Music for children...
...that isn't children's music.
It finally happened. My son found a CD with a song by one of my old bands on it, and then he laughed and laughed while listening to it in utter astonishment. Mom is on this CD? Surely not mom! LOL.
An aside about obsolete technology: My kid is obsessed with the glowing magic rectangle that does all things. Is yours? It takes photos, and makes calls to loved ones. It has YouTube and Netflix and all the other stuff that makes a TV interesting. But it also has music. All the music! It’s a flashlight and a compass and a calculator and let me tell you about this place called the app store, which contains an infinity of games.
In an effort to instil in our babe a love of things that we think are great (music, photography, movies, etc) without fuelling his obsession with our phones (or shaming him for being as interested in them as literally every adult in his world also is), Colin and I have turned to single-purpose gadgets of yore, for help.
Our kid now has a CD player in his room. He has total control over our combined CD collections. If he breaks some of the CDs, well, who cares? He loves music, and I don’t want his love of it to be wrapped up in an object I’m trying to limit his access to. In his bedroom, with his CD player, he has complete autonomy. He can play whatever he wants, whenever he wants. He’s always discovering new faves among our sizeable collections. He’s proven himself to be so responsible with his CDs that he’s now allowed to operate the record player (with supervision) as well.
We’ve also done this with other technology. Kiddo is pretty good at using a digital camera, loves making art with our old scanner and printer, and knows how to operate the turntable, DVD player and VCR.
Typing all that out makes me feel like one of those insufferable “oh, we prefer wooden toys” families, but that’s not it. This isn’t too different from giving him access to all our pens and paints and books. They’re just tools for him to learn and be creative with, but ones with less chance of getting sucked into some kind of horrible bubble popping game for three hours, when you definitely started out with the intention of doing some arts & crafts. I’ve been feeling pretty nostalgic for pre-smartphone times myself lately, so it’s also fun for me.
The CD he recently found is a compilation of children’s songs by not-children’s-musicians that Rough Trade put out in 2006, called “Colours are Brighter.”
Most of the songs are hard to find on Spotify or Apple Music, but someone appears to have put the whole album on YouTube in this playlist. Give it a listen (it’s quite fun).
This Guardian review from the time amusingly (perhaps tactfully?) avoids mentioning my band’s contribution (“Tidy Up, Tidy Up,” by The Barcelona Pavilion), but is reasonably accurate in its assessments of the other tracks (Jonathan Richman, what were you thinking with that sad old dog song?).
In spite of the reviewer’s claim that Franz Ferdinand's “Jackie Jackson” falls flat, my seven year old counts it in his top four. It’s in constant rotation alongside Belle & Sebastian’s “The Monkeys Are Breaking Out the Zoo” (he’s choreographed a dance routine to go with this one, featuring all of his monkey and ape stuffies), Four Tet’s “Go Go Ninja Dinosaur” (probably the best song on the album), and of course, mommy’s song, to which he theatrically “tidies” his room, mostly by shoving piles into the corners (to be fair, I also sometimes tidy this way).
My son has always loved listening to music. Most of the time, it’s just … music. He loves Daft Punk and The Weeknd, is into the Beetlejuice soundtrack and the songs from the Zombies musicals on Disney. We’re happy to share what we like with him, and let him explore and develop his own tastes. (Don’t worry, he doesn’t exclusively listen to cool music. He also heard “Misery” by Maroon 5 on the radio recently and fell in love with it.)
We’ve got a few Muppets records, some Raffi, the usual suspects. Elizabeth Mitchell’s Little Seed was on heavy rotation for a couple of summers, and improved our long road trips significantly. But, for the most part, we haven’t focused much on music that’s specifically for kids.
This week, watching the spontaneous, imaginative joy with which he’s embraced the quirky songs on Colours Are Brighter makes me wish I’d spent more time seeking out music for children, but cool.
Maybe it’s not too late. A friend tells me that the frontman of The Presidents of the United States of America has been releasing kids’ music for over a decade under the name Caspar Babypants, so clearly there’s a whole world out there that I am clueless about. If you have any musical recommendations for me (or a copy of this CD for less than $50), please share!
Next week: It’s almost TIFF time, and I’m writing about falling in and out of love with the festival over my nearly 25 year history with it.
I still have several CDs of kids music you can have! One of my faves was 'The Bottle Let Me Down' compilation from Bloodshot records. I also have the first CDs by Smoosh etc. Fun fact: my kid did NOT like cool kid's music but was super into jive and swing. Put some Louis Jordan on!
It is hugely amusing that the first song he's ever heard from one of mommy's bands is the one with the most mom-like message possible. (Then again, a lot of Steve's lyrics always had mom-like messages.)