Charlie Hope: My producer and I knew that we wanted it to flow and I also wanted to make sure to put the livelier songs first. Loved, for example, starts a little lively so I made sure it was near the beginning of the album—since you’re not really sleeping yet.

I was nannying as I wrote these songs and the little boy I was caring for, Liam, wouldn’t go to sleep on his own so I had to rock him. And sometimes he’d wake up after I laid him down and I’d have to rock him again. So I listened to a lot of lullaby CDs and I picked up on what worked and what didn’t. I liked the albums that were a bit more new agey and ethereal, but I also felt that there weren’t enough lullaby CDs with original songs. I also preferred the songs that were sung in a soothing voice rather than a choral voice.

Charlie: I was really careful while writing the songs, too. In Dreamland I sing about riding in a rocket ship and at first I worried that it was too thought provoking. Would kids be just falling asleep and then think “Oooh! A rocket ship!” and wake back up? In the end I decided it was OK, but I placed that song toward the beginning of the CD as well.

I also wanted to write songs that children could relate to and that their parents could relate to. There are a couple songs sung in the voice of a parent singing to their child. I also thought they could be songs that parents could learn and sing to their kids themselves. Loved is actually about the boy I nannied for. I’m still super close to that family.

Charlie: I tried to be very observant of parents that I worked with as a nanny. Like with the song Best Part, I know a lot of parents feel that way, that they have to work all day, but the best part of the day is when they get home to their child.

And with Sun and Moon I wanted to create a song that could turn into a timeless melody, something you could hum or sing to a child at night.

Charlie: [laughs] And I don’t even have a dog, but Liam, the little boy I nannied, has two dogs, so I got the idea from him. My next album is going to have a dog song, too.

Charlie: I’m not positive how it’s going to turn out yet; we’re still working on a few things. It may turn into a volume series. It should be released in late winter or early spring. The last one took a lot longer, but now that I’ve been through the process once, I’m moving a bit faster.

Charlie: I’ve been working with Liam since he was three months and now he’s four, so he’s been a huge inspiration for me. His little brother is nineteen months now.

Charlie: I actually just had to move on. I was still babysitting a lot, but I wasn’t consistent enough anymore since I was traveling more for music. But, in a way, I do feel like they are my children and I miss them terribly.

Charlie: Oh, yes. I had been thinking, children’s music can be so simple, then I came to liam’s one day and he was wearing cowboy boots and I started singing a melody to “I wear my cowboy boots on my feet.” Later he was having a snack and we started talking about other types of shoes, like running shoes and flip flops.

Another time Liam and I were playing with a balloon and I just started singing “blue balloon you float through the air” and the melody just came to me. I had to write it down so I wouldn’t forget it, then later I went home and had to come up with the rhymes, which isn’t my favorite part.

Charlie: I know it’s important for kids to have songs that rhyme, but it’s never really come naturally to me. The songs on World of Dreams are more ambient so I can get away with words that are just similar sounding. Like in Sun and Moon I say “At night the sun goes down and it’s time to sleep, I’ve played all day and learned my ABC’s” and rhyme sleep with C’s. I said to my producer, “See, that rhymes,” and he said, “It’s OK, but it’s not a rhyme.” But it’s my kind of rhyme.

On I’m Me I did have to rhyme more often, especially with songs like Blue Balloon where really the whole song is just a simple rhyme.

Charlie: I’ve always tried to think positively. Growing up I always had high hopes and would really put the belief out there. I would be very positive—of course it usually didn’t work! But I’ve always been the type of person who will say, “Yeah, I can feel it, this is going to be it, this is going to work out!”

Now with how things are going with I’m Me I feel like it’s a real sign that I am where I should be and I’m doing what I should be doing. I feel like I’m moving in the right direction. I feel like all of that positive energy and focus is finally coming back to me.

Charlie: I don’t even really know how I was able to write and record I’m Me and World of Dreams in such a short amount of time. It just seemed that everything was right in the universe and it all came together. Now looking forward to my next album, I’m a little worried that I won’t be able to top I’m Me, that maybe things won’t come together like that again. I want to record something that will be timeless and I hope it will become something that will last, like Raffi. I want to portray a real respect for children and a relatability.

So this next album is going to be very different. There’s no I’m Me or Frog Song type of song. At first I was really worried about that, but I think it’ll be OK. I lived in the Arctic for six months and there are no trees there, but the area has its own beauty and you don’t miss the trees because there aren’t any. So I hope listeners won’t miss the Frog Song on this next album because there aren’t any songs like that here. I hope it has its own beauty.

Vanessa Trien: Totally.

Vanessa: Yeah. It’s a 450 seat theater! It actually took me a long time to get into the Coolidge because at the time they didn’t have a lot of music in their program. They focused more on jugglers and magicians. I spoke to the director, showed him my material, and explained that I have a whole band, but I think he was still just picturing “girl with guitar” and didn’t think it’d be a draw.

It took me about a year and half to convince him. I remember telling him, “I promise you I will sell out. I will fill the bottom theater—not just the small top one—I can fill the bottom theater. Just give me a chance.”

So then when he finally gave me a chance I was petrified.

But it worked! And people showed up for it!

Vanessa: That’s so sad! When I heard that the theater sold out I couldn’t look outside because I was afraid I would be so upset seeing people I knew not getting in. The Coolidge is right here in my neighborhood, so I know everyone here. This is where all my fans are.

Vanessa: I now teach two days a week, six classes total, with about fourteen families per class.

Vanessa: Plus I’ve done it for five years, so siblings have come and gone, and I’m still connected with a lot of them. Music Together has definitely helped me build my fan base. Families will travel to see me at the Regent or they’ll come here to see me at Coolidge Corner.

Vanessa: Music Together creates the curriculum and you put your own spin on it. They give me a CD and song book—and it’s done really well. They do a good job.

The program focuses on 0-4 musicality and confidence building. They learn to feel the beat and keep the beat, recognize pitch and match tones, hear a song in their head… but the basic principle behind everything is giving parents the chance, once a week, to make music with their kids in a safe and friendly environment.

We work on building the parent’s confidence, too. It’s about the shared experience. I balance the class between teaching the kids about music and also teaching the parents how to make music at home.

I want parents to sing and dance with their kids. There’s a lot of movement in the class, lots of using your body. I push that a lot in my shows too. Sometimes I worry that I’m asking the kids to dance too much! I think the parents get out of breath before the kids do, though!

Vanessa: I had wanted to be a children’s musician for many many years. I had dabbled in it and got a master’s degree in education. I knew how to work with kids and I loved it, but I still couldn’t envision making a living performing.

