In the kindie world, there are few events more momentous than a new Recess Monkey record. The Seattle-based trio is set to return on June 21 with

If you don’t think the world needs more songs about Superman, not to worry — Flying! is about real-life heroism, the kind we see in our own families (“Grandmom’s House”), our friends (“Sidekick”), and even ourselves (“Bravest Kid in the World”). More importantly, the music is every bit as vibrant and joyously eclectic as fans have come to expect — and the band invited a few famous friends along for the ride, too.

To celebrate the new record, we lined up an interview with a pair of Monkeys: Jack Forman (bass, keys, vocals) and Drew Holloway (vocals, guitars, keys). Here’s what we discussed:

So let’s talk about the new album! The world is waiting with bated breath to hear new music from Recess Monkey.

Jack: And we’re waiting for them to hear it! Especially my wife, because there are several thousand copies in my basement. We can’t do laundry. [Laughter] It’s good that we seem to have some listeners, because otherwise, the inventory would start to take up some serious square footage. We still have CDs left over from our first band, and that was ten years ago.

You guys are impressively prolific. Was there any overlap between Flying! and your last album, The Final Funktier? And how did you settle on the superhero theme for this set?

Jack: Thematic thinking is something we learned teaching at the elementary school where we all met several years ago — every year, there’s a new curricular theme, and every level literally rewrites their curricula based on that theme, and each class looks drastically different than it did the year before.

We started working together the year that the school theme was “Rhythms.” Obviously, there’s a direct musical tie-in to that theme, so we put together a band of teachers, wrote a few songs, and played them live for the school. But more to the point, in our professional lives, we just got really used to that kind of thinking, and it’s helped us to kind of perpetually pull the rug out from under any kind of stasis. It’s only just now that we’re starting to see how we do that as a band, but we definitely take a similar approach — as soon as one album is finished, we start thinking about what could be our next topic. And that’s really based on what we’re hearing kids talk about.

Drew: It’s very much like a season for a sports team. We’ve figured out that being teachers and having the summers open, that’s when we really want to time our releases, because we have that time open. We’re performing heavily during the summer and not really writing new material, but during the fall, we set aside that time to kind of let the creative juices build up again. So when it’s dark and rainy and we only have a few hours of daylight here in Seattle, we spend those months working on a new record.

There are ideas that are beginning to percolate for me now, melodically, that I’m singing into my phone and saving for later when we have a bit more time. It’s very much a melodic thing for me at first — it’s about capturing the melodies when they’re in the air and making sure they’re around when I have the ability to really knuckle down on them and bring them together with the lyrical ideas I have, and the ideas we brainstorm on together.

I spoke with Chris Ballew a few weeks ago, and his creative cycle sounds similar to yours. He wants to be in the studio when the weather is crappy, and then be out having fun when it gets warm.

Drew: I saw that, and he really captured how I feel about the process. It’s very similar for me.

Jack: A major part of that is that he lives in Seattle too, and you’ve really got to strike while the iron is hot here. Last summer, we were having lots of meetings about Kindiependent, and at one point, he said to us, “Hey, guys, this is great and everything, but we could be at a lake right now.” We ended the meeting and went to a beach. [Laughter] There’s something to be said for taking advantage of Seattle when the weather presents itself.

So your releases are essentially timed out for you. You don’t have to deal with the old-fashioned major-label rigamarole of record, video, tour, repeat, but you do have to work around your school schedule.

Jack: Yeah, and there’s also a parallel with performing, too — we do a lot of shows in Seattle that are free to the public, because they’re being paid for by a library or a similar program, and when we try and set up a date where we’re actually going to charge for tickets, promoters think we’re nuts, because they want exclusivity around the show. Both for live performances and for albums, our perspective is that more is more.

I mean, kids are hungry, and we only have them for a short time — our typical listener will listen to our music for maybe three years. Maybe longer if they have a younger sibling, but that’s pretty much it. And more importantly, we’re hungry and excited to be creative. For us, being independent, maybe we’re shooting ourselves in the foot — maybe we’d be more successful if we recorded half as many albums. But the truth is, it’s just so fun to write and record songs together, and to debut new things live. The visceral creative experience is what drives us, first and foremost.

