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The tunes under discussion may be saccharine, but Chris Wood doesn’t sugarcoat his message. “What parent wants to listen to the Wiggles?” asks the longtime bassist for Medeski Martin and Wood. “I haven’t heard it all, but what I have heard is really bad. How could that stuff not drive you crazy?!?”
On Tuesday 8, MMW releases Let’s Go Everywhere, the latest salvo in an ongoing war against not just bad kid-music but bad music, period. The album was inspired by fans who kept telling the group, “My kid really digs your tunes.” But the band members were doubtful that any kiddie label would understand the intention behind the project—until they met guitarist-producer Kevin Salem. “It’s just them doing what they do,” says Salem, founder of Little Monster Records, which is distributing Everywhere. “They didn’t dumb it down or change the way they make music to try to appeal to kids.”
Salem was motivated to launch the label in 2006 while watching movies with his daughter, Emily, now five. “Most kid movies are pretty good,” he says. “They allow you to discover something together, which is rarely the case with kid music.” Little Monster’s first release, All Together Now, featured tots singing Beatles tunes with the likes of Rachael Yamagata, Marshall Crenshaw and the Bangles. Charming as the record is, why not just play the originals? “Hey, I’d love it if my daughter woke up and put on a Clash CD,” says Salem. “But that’s not where her ears are yet. It takes a little fine-tuning to reel them in, make it more accessible to the family.”
Lloyd Miller, leader of Brooklyn’s the Deedle Deedle Dees—whose two albums are self-released—found a quicker method: “I just pretend I can’t find the kid CDs, and say, ‘How ’bout we listen to jazz?’ That’s how I turned my kid on to Duke Ellington.” Miller writes educational tunes about science and American history in a ragtag style that recalls Tom Waits—a style he forged while working the club circuit, long before the Dees played their first birthday party. “Only one place would book us,” he remembers, laughing.
Little Monster artist Morgan Taylor is the illustrator-tunesmith behind Gustafer Yellowgold, an animated creature who hails from the Sun and sings catchy pop tunes about eels and mustard slugs—yet Taylor claims he’s not even in the kid-music biz. That may sound like a huge load of doo-doo, but the guy has opened for the likes of Wilco and the Polyphonic Spree. “To those crowds,” he says, “I’m just some quirky, cool, weird thing.” True, aging Schoolhouse Rock devotees will go ga-ga over Gustafer’s DVD, Have You Never Been Yellow?
Still, hipping your offspring to edgier sounds won’t keep you from going crazy. Chris Wood got his two children an OutKast DVD, which they played again…and again…and again. “Anytime I went near the DVD player, they’d yell, ‘OutKast!’ ” he says. “I was like, ‘Can we evolve already?’ ”