Vanessa: It is! And I’m such a terrible self promoter. Then I met Steve Roslonek years ago—in 1998—and he had just quit his job to pursue his music career. Sara Wheeler and I were teaching music at the Cambridge Montessori School at the time. I watched Steve play at libraries and preschools and kept thinking that I’d like to do that one day. I viewed Steve as a model and watched his career get bigger and bigger. And finally I thought, “Why aren’t I doing this? He’s doing what I want to be doing!” So he was a really big inspiration for me.

And Sara Wheeler and I have taken the path at the same time. She wasn’t pursuing her performing career either, then right when we both had kids we started pursuing it. We’ve been living parallel lives for a long time.

Vanessa: Having kids was the reason why I locked into this career choice. It all made sense. Life is interconnected. I’m a children’s musician because I’m a mom; I’m a better mom because I’m a children’s musician and I’m doing what I love to do. I love that my kids can see me pursuing something that I’m so passionate about.

Life is interconnected. I’m a children’s musician because I’m a mom; I’m a better mom because I’m a children’s musician and I’m doing what I love to do.

It’s only hard logistically. It gets hard when I have to do promotion and book shows. I don’t always have the time to sit in front of the computer and get it done. I’d be thrilled to keep my shows in New England and New York for a while so there’s less traveling. I’m honestly amazed that I’m sitting here talking to you—there never seems to be enough time!

I guess the answer is that sometimes it is frustrating and hard to manage, but it’s my reality and it’s a wonderful reality.

Vanessa: Oh, total inspiration! I just finished writing a pirate song. My son’s five, so I’m in the world of pirates and cars and trains. I have another song I’ve been trying to write forever called Cars, Busses, Trucks & Trains.

My son and I often write songs together, so we started writing this pirate sea shanty a couple years ago—we wrote the chorus together—and I finally wrote the rest of the song and I just performed it a couple weeks ago for the first time.

I also just finished writing a song called Peacock Walk because when my son was two he would chase the peacocks around the Franklin Park Zoo and try to walk like them. He’s definitely my little muse.

And now my daughter is, too. She’s 16 months old now. I’m so glad she likes music. When I turn the music on she gets these sparkly eyes and this sparkly smile like she’s saying, “Is that for me?”

Vanessa: I met her through Music Together. She started teaching classes a bit before I did, so I called her to meet and just make that social connection, and we really liked each other and started hanging out. I was playing with a little trio and I asked Sharon if she would come sing with us. I just love vocal harmonies and female vocal harmonies just melt me. So we would sing together during the show and I just loved her energy. I like that she can be my arms during the show since I’m busy with the guitar. When I do solo shows I have to do it all, but it’s a luxury to have Sharon there to act out the songs while I’m singing them or do the hand motions with the kids.

She has so much energy and she’s just so cute on stage.

Vanessa: She is adorable, plus she has a musical theatre background and can do performances as well, like when she plays Wyona from Wyona Wide. I’d like to incorporate that talent of hers into our shows more. With this new pirate song I really want her to act it out. We’ll figure that out.

Vanessa: We will!

Vanessa: There you go. I think that’s it. I’ve always been into folk and acoustic, so that’s how I think of myself, but because I’ve had other instrumentation available to me on stage and especially in the recording studio with a producer who really liked trying building on songs bigger and bigger, that my music kind of took on a life of its own. My songs are often acoustic at their core but with a bigger rock quality added to them. I like that for the bigger shows and I really like getting kids to move. It’s also helped me write new songs in a different way. I never would have written High Five before when I didn’t have a band. But now that I have a band I can think about all those sounds and instruments when writing.

But for my next album there’s a part of me that wants to scale back a bit, like Laura Doherty. She has very beautiful, very simple guitar arrangements, which remind me that I used to love doing that, too. So I’m still undecided about how to pursue my style. I’m having so much fun with the Jumping Monkeys’ sound—maybe I can find a way to combine the two and not go over the top.

Vanessa: A lot of my students who also come to my shows will “play Vanessa” at home. Their moms will say, “You know my son loves to pretend to be you. He’ll put his stuffed animals out and sing on the couch like it’s a stage.” I get that so much from parents. The kids do the songs, act out the motions, even fall asleep during Driving in My Car like I do on stage. I think that’s probably the biggest compliment of all, hearing that these kids on a regular basis are pretending to be me and acting out my classes or shows at home.

Vanessa: It’s true, but I did have a heartening moment. When I worked in the public schools I worked mostly with first to third graders, but now I work with kids that are considerably younger, from 0-6. So when I recently performed at a family showcase at the New England Regional Folk Alliance Conference I was shocked to find that they had invited 130 third graders—eight year olds—to be the audience. I kept thinking, “Third graders?! I don’t work with third graders! What are they going to think of me?”

But I have to pat myself on the back because I had them eating out of my hands. It just proved to me that even though they are eight, they are still so physical and music can still turn them on so much. The musicality, the moving, the call and response that I had them doing still got them very excited. It made me want to do more work in schools with older kids. You can still play music for older kids, you just need to approach them a little differently. Music can be a way to connect with just about anyone of any age.

So what’s the benefit behind the benefit concert? And how can you win a chance to see They Might Be Giants for free?

John and John are here to raise money for a worthy local non-profit, Boston By Foot. Boston By Foot provides guided walking tours of downtown Boston, pointing out interesting history and telling you the stories of the town while you wander about. It’s a great way to learn about Boston, both for tourists and locals alike.

John F. says, “So much history has happened in the streets of Boston, and one tour with Boston by Foot really tunes you in to that. It’d be hard to make it seem dry and historic—it’s actually pretty juicy and often just strange. The other thing a Boston by Foot tour shows you—and this stuck with me forever—it teaches you to look UP!”

Both shows at the Regent on May 23rd will benefit Boston By Foot. Tickets are $22 a piece and all concert goers can also use their ticket stubs to get a free tour from Boston by Foot, including Boston by Little Feet tours for kids, during the upcoming season.

Of course you want to catch TMBG when they’re here, and just by leaving a comment on this post you’ll be entered for a chance to win a Family 4-Pack of free tickets to the show!

All you have to do is comment on this post below or contact me and leave an email address so I can contact you if you win. Let me know why you and your family want to attend the show and which time you prefer, 12pm or 3pm. That’s it!

The winner will also receive a free copy of Here Comes Science courtesy of the band!

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Would you like to earn an extra entry? You can…

• Subscribe to my email or RSS updates;
• Let your friends know about the contest on Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace;
• Post about this contest on your own Blog or website;
• Add Boston Children’s Music to your Blog Roll;
• or email five of your friends and tell them about this contest.

Be sure to send me an email or comment on this post to let me know what you did for your extra entry.

This contest will end Monday May 17th at midnight!

Good Luck!

Morgan Taylor: When I wrote the music that started it all, I wasn’t thinking of kids. I had a rock band and I wrote songs. But then I moved to New York and I had a sort of creative awakening. I had always written songs, but suddenly I felt really inspired, like I was lifting the barriers of any kind of creative block. I felt like I got into a groove and really found my voice.