When it comes time to pick a new theme, how does that work?

Jack: The first goal is to not revisit territory we’ve been to before. We’ll look back at the last record and kind of debrief it — what worked, what didn’t, and look at our overall canon as far as what we’ve done thematically, and things we’d like to do musically or instrumentally. And then, after talking about all that, we’ll start going through huge lists of ideas inspired by things we’ve heard kids talk about.

Superheroes — I feel like we’d talked about that before this record. That was one that was shortlisted back when we were talking about The Final Funktier, but an outer space record just seemed so kid-centric and fun that it had to go first.

Let’s talk about writing for an album concept, as opposed to just letting the songs develop organically. How does it affect your songwriting process?

Drew: I feel like it’s really helpful. None of these themes or concepts are 100 percent binding — it’s just more an umbrella for everything to fit under. It really helps to kind of round out possibilities as a songwriter, and still allow space for things like “Flapjacks,” from the new album, which doesn’t really have a direct correlation to the theme, or with a song like “Bunk Beds,” it’ll provide the spark to add a line about bringing your favorite action figure up there with you.

There are ways to massage the concept into certain songs, and then there are overt ways of working it in, like “Bravest Kid in the World,” which is about all the tough things kids have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. So it allows me a lot of freedom, and while there are a certain amount of ideas percolating before we have the conversations leading into a new album, those ideas really help.

Jack: And it’s an easy way for Daron and me to help out in the songwriting process, which really isn’t our forte. Drew is the reason we can be as prolific as we are, because he just writes like crazy — I mean, he’s a wordsmith, and he’s great with melodies. We can throw some energy behind the process while still knowing Drew is going to be the one doing the heavy lifting.

What’s your approach to crafting a successful kids’ song? I think I say this during every interview I do, but what you’re doing is a lot harder than it looks.

Drew: Yeah, it’s…there’s no complicated math or anything, but it really is a craft. I’d go back to what Chris said when you guys spoke — about how sometimes a song just falls into your lap, and sometimes it takes more work. It’s really difficult to explain or put into words. I think with the frequency we’ve been on, and just trying to stretch myself as a writer personally, I’ve tried to be strategic about bearing down on the ones that don’t just fall into my lap. You know, setting aside a little time each day, no matter what comes of it — just to have that routine.

I’ve noticed — and maybe you have too, although you probably can’t say so explicitly — that two of the major pitfalls in family music are either writing songs that are didactic or songs that are goofy with no purpose. You guys avoid both of those consistently, and maybe it all goes back to spending so much time with kids, but how do you do it? How do you manage to make your records fun and childlike without falling into those traps?

Jack: That’s a huge compliment, so thank you for that. I, for one, was hugely dubious of kids’ music in general when we started. I wasn’t really aware of it, but of course there was good stuff happening in the genre when we started out; I just hadn’t heard it. I’d only heard stuff that was one- or two-dimensional — not very interesting to me as a musician, or as a non-three-year-old. [Laughter]

The way we teach at our school, it’s a place with really high expectations for kids. We talk about really big concepts, and we let their inquiries guide us in teaching them how to get to their next steps developmentally. We all go by our first names — we’re not Mr. Holloway or Mr. Forman. We try as hard as we can to be an integral part of our relationships with the kids, instead of coming at them from an autocratic perspective. And I think what people really notice when people walk through our school is that teachers are talking to kids like they’re people. We’re not afraid to really engage them in big conversations.

When we started making music, we tried to do that too, and I hope we’ve been successful without pandering one way or the other. We try to make something musically that we would like, first and foremost — if you took the lyrics out, you’d hear something that would sound a lot like the stuff we’re listening to now, just as music fans. We really wanted to make our work sound like real music with real instruments, and kind of push the edge of the genre a little bit, from our perspective.

