, and about being yourself, and about loving who you are.

I love that. That’s definitely the most meaningful song on the album for me, and I wrote it as a message for kids — I didn’t sit down to write an adult contemporary ballad. I just didn’t know if kids would be receptive of the message or not, so that makes me really happy.

What’s your writing process like? Where do you look for inspiration?

You know, it’s a relatively ragtag operation I’m running over here. I write fairly quickly, and it tends to happen when a word, or a hook, or a chorus pops into my head — I’ll just keep singing it over and over until I add onto it. I sing out the whole song, usually into a voice recorder or my phone.

Although not that long ago, I had one particular hook in my head that I didn’t want to lose, and my phone at the time didn’t have a voice recorder function, and because I was underground on the subway, I had to wait until I got my cell reception back before I could call myself and leave that hook as a message — so I was just sitting on the train, singing over and over again to myself. And then this mariachi band comes onto the train, so I’m sitting there trying to sing louder than them. It was quite a New York moment.

But that’s how I do it. I sing them out, starting from small fragments, and it usually takes me about a day to finish.

So you don’t set aside a specific writing time for yourself?

I haven’t in the past, but I’m doing that more and more. We’re making a Christmas album right now, and we need to get two more songs before the end of the weekend, so it’s just…I mean, I don’t know what it’s like for you, but I know for me, I can go months without shopping, and then all of a sudden I go through this period where I feel like doing it all the time. That happens with songwriting, too, where I won’t do it for a few days or a month, and then all of a sudden, I’ll write four songs in a week.

You’ve sort of alluded to the challenge of finding a balance between the artistic side and the business side of the band — and for all intents and purposes, you are the Jimmies.

Yeah.

But it doesn’t seem like a ragtag operation at all. There’s a lot of production value to the Jimmies’ stuff, from the music to the videos to the artwork.

Thanks. It’s one of those things where…I certainly didn’t know that the business end of it would come naturally to me. My day job is doing voice work, and that doesn’t require a whole heck of a lot in terms of marketing or business savvy. So it was a surprise to discover an affinity for it when I started getting into making music.

But I also suffer from perfectionism, so it’s probably more of a burden than it might be for someone who actually enjoys running a business. I want things to be perfect, so it’s hard for me to delegate; I’m learning, as the years go by. Some things don’t have to be perfect, and some things can be done by someone else. But for a long time, I had my hands all over anything that came out of Jimmies HQ.

In the pop music world, the amount of downtime between Jimmies albums would be nothing at all, but in the kindie world, it’s an eternity.

Right.

Is that perfectionism the reason you’ve released albums at such a deliberate pace?

Well, we did have the DVD in the middle, which took almost three years to make. We definitely took a long time to make the first album, and then three years to do the second, and then I started working on the new album almost a year and a half, two years ago — that’s when I went into the studio to lay down the basic tracks. And then I got really caught up in pitching these two television shows.

It sent me off in this completely different direction, and this world where I had to be traveling all the time and taking meetings with all these different companies, but in the end, I realized I might not even want to make television! I missed my Jimmies band. I use the analogy that I came to Madison Square Garden with a soccer ball and I knew all these cool tricks, and then someone handed me a basketball and said “Hey, you should go join the NBA!” so I did that for awhile, only to realize I couldn’t do the soccer tricks that I really love.

So I sort of put the TV stuff on hold and went back to finish the album. And here I am, excited and focused. I might go back to the TV projects later, but I just lost sight for a little while of the whole reason I showed up at Madison Square Garden in the first place.

You mentioned doing voice work, and I know you’re the voice of the Nick Jr. promos. You’re also on Bubble Guppies now too, right?

That’s right.

I imagine there are a lot of kids like my daughter, who has grown up listening to you with the Jimmies, and when they find out you’re also a voice in a TV cartoon, it sort of blows their mind a little.