I was still writing songs for the band, but I was also writing fun songs for myself. They weren’t for anything but for the enjoyment of creating and oddly enough those are the ones that ended up as Gustafer music.

Morgan: Around fall 2003 I started drawing these pictures. The band I was in had broken up and I wanted to do something else and my wife, Rachel, suggested I work on the kids’ book I had been thinking of creating.

So I go into it thinking “this is going to be a kids book” and I take the lyrics from some of these silly songs I had written and start illustrating them. Most of them are sung in first person, but I knew it wasn’t me saying these things, so I thought “I’ll use that pointy headed yellow guy I used to doodle back eight years ago as the main character.”

Once I saw him on the paper his world started forming and I began to figure out his story. So I was looking through my songs to see which would work for this project and one of the songs was I’m From the Sun. And I thought, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I just happened to write this.” So I used that song and it became the nucleus for the whole thing.

The other cast members or characters are also from fun songs I had written earlier. So it blossomed from there and all of a sudden we’re thinking, “How can we do this live? How can we sing and have the images at the same time and have it in sync?” It took a few months of doing shows to figure out the technical aspects. People started getting really interested in it right away.

Morgan: Yeah, it was crazy. It was really a lesson for me because it turns out that the music I’m finally having success with—well in my terms having success—is the music that is the most me. It’s the music I’m creating just to create.

It turns out that the music I’m finally having success with…is the music that is the most me.

It’s the music I’m creating just to create.

Morgan: Now that we’ve established it and have three DVDs out and now that I see what it is and see people’s reactions and know what people like about it and I’m writing on purpose for it now—yeah, now I know I’m writing for kids.

But I’ve also been able to set my own standard so it’s actually quite easy to both write for an audience and for myself because it’s my own standard.

Morgan: The humor in it is weird enough that people that age can get it. It works on many levels. Gustafer looks like a preschool character, the music is easily accessible because it’s basically just pop (I want to write catchy melodies, that’s what I’ve always wanted to do anyway), but the humor is my sense of humor and leaning toward the absurd.

Of course, I don’t want to make it so weird that it’s inaccessible—I want everyone to enjoy it—but I want it to be full of a bunch of inside jokes, too.

Morgan: There’s depth to it and also some subject matter that I’m finding out is not normal for kids’ music.

Morgan: Well, the sun is a great place—it’s exciting and different—and he had an established life there, but he always wondered what earth was like and he just had to find out. He had to know what it was like to touch snow, to feel the greenery, to experience cooler climates. He just had to know. So his brother built him the Sun Pod and Gustafer just went for it.

Morgan: I don’t think he knows. He’s just going. In a way his life is a bit of accidental tourism. He’s often a passive observer, taking things in, but always having fun with it.

Morgan: Yeah, we’re recording now. The music is mostly finished. I’m just starting the process of the animation. The drawing actually takes a lot longer than the recording. It’ll take me probably until the fall to finish the drawings.

Morgan: Yes, there are some new peripheral characters. There’s new adventures. This is going to be the first DVD that is plot-driven, that tells a full story. So something happens in the beginning and Gustafer has to figure out what’s up and it’s solved by the end. It’s very silly but also possibly spiritual in places.

Morgan: Yeah, we’re aiming for next January.

Morgan: It’s a long time for me, too. It just takes so long to draw. If I were just recording the music, I could put out an album every six months. But it’s the art that makes it special, and that takes time. Also, we spent all of last year touring so I didn’t have the time to work on anything new.

Morgan: At least a hundred shows a year. We did our 400th show recently in Philadelphia. So we’re up to about 435 now.

Morgan: I drew everything by hand and we knew how we wanted things to function.

Morgan: Basically I wanted it to be like looking through someone else’s medicine cabinet. You get to look through this guy’s stuff and you can click on something and then realize, oh, that’s the radio, and it plays music. And there are little hidden videos all over the place.

There are multiple ways to get to certain things, so if you don’t want to hunt and peck you can go straight to the link that says “videos.”

We just wanted something that would be fun and it’s not super animated, like the rest of Gustafer’s world.

Morgan: Oh, but he is there! He’s just always in the other room.

Steve: Like “Are they really sensational?” (laughs)

Steve: There have been a number of kids who fill that role at different times, but in the last year or two it’s primarily been Mariel Ross and Linnea Ross; They’re sisters. I’ve been totally blessed and very lucky to have found kids that are both fun and super performers.

Steve: Mariel is 14 and Linnea is 12.

Steve: They are, but they’ve always been that way. I started working with them three years ago when Mariel was 10 and she had a solo at the Kennedy Center. And I remember thinking that she didn’t even seem to notice that there were like 600 people out in the audience. She didn’t have a nervous bone in her body. She just loves doing it.

Steve: Thank you very much! That’s what we’re aspiring to. We want to be professional enough, but still maintain that personal element. The thing I love about live shows is being able to interact with the kids—the unpredictableness of it—but then you worry that the professionalism might fall apart. You need to have enough elements that are totally planned out and produced well while still leaving room for elements that are very spur of the moment.

Steve: That can get a little messy. And I hate to not do a request. What we did at our last show at the Regent was play a medley of some of our older songs so we could still feel comfortable playing new songs and not leave anyone out.

Steve: One nice thing about the performance not being scripted is that you can gauge the audience and try to customize what you’re doing. You can also plan your set based on the venue. If we’re in a theater where everyone is sitting, like the Regent or TCAN, then it’s nice to start with a listening song, like Giant. In other venues where not everyone has a seat, like at a school gymnasium, you need to start with a real participatory song just to get everyone focused on what you’re doing.

For theater shows I like to start with Marvelous Day because it’s mostly listening, it introduces the band, but there’s an interactive echo part in the middle, so the audience can see that the show is going to be lively and they are going to be asked to do stuff.

A nice second song would be something like The Pirate Song or She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain When She Comes. They’re nice interactive songs but everyone can stay seated.

If the audience is older, then you can throw in some longer story songs with less participatory parts, but typically it doesn’t feel right to have more than two of those types of songs in a show.

While on the one hand I’m always amazed that I am able to do this for a living, on the other hand I can’t really see myself doing anything else.

Steve: Probably not as much as there should be! (laughs) But yeah, you have to be aware of your audience. As audiences get larger it can be harder to know what everybody wants, but there’s still an energy and you can feel if you need to speed things up or slow things down.

It’s kind of like being a parent: You need to stay at least one step ahead of the kids. You need to know where they want to go. I’ve never been one to feel that things have to go a certain way. I don’t want to make people do something they don’t want to do.