That music is what really sets you guys apart from the crowd. Your arrangements are really smart — really robust and layered — and they’re very eclectic, too. What’s your approach there? How do these ideas develop in the studio?

Jack: This time around it was interesting, because we had Tor Hyams on board as producer, and he really helped us understand some new instruments and ways we hadn’t played them before. We came up with the idea of having a Latin breakdown on the song “Covered in Band-Aids,” but he really brought it into reality. There are a lot of places on the album where we used him as sort of a Wikipedia for music, and it opened us up to trying some things we’d wanted to do, but maybe didn’t know how.

We’re also all addicted to getting new instruments. You can hear how our collection has grown with each record. Go back to Field Trip and you can hear the Moog I bought, which has been on every record since. You can hear when Drew bought a ukulele or a mandolin — it would be fun to go back and listen to the albums that way, to pick out where we picked up instruments. It’s funny how the voicing of an instrument can open up new genre territory.

Drew: I think we’re constantly trying to be creative with every new record, but without saying “We need to have some zydeco on this one,” or “It’s been awhile since we did a blues song” — we aren’t using a tally chart to make sure we get enough genres in there. Often, it’s attributed to just having some really talented people around to help re-author what we’ve done, or look at it through a new lens or style.

Does any of this come from a feeling of responsibility to act as a sort of gateway into different styles of music for your audience?

Jack: Oh, absolutely. And really, if parents ask us which albums they should be buying for their kids, we aren’t going to name kids’ bands, we’re going to say Sgt. Pepper’s. We’re going to talk about the ones that shaped us. There are a lot of kids’ musicians that we love, but we don’t think kids have to listen to stuff that’s written for their age group. I mean, when we were younger, we were listening to artists like Lionel Richie, Neil Diamond…Huey Lewis’ Sports was my first album. There were so many albums that helped me understand music as a kid, and not a single one of them was written for someone my age.

And that’s an interesting line to walk, too. We have a list of easily 100 kids’ musicians we’d love to recommend, too. But the music doesn’t have to be written for kids. There are a lot of things out there that kids can appreciate.

Let’s talk about some of the special guests you enlisted for the new album. Some of my favorite artists joined you here, including Dean Jones — who is a genius — and you even had an Okee Dokee Brother.

Jack: Yeah! We could only get one Brother. We couldn’t afford them both, because they’re just off-the-charts expensive. [Laughter] It’s such a neat window into what’s happening right now in kindie music — people are just collaborating like crazy, asking each other to be on their records, and volunteering time. Some of the people who guested on Flying! are artists we’ve just met over the last year.

I’m guessing this mostly happened via filesharing rather than recording in the same studio.

Jack: A couple of people came to my house — Chris Ballew and Tom Baisden, who is the guitarist for the Not-Its!, were able to record here because they’re local. Everything else was virtual, which is just the best, because it turns your inbox into Christmas morning. When there’s a YouSendIt email waiting for you, containing something that’s just going to blow up a song, and you’ve finished the download and you’re slotting everything up in Pro Tools and hitting play for the first time…oh, it’s the best.

This leads us into something else I’d like to discuss, which is the Kindiependent collective. This is something that comes up a lot in my conversations with artists, and I think you guys are doing something really cool.

Jack: It seems like it may have captured the imaginations of people who want to collaborate with others in their own cities, but maybe hadn’t figured out how to do it. I can’t say we thought of Kindiependent — it was the result of a number of different things. For instance, we played Jiggle Jam in 2009, and came back really excited by what we saw — you know, all these bands working together. We started getting people in Seattle together informally, just meeting for pizza and things like that, and invited some guests to join us on The Final Funktier. We’d done a sort of summer festival the year before that was moderately successful, too.

The idea is that there’s sort of a decentralized government at work here in Kindiependent — six bands and a couple of other boosters, getting together to dream and find opportunities we can take advantage of. It’s been said before, but it’s really true: a lot of people in the kindie scene are really into building community, sharing fans, and really, actively supporting each other. It’s really true. Every time we’ve done a Kindiependent event, attendance has at least doubled — from 400 to 800 to 2,200. It’s really fun to see that if you build it, they will come.