[Laughs] I do all sorts of voiceovers — that’s my thing. So you probably hear me all day long, for Dunkin Donuts or McDonald’s, or because I’m the little girl in all the General Mills commercials — I do all those “Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids”-type lines, and I’ve been doing that for about 10 years, so if you watch any amount of children’s television, you’re hearing me.

So you’re in the belly of the beast in terms of children’s marketing — and some of the stuff that drives parents nuts.

Right. I know. I do all these cereals, and the message is “This is a very special thing that people are going to try and take away from you, and you need to do everything in your power to attain it. It will be a long, arduous journey, and you must do everything in your power to maintain your grasp on this cereal.” There have been some occasions when I’ve been unhappy to be a part of campaigns.

How do you reconcile that with your status as a children’s entertainer?

I love voiceovers. When I was a kid, I’d take out the ads in the paper long before the comics, and pore over the coupons to see what was coming out. I always loved that stuff. And I also understand that most television programming, in the most cynical view, is just there to fill space in between commercials. That’s really the point of programming, is to keep people watching until the commercials come on. If you want high-quality content, it needs that support.

I imagine that your professional life contains a lot of manic voices and goofy sound effects, and it wouldn’t be surprising if someone in your position reacted to it by making quiet, acoustic music, but the Jimmies are very energetic.

I think in general, even when I’m not working, I live a fairly manic, goofy life anyway. Someone asked me once if I ever thought about writing adult music, and my response was that I don’t feel like I write kids’ music. I just write music, and it just so happens that it’s most relatable to a third-grader, because that’s my sensibility. I’m not thinking about anything from a marketing standpoint, I’m just thinking, “I feel like writing a song about a hamster today.” You know?

How has the band configuration evolved? Most of the instruments on this album were played by one person, right?

Yeah, well, for the first album, I flew down to my dad’s incredible hardcore hip-hop studio in Florida, and used these amazing session musicians for the songs. And when it was done, I came back home and held auditions, and had this utopian vision of “We’re gonna be a band!”

But the problem with that is, because I started the project and wrote all the songs, it was sort of like having a boyfriend move into your apartment with all of your stuff. You want it to feel like a joint thing, but that’s still all your stuff. So it never quite felt like a true group effort, and at one point we let our bass player go, and then our guitarist, who I adore and who we still play with quite a bit, graduated college and moved back home to Austin, so we lost him.

So then it was just me and my drummer Dan, who I’ve had since our very first auditions, way back when, and we moved to a work-for-hire situation. And Dan has added drums to things we’ve done in the studio, on a remote basis, but most of these tracks were handled by an amazing musician named Steve Gordon, who my dad has worked with for years — he played with Betty Wright, and was a staff producer for Atlantic. He and my uncle worked together on a bunch of projects.

You’re touching on one thing I find really interesting about the Jimmies’ music, which is that even though the vibe you project is really fun and happy, when it comes to the arrangements and the production, you aren’t messing around.

Yeah, I think it goes back to the whole perfectionism thing. My dad did everything he could to keep me away from music — he wouldn’t even let me play an instrument — but when it comes down to it, I know what I want things to sound like. I don’t have the language to express it, but because I have a clear idea of what I want, my dad and Steve give me an amazing amount of trust and support.

I’ll say, “It goes like this,” and Steve will say, “But music doesn’t work like that — it’ll fall over on itself,” and I’ll say, “But that’s how the song goes.” So he’ll do it, and it’ll work, and he’ll say, “I don’t know how your band is going to play it. Good luck!”

Have you given any thought to the next record? Have you been able to stockpile any material at all?

Yeah. For the next one, I’d really like to do a musical. It’s an idea that’s been sort of marinating for a long time — I wrote this story called “Jelly and Peanut Butter,” about Jelly wanting top billing, so they break up. I read it on XM a long time ago, and got a lot of requests for it, and I think it’d be a natural for a musical.

So I think there will be a much shorter wait for the next one. When I got back to working on Practically Ridiculous, I thought, “I have to get back in there in a hurry, because the kids who listened to our first album are getting to be too old to care about the new one!”

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