Steve: I think there is something hugely valuable in attending a live performance. It can be a fantastic exercise in learning social skills, for example. For kids, so many of their experiences are new and it’s great to expose them to something like a live music performance where there is some structure to it, but there is also some spontaneity as well. Learning to organize and balance that in their heads is a great social interaction exercise. Then you add music to the mix, which is something that is just magical and completely uplifting, plus kids are both listening and singing along so they’re participating in the creation of the experience.

I think the best interactive songs have specific movements or dances that are expected, but also leave room for the kids to play with the dancing or singing and throw in their own interpretations, so that they can feel like they are both part of the group but also individuals.

Steve: Yes, I know everything about it. (laughs)

Steve: I worked with a director who is from Arlington (David Padrusch, owner/director of Mad Rush Pictures, Inc.), and that one location was always at the top of the list. It worked out perfectly for the Marvelous Day video because there’s a huge a playground and we could shoot some scenes there, but also, we had over a hundred kids and some might be shooting a scene while others were not, and if they weren’t working, they could go and play.

Steve: Yes. Extraordinarily. There’s just so much content on the DVD—we just kept adding more and more. It was a lot of fun.

Steve: Yes. I’m one of the hosts in between the morning shows. But some of the music videos are also shown at other times during the day. And the Music Time with SteveSongs CD are all songs from the first season of interstitials that we did.

Steve: Yes. We’ve already finished the songs for volume two. The volume two songs are currently on rotation on PBS Kids this season. And we’ll start writing songs for next season very soon.

All of the songs needed to be exactly a minute long for the TV spots, but we recorded some of the longer versions, up to a minute and a half, for the CD. It’s very different than any CD we’ve put together—and I think there’s something nice about an album in which you can listen to eighteen tracks in thirty-five minutes.

It was a very fun and challenging writing assignment—it was like a writing workshop where you had to take out anything that wasn’t needed. Many of these songs, if we had been writing them for an album, we would have done them in different ways. We’d start with a concept and we’d feel like we needed at least two minutes to introduce it lyrically, elaborate on it, then come out with the resolution. It was definitely a challenge to get everything down to one minute.

Steve: Right.

Steve: “You’re better than princesses!” (laughs) Another time we were shooting a little promo for the DVD and had a bunch of kids watch it then asked them on camera afterwards what was their favorite part of the show, and one of the kids said, “the popcorn.”

Steve: Always. Almost every day—at least once a week.

Although, I would say that while on the one hand I’m always amazed that I am able to do this for a living, on the other hand I can’t really see myself doing anything else.

Leland: There’s a guy named Dan Foley who is part of a juggling duo called the Airborne Comedians and he is really well connected with the children’s family entertainment community, especially the Faneuil Hall street performers. We didn’t know the first thing about what kind of family entertainment would sell or who the audience would be, so he helped us produce the series the first year or two.

Once I got the handle for the kind of things that worked and didn’t work then I took over hiring the talent and producing the shows in the series.

Leland: We learned the hard way that the main audience is preschool and early grade school. We thought we would be more sophisticated and produce shows for grade school and older, but those are the kids who already have a lot of activities going on with sports and soccer and dance classes.

We also try to keep in mind that we want to find shows that the parents will enjoy as well. And I guess we predominantly put on music shows. There are more children’s music entertainers around than other genres and it can be hard to find really good and dynamic jugglers or puppets. So we do try to mix it up, but usually we fall back on the music shows.

We have a lot of people who come through on a regular basis and we try to bring them back; someone like Justin Roberts or Billy Jonas from out of town. And of course we bring in local artists like SteveSongs, Ben Rudnick, Vanessa Trien, or Debbie & Friends.

Leland: On the 14th of November we have Sara Wheeler and Little Groove. We have Jenny the Juggler on the 21st and then on Thanksgiving weekend we have the Sing-A-Long Mary Poppins.

Leland: Well, it’s really kind of like Rocky Horror Picture Show for families. It’s a really nice restored print of the film with the song lyrics burnt into it and everyone who comes gets a Perform-Along Fun Pack with little objects you can use to interact with the film. For example there’s a tambourine, so whenever Dick Van Dyke is playing music with his one-man band the kids can play along.

We also encourage kids and grown ups to come in costume as their favorite character or something inspired by the film and then we do a parade before the film down the aisles and up on stage. There’s also a Master of Ceremonies that leads the parade and shows people how to use the things in their fun pack.

Leland: We show the whole movie but only the parts with music display the words. It’s really a lively thing. We’ve also done the Sing-A-Long Wizard of Oz and we may bring back the Sing-A-Long Sound of Music, too.

So Mary Poppins has become a tradition that we do every Thanksgiving and in December we have some holiday shows. We’ll have the Legacy Dancers the first weekend of December and that’s just great because they choose really interesting holiday music, it’s not just your standard Christmas carols, and then there are eighty dancers, a lot of them kids’ ages eleven to eighteen, and really great choreography and stunning costumes.

And the last show of the year will be the Holiday Extravaganza with Ben Rudnick and Friends. Right now I’m busy trying to program January through April.

Leland: We do it October through April. We’ve found that once the nice weather hits people stop coming.

Leland: We do them in conjunction with the series. We set them up in these back platforms—we take the chairs out and set up tables. The kids sit together during the show then afterwards they meet the artists then come back here for cake and we bring in pizza and juice and they have their party here.

Leland: Well, we can also do parties where the family brings in a DVD of a movie and the kids can watch it here. We can do that up here on the big screen or down in the basement space where there is a smaller stage and screen.

Leland: Yep.

Leland: We like to have the regulars back, like SteveSongs, who has a great draw. We like to have him kick off the series in early October. But we don’t want it to get stale, so we mix in some new performers, too. Sometimes we find someone just based on a recommendation from a parent or a customer; Sometimes someone from a band will tell us about another band they know. Either way we end up getting some really interesting performers coming through.

Leland: Well, I think that it’s a real change from your standard video and television entertainment. When we first started the series our motto was “Way Better Than TV!” Why waste your family’s time with Saturday morning cartoons when you could come in and see some live entertainment?

The parents seem really grateful that we’re doing it and in a theatre setting, too. A lot of kids’ entertainment will be in libraries or schools and not on a big stage. It’s fun to be able to do that. And the performers really like the opportunity to do it, too. We also have 500 seats so we can put on some really big shows, too.

And I think parents are really aware of the value of their kids seeing a live show with the interactive and educational nature of it. You get so much more out of a live show than you ever could from a CD or DVD.

Dan: Rutabaga’s in the store are big ugly things because they chop the really beautiful green parts off and then they cover them in wax, so nobody wants to eat them. But rutabagas at the farm come with a huge luscious green top and aren’t covered in wax. I actually didn’t think of the wax version when I wrote the song. I do eat them a lot in the fall and winter because they’re root vegetables and store well. I put them in stew with other root vegetables.

Mike: Actually, if you roast them, they caramelize a little bit, which is really nice.

Dan: The best way to see a rutabaga is at the farm. And they’re a fall vegetable so they’d be available now.