Another day, another senses-shattering round in the 2011 KidVid Tournament! Today’s matchups are being hosted by kindie kingmaker Bill Childs over at Spare the Rock, Spoil the Child — let’s take a look at our contenders in the Pete Seeger Regional division.

#1 Seed: Keller Williams, “Hula Hoop to Da Loop”
I like Keller Williams, and I enjoyed his kids’ album (aptly titled Kids), but on the surface, “Hula Hoop to Da Loop” seems like kind of an odd choice for a video. I mean, the song doesn’t do much, does it? Happily, Williams gets around this with one of the more enjoyable clips I’ve seen in awhile. First of all, I love watching artists play with loops; second, the way that shot is framed is just lovely — there’s something almost inspirational about watching all those hula hoopers running over the horizon. Plus, this is either a live recording or it was brilliantly edited to look that way.

#4 Seed: Justin Roberts, “Obsessed by Trucks”
Justin Roberts is often referred to as the “hardest-working man in children’s show business,” and he’s apparently building a second generation for his empire by using his children as free labor for his videos. Oh, those poor kids. You can almost hear Justin screaming at them between takes, can’t you? I’m sure one day, the Lily Tomlin/David O. Russell-style blowup that must have erupted behind the scenes will make its way to YouTube; in the meantime, we have this homebrewed clip, led by the effortless charm of a pint-sized lip sync star and a little boy who’s, well, obsessed by trucks.

#2 Seed: Jamie and Carmen Broza, “The Waters of March”
A simple, lilting melody, a pair of gentle voices, and a song about the passage of time, sung by a father and a daughter, interspersed with clips of their life together. This is beautiful. Oh, and I love hooters! Get your mind out of the gutter, jerks — I was talking about the melodica…

#3 Seed: Recess Monkey, “Black Hole in My Room”
Recess Monkey is very popular, and for a lot of very good reasons, but this song has always gotten a shrug from me — I get restless listening to a chorus that repeats itself this many times. I have been overruled on this by my kids, however, who giggled like crazy the whole time the video was on, and who grilled me on the nature of black holes after it was over. Well played, Recess Monkey.

That’s it for today’s videos. Go vote for your favorites!

The Final Funktier

Personally, I’ve always found space pretty terrifying, but maybe that’s because I came of age during an era in which space songs were being recorded by freaky, synth-toting dudes like Peter Schilling — or maybe it was because Starship came from space, and they were awful. Either way, Recess Monkey makes leaving Earth sound like a lot of fun, from wearing “Moon Boots” and a “Jet Pack” to meeting up with a “Ukulalien,” sailing in the “Galax Sea,” and doing the “Constellation Conga.” (The band’s shifty manager, Mayor Monkey, even makes an appearance on “Space Elevator Music.”) I’ve always been a firm believer in outlawing concept albums, but The Final Funktier is so good it almost makes up for Tarkus and Tales from Topographic Oceans. (Not this one, though. Shudder.)

If you want to be picky, Funktier‘s actual funk quotient is perhaps overstated in its title — it isn’t like Recess Monkey has turned into Parliament all of a sudden — but this 15-track collection delivers some of the band’s sharpest, most entertaining songs, full of hooks, humor, and that signature Recess Monkey charm. My personal favorite is the brassy “Constellation Conga” — Recess Monkey, please send me an eight-minute dance mix of this track immediately — but there really isn’t a bad tune in the bunch. It’ll make a perfect soundtrack for the next time you head out for new adventures (or, y’know, grocery shopping) in the family car. Watch the band’s video for “Moon Boots,” and then go pre-order your copy today.

Recess Monkey – Field Trips with Recess Monkey (2009, Monkey Mama)
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Our love for Recess Monkey has already been well documented, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t alert you to the imminent release of Field Trips with Recess Monkey, a DVD companion of sorts to the band’s most recent album, the stellar Field Trip.