Mike: Well, it’s a Maine delicacy…

Dan: It’s not necessarily Maine specific.

Mike: I never met a dilly bean before I moved to Maine.

Dan: My first one was in Connecticut.

Mike: They’re string beans that are treated sort of like pickles, but there’s a higher garlic content.

Dan: Well, the right store. And at the bottom of the dilly bean jar in the brine they’ll put hot peppers and garlic and other spices so they have a little kick to them.

Mike: They’re really good. They’re crunchy.

Dan: When I moved to Maine, I rode my bicycle from New York city to Maine to make the decision to move there…

Dan: I did.

Mike: To Bangor Maine, which is up there.

[My] overall goal is just to increase children’s level of engagement and curiosity with the world around them…. I sing about being a person.

-Dan Flannery

Dan: On the way I camped in Connecticut and there was a group of old folks camping in the lot next to me. They saw me roll in on my bike and I was exhausted so they invited me over for dinner.

They told me they have a canning party every year and pickle tons and tons of dilly beans and they gave me a jar. And I was so amazed by them and said, “I am going to show these to Mike.”

So I tried to ride to Maine with them, but by the time I got there I think there were only three beans left, because they are that good.

Mike: Twenty-two, twenty-three years?

Dan: I was four and you were eight.

Mike: So we started playing approximately twenty-two years ago.

Dan: Well, for four and eight, yeah, it was pretty good.

Mike: As the Flannery Brothers we’re coming up on about a year of live shows.

Dan: I don’t think so. There’s sibling constructive criticism.

Mike: It’s actually been a really good process. We’ve been working together for a couple years and we act less like siblings and more like friends now.

Dan: We’re actually really on the same wave length. We say the same things at the same time a lot and that really helps when playing music. Sometimes I get things wrong, like today I switched verses in a song, but Mike just sang along. He got it. He knew what was going on.

Mike: And we collaborated on all the songs on the album. Dan and I just sat in my studio in Bangor and hashed out every note in every song.

Mike: Dan is a promoting machine.

Dan: It’s tough. I do all the graphic design and I learned how to program websites just to make our website, which is sculpted entirely out of clay. I also do all the artwork and marketing. It’s all do-it-yourself. I made the shirts, too. But it’s really rewarding.

Dan: In Maine, that’s not the case. So we’re actually very lucky to be in Maine. There isn’t a lot of competition. But reaching out past Maine has been difficult.

Mike: We got a lot of news coverage during the John Lennon Songwriting Contest because we needed to drum up votes. We were on the local Bangor news four or five times during the course of the contest. We’ve been in all the papers.

Dan: It’s definitely worked to our advantage to be in Maine.

Mike: They’re honest.

Mike: It’s great. You know if something is working.

Dan: …or not.

Mike: But most of the time what we do works. And we never come with a set list, because you never know what the energy level is going to be.

So if it’s time to get moving, we’ll play Jump Up and Down, if it’s time to calm down we’ll play Broccoli Yet. There’s a lot of back and forth. It’s not like at a rock show where you play at the audience, we’re playing with the audience.

Dan: And kids dance. There’s a lot of dancing.

Dan: I think the overall goal is just to increase children’s level of engagement and curiosity with the world around them.

Mike: When we go to write a song it’s always about something that gets us excited.

Dan: My rule is that if it doesn’t apply to me as an adult, then I won’t write about it for kids. I think there’s an inherent dishonesty in that. I don’t ride the school bus, for example, so I won’t write about missing the bus. I sing about being a person.

Dan: We’re developing a new website called makeupsongs.com where kids send in their song ideas and then we’ll take those topics and develop video shorts online where we explore those subject matters and then write a song about it.

So if a kid wants to hear a song about popcorn, then Mike might go to a farm and talk to the farmer to learn how corn becomes popcorn, and Jonathan, our drummer, will go to the movie theatre and eat ten huge boxes of popcorn and totally immerse himself in the world of popcorn.

We want to have as much of a collaboration as possible with our audience.

Mike: And we’ve already started working on another CD.

Dan: I’ve also written some songs for an EP called Move Over Lullabies, It’s Time for the Wakeup Songs. It’ll be four or five songs designed to get you up in the morning.

Mike: Fun.

Dan: We’ve been called the Grateful Dead for little kids. I think the band’s writing style is very Harry-Nilsson-like. I also get a lot of inspiration from Jonathan Richman.

Mike: Oh yeah! Jonathan Richman!

Dan: I’d say that if we had to define ourselves, we’re “Jonathan Richman approved fun rock and roll for kids.”

Mike: But we don’t know if he’d approve.

Dan: He does.

Mike: Okay.

Dan: I’ve seen him play before. He approves.

Ben Rudnick: Since the first day we met!

John Zevos: A little over twenty years. Chris is twenty.

Ben: Right. John’s wife was pregnant with Chris when I first met them.

John: Chris is the gauge.

Ben: Children always are the gauge. And Chris is that particular gauge. I also went in for music lessons and learned from John.

John: Not usually, no.

Ben: The songs I write I’ll work on as much as I can on my own. Then there might be a chord or two that can go either way and I’m open for opinions. Of course, sometimes there’s a chord or two that could go either way and I won’t change my mind.

John: And sometimes the arrangements come out once we start playing the song together and get a little more of a group thing going. And that’s always better.

Ben: Even if you look at the songs that have my name on them: I’ve clearly written the music, I’ve clearly written the words, but it feels like a collaboration. So I’m game to John’s mojo.

John: I wrote a couple on the new CD.

John: I just wrote that, lyrics and music, in about five minutes. It’s a true story.

John: Oh yeah, that music has power, there’s no doubt about it.

Ben: Last year my daughter got Bat Mitzvahed and we played a song called Salaam, which means peace. The band that wrote it, half of them are Palestinians and half of them are Israelis and they go around the middle east performing this song.

Playing at the Bat Mitzvah—that was something! Just the two of us like today.

Ben: We really look at the family unit. Sometimes we end up in front of just kids, but that’s not what I shoot for. We like performing for families. It’s such a great bonding time.

Like this show we have coming up in Lexington on July 17th—we’ll have so many people out there and it’s such a great together time. It’s not a time for you to leave your kids here with us while you go off and talk, though oftentimes we run into that and it can be frustrating. Sometimes parents leave us to baby sit, and yes we can engage the kids, but our focus is seeing the family together.

As far back as Emily Songs, our first CD back in 2000, we would get responses from parents saying, “Thank you Ben! We spent the day dancing together to your CD.” And we still get those reports. That togetherness is hard to come by these days.

John: That’s where it’s at for me.

Ben: The CD is art. It’s a snap shot and it’s fun. But the live performance is a living, breathing thing and it changes. Sometimes the songs don’t make it off the CDs because the art seems to want to remain there.

John: Other times they live and change and grow.

Ben: And from our perspective the live performances are the best part. We’re excited now because it’s summer and we’ll play more. Everything will get tighter, we’ll push boundaries…

John: Songs that we haven’t played for a while will come back…

Ben: And it’s a conscious thing to tweak the songs as we’re going—for everybody in the band—so when we get cooking, there’s four of us on stage but it feels like eight, because there’s just so much more happening. So the live thing is huge for us.

Ben: Well, they become part of the event. And you know many people setting up events ask for an “educational” component. And we think, “educational?” How do you define that? Spirit, enjoyment, togetherness? Leaving the parents and the kids closer? Is that educational? That’s a wall we run into a lot when booking events.

Ben: Right. How do you explain this to them? How do you explain an intangible? John and I have talked about this before and I always think about George Harrison. You listen to a George Harrison CD and you are so much better off than when you started.

John: You feel better.

Ben: You do feel better. And that’s the effect we like to think our CDs have. They leave your family better off.

Ben: I’m embarrassed to tell you it’s a hard sell sometimes.

John: It can, but we’ve been doing it for so long that we can gauge the crowd and if something isn’t working we can switch it around.

Ben: We can alter pretty quick. It can be real challenging. We need to get the kids on our side, but once they’re on our side they stay there. It’s all about making that initial catch.

John: We were playing to a bunch of kids once and they were getting real excited and worked up. The principal was getting concerned and asked us to take it easy. This is a great example of how the songs can change. So we played My Name is Burt but we did it real slow. Ben sang it like Frank Sinatra.

Ben: We’d never done that before. It really was fun.

John: And we’re getting the energy from them, too.

Ben: It’s also fun to play songs that the kids aren’t as familiar with. We just love to play San Antonio Rose and this is a song that the kids potentially have never heard before. But the energy level is so good—how can you not love San Antonio Rose?

John: And I think it’s important that they be exposed to things like that.

Ben: John’s a music teacher; He’s practiced at exposing kids to new music. So if he says it’s OK, he has a license, so it must be a good thing.

Ben: We were in Stoneham and a little kid came up to me and said his favorite song was Jessica’s Song from Fun and Games and then his mother said that her favorite song was Jessica’s Song. And then just last year we had this family come up and present Jessica to us, a brand new baby who’s named Jessica because of our song. I think that’s pretty good feedback.

John: I love our fan Jason. It’s not so much his feedback as it is watching him at a show singing along. He knows every word to every song, from M.T.A. to The Fox—and that’s got a lot of words! And he knows them all.

Ben: Jason wanted us to play The Challenger Baseball Song when we played for his school in Lexington. Afterwards I received an email from a mom who had just arrived while we were playing that song. Her daughter has special needs and plays Challenger Baseball up in Billerica and she was just knocked out! I mean, where else are you going to hear a Challenger Baseball song?

John: I didn’t know that.

Ben: Yeah, I still have the email. We get a lot of emails. They really help us keep going. Some days you can’t find a gig or they want the other performer and then you get an email like that or a family names their kid after a song you wrote…

John: Or that family we met at the Hatch Shell last year.

Ben: Oh, yeah, that was huge. We used to play a lot in Groton. Then last Spring we played at the Hatch Shell for the Nstar Walk for Children’s Hospital. We met a guy there who told us he had seen us at one of our Groton shows and soon after that his son had been diagnosed with cancer when he was about four. So they had years of going back and forth from Groton to Children’s Hospital in Boston and the whole time the only constant was our music. The entire family just latched on to our songs playing in the car or at the hospital. And there was the little boy, nine years old now, and he was healthy.

John: It meant so much to them. It just blew me away.

Ben: And what do we know? It’s great to hear that. It’s amazing what music can do.

Of course the down side of playing music for kids is that they do grow up and go away. At some point we’re going to miss Jason. So it’s a challenge to keep your fan base growing. That’s why the summer is such a great time to meet new kids.

John: I had fun!

Ben: Well, the talent just showed up and played.

John: Ben had it all on his shoulders.

Ben: I was trying to arrange everything. The backdrop alone was unbelievable. But once we got going, it was fun. For the actual video sequence we cranked the stereo and played to the recording, and that was just funny. Simon, the director, caught all the angles and I think he did a fabulous job. When I saw the first take on it, I thought that the mandolin doesn’t look like a mandolin. It looks like a being, an entity. He made things that are common seem other worldly.

When you’re creating a song or a video the best part is seeing how it all comes together. That’s where the studio can be really exciting. You bring it all together and make this “art” thing out of all these contributions, which is different than performing live. But I’m an organizer, so I do really like that aspect of recording.

John: Some day.

Ben: I look at the videos that all these other bands do and I can’t quite fathom how they afford it. So to answer your question, I don’t know. I need to call Simon, who did our first video. Next year is our tenth anniversary as Ben Rudnick and Friends and it would be nice to have something. I was thinking we could multi-track Lexington and Arlington and put together a live performance DVD. I always feel that each thing we release improves on the model, but it will be hard to improve on the Sam video because the animation is stunning, and to do that is very expensive.

We have songs going all the way back to Emily Songs that would make terrific videos. That’s why I hope that someone will pick up a song like Race Car for a racing show and all of a sudden drop a whole lot of money on us for licencing and then I’ll take the money and reinvest it in the band.

Ben: I did all the promotion for Emily Songs myself, but for Fun and Games I went looking for a publicist. She was very impressed with what I had done with Emily Songs, because we were actually a known band. But back then it wasn’t like it is now—there weren’t a million bands doing kids’ records, like Madonna or Jewel or Ziggy Marley, so it was a little easier to wedge your way in.

It’s a lot of work. Once the CD is done there’s just an onslaught of work, even with a publicist. There is so much to do, people to call, text to write. It can be exhausting and I’m always thinking that all I really want to do is play music!

Debbie Cavalier: We’re very excited about it! We’ve found that the whole concept of story songs really resonates with families and children so we’re going to keep that theme going. As was the case with Story Songs and Sing Alongs, this CD will contain songs representing diverse styles and instrumentation. There will be some guest artists on there as well!

The new CD will probably be called More Story Songs and Sing Alongs and one of the songs that we’re doing is “The Little Engine that Could.” We’re very excited about that one.

There are also a couple of songs that we do in the live shows like “Simon Sez” and “Rosie Wrong Rhyme,” that will be on the new CD. “Rosie Wrong Rhyme” is actually an old Shari Lewis tune. It’s the only one I’m putting on the CD that isn’t original. I had the opportunity to work with her back in the ’90s on songbooks and she really inspired me so I wanted to include a song of hers.

Probably late Fall. We’re doing some recording next month for the first five songs.

I’m so lucky being at Berklee College of Music with all the wonderful musicians there contributing to our CD. We had forty-five musicians on the last CD, most of them from Berklee. It was great being able to just pull in this horn player, or that banjo player at a moment’s notice.