For those not already in the know, Recess Monkey is a fun-loving, award-winning trio whose previous forays into kids’ music — including the aforementioned Field Trip, 2008′s Tabby Road, and others — have earned them a devoted following, as well as stacks of glowing reviews from outlets like NPR, Real Simple, and the notoriously cranky and difficult-to-please Stefan Shepherd of Zooglobble. (Just kidding. We love Stefan and he’s nothing but charming.) Field Trips with Recess Monkey is the band’s first DVD, and includes videos for four songs (“Marshmallow Farm,” “Haven’t Got a Pet Yet,” “Fort,” and the wickedly catchy “Hot Chocolate”) as well as a handful of vignettes following the Monkeys around Seattle.

Like the band’s music, Field Trips is a smart blend of educational and entertaining. The DVD consists of four “episodes,” each one hosted by Recess Monkey’s manager, a puppet named Mayor Monkey; his segments take place in various Seattle landmarks (including Gasworks Park and the Pike Place market) and lead into fun stuff like videos of the band’s appearances on Radio 8 Ball, live performances, and a look at how the Field Trip artwork was illustrated. As you might expect given its self-released origins, it’s charmingly low-budget, relying wholly on the music (and the band members’ charm) to hold viewers’ interest.

Partly for this reason, you’ll want to save Field Trips for slightly older viewers, or kids who have seen the band in concert; it’s a rather staid viewing experience, and some segments (such as the radio call-ins by local fans, or the visit to illustrator Matt Hawk) may lose the under-8 set, particularly if you try to take in the DVD all in one sitting — but then, it’s divided into episodes so you can view it a little bit at a time. Monkey Jack Forman describes it as “kind of like American Bandstand meets This American Life,” and that isn’t too far off base. At $20, 90 minutes, and plenty of replay value, it’ll make a great gift for any Recess Monkey-loving fan (or family).

Recess Monkey – Field Trip (2009, Recess Monkey)
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When I was a kid, Seattle was the place with nifty architecture where the SuperSonics and the Seahawks played (no reason to care about the Mariners, as ours was a Yankees household). When a got a little older, it was the place where flannel-clad heroin addicts made sad, loud music that the world went crazy for. These days, folks my age tend to think of coffee and economic summits when they think of Seattle — but for my daughter, and a not-inconsiderable number of her peers, it’s the place Recess Monkey comes from.

The band — made up of teachers Drew Holloway, Jack Forman, and Daron Henry — returns in June with its fifth album, Field Trip, fittingly recorded in the music room of the school where they met (and where two of them still teach). Trip continues the absurd one-record-a-year pace Recess Monkey has maintained since debuting with Welcome to Monkey Town in 2005, a work ethic made even more impressive by the fact that each of these songs is a delicious nugget of kidpop goodness that sounds nothing like the work of a group of insanely prolific part-time moonlighters. The album is, in other words, just the right kind of awesome for little ears — as my wife recently discovered, much to her eventual chagrin, during a three-hour drive in which Field Trip, per my daughter’s repeated requests, played on an endless loop.

Still, even after experiencing drivetime burnout, my wife has to admit this is one of the best records we’ve heard all year; she’s particularly enthusiastic about the clever, poppy “L.I.C.E.” (it stands for “little insects crawling everywhere”) and the cleverly arranged backing vocals on “Sack Lunch” the lilting “Tiny Telephone.” As for me? Well, I wasn’t on that drive, so I’ve got nothing but love for these songs, especially after blasting them all morning and watching my kids dance and sing along. They’re a pleasantly eclectic bunch, with room for everything from the new wave groove of “Hot Chocolate” to the Latin flair of “Ice Pack,” and they’re filled with an infectious sense of fun (example: the velcro solo during “New Shoes”). Whether you’re already a Recess Monkey fan, or just a parent in need of some great new family music, you’ll want to pre-order your copy of Field Trip today.