DC: Sure. The continuing education division provides Berklee curriculum and music education opportunities to musicians all over the world who can’t enroll in a full-time degree program at the college.

We run two main activities: Berklee Press, which publishes books and DVDs based on Berklee’s curriculum, authored by Berklee faculty; and Berkleemusic.com, Berklee’s online extension school that offers fully accredited semester-long online courses taught by Berklee faculty. It’s really a wonderful thing. A lot of people say, “How can you teach music online?” but it’s amazingly effective. We have songwriting, music business, guitar, production, arranging, orchestration courses, and much more available online.

Berkleemusic is the largest online music college in the world and has been awarded the “Best Online Course Award” by the Continuing Education Association for five years running.

DC: Mike Carrera, my producer, and Bill D’Agostino, our drummer, are both Berklee staff; Sue Lindsay used to work there, but now is working independently; and almost everybody playing on the CD is from Berklee.

I also have some incredible musicians playing live with Debbie and Friends who are not part of Berklee, including Rory McKenzie on bass, Liz Gould on percussion, Brian O’Neill on percussion, and Eric (Saulnier) Salt on guitar. Sometimes we have Adam Olenn on bass and Jeff Muzerolle on Drums (both Berklee staff). Each one of our band members bring so much energy and wonderful musicianship to our shows!

Everyone in the band really enjoys playing Debbie and Friends shows. It’s so refreshing for them to play for children. When you play for an adult crowd, you’re often just background music and people are talking over you, but when you perform for kids, they are with you and part of the show every second.

DC: We live in Watertown and we just happen to live on a street with a dozen kids who were all excited to be part of the CD. So, I just paraded everybody through my home studio to record a lot of the speaking and singing parts. That was a lot of fun.

My niece and nephews are on the CD as well. I really started this whole project because of my nephew Will. He told me the story of the Three Little Pigs one day with such enthusiasm that it sounded like sections of a song. It occurred to me that the Three Little Pigs story would make a great song, and it just grew from there. I began writing story songs and other music for children and have never looked back. The fact that Debbie and Friends started with my nephew Will makes it extra special to me. (And, whenever we play shows in Boston or Philadelphia, Will comes up on stage with his brother Ronnie and sister Rebecca to join us on a few songs. They and their brother Teddy are a constant source of inspiration for me!)

The main child vocalists that are on the CD are Amber and Aubrielle. They are the great nieces of Darcel Wilson (Berklee voice faculty who is featured on Love is a Family) and are wonderful singers. We had so much fun recording with them. They would come into the studio and we’d have pizza, and we’d record them and they just sang everything perfectly the first time through because they had spent a lot of time rehearsing with their Aunt Darcel.

DC: My number one favorite thing to do is perform and interact with the kids and their families because I feel like we are all doing the show together. Every single song has something for them to do. I was a classroom music teacher for years and I think that as my career progressed and all these opportunities came my way I was pulled further and further away from interacting with children. I really love performing and interacting with kids‚ whether it’s with five or five hundred!

However, recording and working with Mike, my producer, is incredible because he really gets the whole children’s music thing and he’s so creative. We started working together on Debbie and Friends by accident, really. I invited him over to help me with my home studio a few years ago. While he was there, I played Three Pigs and a Wolf for him and he surprised me the next week with the whole Brooklyn wolf narration part. That was all his idea! I knew right away that we’d make a great team!

The creative process with him is really magical. I start with a song and he just takes it to a whole new level.

DC: Yes. When we first recorded the songs I hadn’t played them in a live setting at all. They’ve grown. I almost wish that we could record them now. I heard Faith Hill say once, that when you play a song live people expect you to do the CD version, but the songs continue to grow and change. It’s true. So I’m glad we didn’t record Rosie or Simon Sez so we could play around with them first.

DC: I really enjoy leveraging all of the communication tools of the Web to stay connected with the fan families of Debbie and Friends. I’m blessed to work with the most amazing marketing and technology folks at Berklee who have advised me on Debbie and Friends’ Web presence along the way. The Vice President in charge of BerkleeMusic.com, Dave Kusek, wrote a book entitled The Future of Music and the Music Business and I’ve learned so much from him over the years. Music marketing expert Michael King has also taught me so much.

I am also really lucky to have the opportunity to work with Barkley Studios’ Robert Heath. He designed my Debbie and Friends logo (the Deb Head), built my web site and my blog, and created templates for me to work in to keep my web site content fresh and current. He always makes sure the branding is consistent and our look and feel is fun for kids.

My mentor in this is children’s music marketing guru Regina Kelland. She has advised me on the marketing side and has opened so many doors for Debbie and Friends.

DC: I believe that over the course of the past ten to fifteen years, parents have been more proactive in making music part of their children’s daily lives. Parents are finding ways to fill the void in schools where budget cuts have eliminated arts-related programs.

In addition, there is a tremendous amount of research readily available on music and the brain, and the important role the arts play in developing the “whole child.” These are among the factors that are driving parents to give their kids a musical experience, thereby populating children’s music concerts, music classes such as Kindermusik, and driving children’s music CD sales.

Regarding “annoying” music, I think all genres have been called that by one person or another. I think Parents are becoming more aware that sharing quality, age-appropriate music with their children is a special experience that resonates with the core of their being.

DC: Go for it! But, only do it if you absolutely love children’s music and interacting with kids and family audiences. Children are the most discerning audience of all. If you are not genuine, they will know right away.

To break in, start performing locally and grow regionally, then nationally. Play at schools, libraries, festivals, and work towards theater shows. Establish a connection with your fan families from the start and nurture those relationships. Encourage families to sign up for your email list at each performance. Email newsletters are a great way to stay in touch. Make your web site a fun, dynamic destination and a place they want to frequent and explore together. Keep your concerts interactive and filled with active participatory experiences for the children and parents. Produce music that both parents and kids will enjoy.

DC: I always try to make sure that I have a presence before and after the shows. I really like to meet the families who come to the shows. I love to hear anything they want to share, like a favorite song, and then I like to use that in the show to let them know how important they are in all of this.

They also give me wonderful ideas and remind me that it’s time for another CD! A little boy came up to me after our last show and said, “When are you coming out with another CD?‚” and I said, “Oh, very soon, we’re working on it, I think in the Fall,” and he just made a disappointed sigh. It was so adorable and great to get that kind of feedback and to know that they want more Debbie and Friends music now!

The internet is also a great way to connect. I have the email newsletter, and I always include a way for families to can email me directly. I try to encourage that kind of dialogue with parents.

Bill Harley: That’s so great. This is really right up my alley because there’s something that happens when you see live music that you can’t replace. A video or CD is a vicarious experience compared to what happens on stage.

BH: It really is a fine art. If you have a big band up on stage you have a lot of sound that can carry the day, but when it’s just you it’s much more vulnerable.

I try to talk seriously about being a kid—I don’t mean not humorously—but seriously. Let them know that their experiences are valid. I think if you do that, the parents appreciate that their kids are enjoying themselves and the adults remember that stuff too. The adults get to relive their childhood and the story is touching a part of them.

Bill Cosby was able to do that. I loved his comedy as a kid, but as an adult I still think it’s funny, just in a different way. So I think a really good story or song can work on a couple of different levels.

BH: With older kids I tell longer stories and when there are younger kids in the audience I know I’m going to have to do things with more repetition.

I have actually written a piece just about that: How do you entertain a family audience? There has to be repetition and an understandable plot line for younger kids, it has to be animated, but there also has to be enough there to appeal to adults.

And kids don’t mind if you’re shooting something over their heads now and then as long as they know you’re respecting them. Kids learn mostly by stretching and trying to figure things out in context. What they’re doing is taking words or concepts in context and trying to make sense out of them so if they don’t understand everything, it doesn’t bother them, they don’t mind that at all.

As for the kids in the middle, I love talking to upper elementary school kids, but I do begin to lose them to pop culture. So there needs to be a lot of material with irony, sibling stuff is really important, and the difference between the adult world and the kid world is really important for those nine to twelve year olds.

BH: Well, this is more about performance than content, but I had one kid come up to me who was about six years old say, “Thanks for the movies!” And I had told a lot of stories during that performance and I thought that was just so incredible because what I was doing was making a movie in his head. It was a really great comment.

And this one isn’t actually a great compliment for me, but it really made me think. This kid said to me, “You’re a really good storyteller, but you’re not as good as my dad.” And he’s right, because his dad knows which stories to tell him and is going to tell them at the moment they need to be told.

BH: There’s a kind of hierarchy of what you can get people to do during a long show. In the first or second song you don’t ask them to do anything that involves putting their arms outside of their body frame and you don’t teach them a song or chorus that has 100 words. A song like “Is Not, Is Too” is a good one to start with or “I Like to Sing” where all they have to sing is “La, la, la, la,” that’s all they have to do.

So once I’ve got them to do that I can ask them some questions so everybody has to raise their hands. And now there’s some participation. But if you start right off and say, “Okay, now I want everybody to stand up and pretend they’re a rabbit,” they’d just want to crawl under their chair. So there’s kind of an art to it.

BH: I’ll be quite honest with you. Some of the stuff I want to do doesn’t work well with three and four year olds. And the major marketing of kids music is to those younger kids.

Since I’m dealing with story and language it’s always a challenge and the younger ones are almost always the ones who determine the length of the show. About fifteen minutes before the end of the show I start watching them and thinking, “Are we done yet.” If I feel I can push them a little bit farther, I will, but there has to be a lot of repetition or something physical for them to do. It always is a challenge.

BH: Yeah, and that gets back to the whole thing about live performance. One of the things that I want to have happen is for the audience to be aware that they are part of the show too, that their listening and participation are essential to the success of the show. And so a piece like “Bear’s All-Night Party” is actually a very simple arrangement, but audiences don’t usually get involved in the song like that. I can see that as the bass comes in, then the birds start singing, people start thinking, “Oh my gosh, that sounds like music!”

And then of course for the littler kids there’s Bear, and every time the bear talks it’s funny.

BH: Usually I know that if they are crying it’s not because of my material but something else.

But I’ll never forget this… I have this one story that is a short “jump” tale and the only reason you tell it is to go “Boo!” and surprise the audience. It’s a little dumb story where I wake up at night and there’s this little two inch ghost trying to scare me, but at the end I scream into the mic and the audience jumps into the air.

Anyway, I remember doing that once when there was a family in the front row who had driven an hour and a half to come see me and the four year old freaked out and couldn’t be calmed down and they had to leave and I felt like such an idiot. So now with older kids I have some ghost stories, but with family audiences I’m pretty careful with material.

Most of the time when a kid is screaming I’m standing on the stage trying to figure out how long does this go on before it has to be addressed. Because the audience starts to worry. With big band shows with lots of people on stage it’s not a problem, you can just turn the music up, but with me it’s just out there, it’s just me and my voice, so there’s a real fine balance that you have to strike.

And here’s the other deal with live performance, a lot of kids (and adults) don’t even know how an audience is supposed to behave, they don’t know what a show is. If we tell kids that they’re not going to be able to run around during the show, that this is a special listening show, they may need to be reminded, but they’ll understand it. I think we demean kids when we assume that they can’t pay attention for that long.

BH: Right, and as I do this longer I realize that that is one of my jobs. We do less and less things together, especially with people we don’t know, and that’s not a good thing.

BH: Tolerance in a very broad term—that there are many different ways to be.

Acknowledgement that what they are going through has value, that who they are and what they are experiencing is real. And that other people go through the same things, too. There are a lot of situations that are unfair for kids. They don’t have power and they can’t change things. There are things that they want to do that they can’t do, and not necessarily just because it’s not good for them, but maybe there’s no money, there are too many kids, or we have to do something else. If adults acknowledge that and say, “This isn’t fair, but it’s the way it is,” then kids will understand that. But a lot of times we don’t do that, we just say, “No, we’re not going to talk about that.”

I feel like if I say, “You’ve got a brother who drives you crazy? You’re not the only one,” or “Sometimes your parents don’t pay attention? You’re not the only one,” or “Sometimes things don’t work out right? You’re not the only one,” then kids will know that somebody is on their side.

BH: It should make me calm down about what I’m doing—and every once and a while it does—because people have recognized that what I do has value. I should stop worrying about whether I’m any good and I should trust myself more that what I’m doing has value, because I’ve had that affirmation for it.

Now I shouldn’t have to ask “Do you like me? Do you like me?” I should just do my work and not have that kind of insecurity. It’s settling in a little bit.

The first Grammie didn’t make a huge difference in terms of my career. I mean, I’m in my fifties, what am I going to do now? What am I going to change? More people may come see my shows, but I’m not going to change the nature of who I am or what I do.

BH: It really is. I’ve been doing this for thirty years and when I started there was Raffi; Sharon, Lois, and Bram; and maybe a half dozen others, but now there are so many people that I can’t even keep track. I think that is all really good.

And it leads us to the long discussion of what’s happening with the music industry generally, where CD sales are going down, so what I suspect is that local and live performances are actually going to become more important. This happened with bands where CD sales went down and their music was passed around as files, but this increased the band’s visibility and drove people out to their shows.

There are a certain number of people who get into children’s music and think, “Oh my gosh, I can make a lot of money with this!” And they’re going to find out that that’s not true—that’s just not true. There will always be a percentage of people who make a fair amount of money, but in the end we’ll find out who wants to do it because they really love doing it.