More Weird! (Review Wrap-Up Fall/Winter 2017)

In a world where it seems music either gets pushed to the forefront for the masses or the background as wallpaper, it's pretty easy to lose sight of the weirdos -- which is, anyone who's making music who's not shooting for superstardom or complete anonymity.

I hesitate to call the following albums from the past 2-3 months the product of weirdos -- those artists I've met personally certainly wouldn't fall in that category -- but to the extent that these aren't albums aiming for the Billboard Top 40 or your local Pottery Barn soundtrack, they are a little weird. I'm not sure that there would be many kids who would like all of these albums equally, but there are probably more than a few families in which at least one of the clan would find something of entertainment value within. There are some other albums out this fall that have given me joy, but these are some of the highlights, as well as being music I haven't really covered much, if at all.

Dreamers - Lard Dog and the Band of Shy: That cover art, with its angular illustrations suggesting a family-friendly Picasso, nails the overall Lard Dog attitude. The music itself, swing and Tin Pan Alley-influenced, seems beamed in from another generation -- this is an album that features a song called "Who's Your Favorite Beatle?." Meanwhile the lyrics at times seem beamed in from another planet altogether, either because they're non sequiturs or literally in some made-up language (lookin' at you, "The Kimbaloo.") The second track, "I Like," expresses a variety of the singers' favorite things, including Stravinsky and Mork from Ork, which would scan poorly if sung in "My Favorite Things," but fits the attitude here just right. There's a kindness here that is very endearing.

Endangered Species Project - Fire Dog: Mark Pagano and his St. Louis, Missouri-based band started off making music for adults, but is spending more time these days making music for kids and musically, there's no difference between this album and one made for the older set. (Heck, kids'll love the guitar riff on "Kingdom Phylum" not knowing that it's ripped off from Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Not that I'm complaining.) This is a concept album about, unsurprisingly, endangered animals. Where I think the album succeeds more than most similar "nature-inspired" albums for kids is twofold -- first, it's far more focused on endangered animals, with a song about the federal Endangered Species Act, songs about habitat and what it means to be endangered, and songs about some animals themselves. It's a coherent whole. Second, and I admit this is totally personal taste, I dig the indie-rock vibe. (You or your kids may differ. Or may rock out.)

Songs from the Monkey House - Jack Forman: The bassist from Seattle trio Recess Monkey (and afternoon DJ on Sirius-XM's Live from the Monkey House call-in show) releases his first album through Amazon Music and pretty much goes the full "Weird" Al on this one. These are silly songs for the 7-year-old (and possibly 37-year-old) goofball in your life, with drooling dogs ("Dog Park"), Star Wars ("Yodeling Yoda"), and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ("Candy Tour") serving as some inspiration. There's an amusing song ("No Name") about a band that has everything but a name in which the denouement from the punchline is better than the punchline itself. Not that Recess Monkey ever made its name based on its heartfelt odes to family life, but Forman dials the comedic id way up here. If someone in your family has ever entertained the notion of buying a rubber chicken (or is amused by said notion), this is for you.

Gonna Be Great - David Tobocman: Tobocman has a slightly rarer niche in kids music -- sophisticated AM-radio pop for more a slightly younger set. (After all, his first album, Very Helpful Songs, was explicitly created to help teach kids the ways of the preschool world, a description that doesn't adequately convey how pleasant of a listen it was.) There's a gentleness and quiet optimism on this new album, and while there are a few "helpful" songs -- the touched-by-southern rocker "Keep Your Hands To Yourself," the '70s funk "Don't Put Money In Your Mouth" -- the songs that'll probably stick to you and your 6-year-old's brain will be the more story-focused "Dalia" (a figure-skating elephant) or "The Cookie Factory" (yes, a song about bakers, but more subtly, an ode to the working man and woman). And, hey, if your six-year-old doesn't appreciate the Shakespeare (or Beverly Hillbillies) references in "Something Called King Lear," just give her time.

Imaginary Universe - Johnny Bregar: I've long been surprised that the Seattle-based Bregar hasn't received more attention for his crafty and well-crafted roots-rock for kids. I suspect that his under-the-radar impression is due to his comparatively low output (that link above is to his last album, released in 2012) and minimal touring. It's really too bad, though, because he's particularly good at striking the balance between kid-focused but not "kiddie" lyrical approaches, heartfelt but not sappy. In any case, it's so good to have Bregar and his voice back to tickle your family's ears on his latest album. You can listen to the entire album on the standard digital outlets as well as Bandcamp, and if you just have time for a couple tracks, give his take on the traditional "Ain't No Bugs" and the rocker "Sleepy Heads" a try. (If I told you which song the latter reminded me of, it'd give away the whole joyful final act reveal of the song.)

Looking Forward by Looking Back (Dan Zanes' "Lead Belly, Baby!")

When most people think about Smithsonian Folkways' kids' artists, I'd guess that the first names that come to mind are Ella Jenkins and Pete Seeger, with probably Woody Guthrie close behind. But if I were to make that trio a quartet, I'd add Lead Belly to that list. Lead Belly (born Huddie William Ledbetter in 1889) was a master of the 12-string guitar, and starting in the mid-1930s until his death in 1949, he recorded for a wide variety of labels.

His outsized influence on blues music generally masks the fact that he only recorded one album specifically for kids for Folkways, and that was an album released more than a decade after his death. But in 1999, Smithsonian Folkways released Lead Belly Sings for Children, a collection of songs Lead Belly specifically recorded for kids in the 1940s along with other tracks that fit right in. The liner notes describe it as "essential listening for all ages," and in this case, the hype fits.

Nearly three quarters of a century after Lead Belly started recording for Folkways founder Moses Asch, Dan Zanes has joined in. As part of the typically detailed and lovingly-produced liner notes to the album, Zanes writes of being seven years old and discovering a Lead Belly record in the basement of his local library just as he was getting interested in the guitar. In Zanes' telling, Lead Belly's music played no small role in Zanes' path toward becoming a musician. In other words, this is a labor of love.

Now much of Zanes' all-ages musical path has felt like it came out of love and not any sort of calculated attempt at super-stardom, but this album does feel to me just slightly more personal, as if going back to one of his first inspirations helped Zanes tap into his own inspiration. In time-honored folk tradition, Zanes adds his own voice and approach. “Bring Me a Little Water, Sylvie” is given a slightly more uptempo, lilting feel. Zanes has always been willing to make a space for hip-hop on his albums, but he's opened up a lot more room for it now. There are many reasons that might be appropriate, but probably the most appropriate is that the arrangements breathe new life into these tracks. The original Lead Belly recordings, after all, were primarily the man and his guitar -- they sound great, but there can be a certain monotony to those tracks. But the arrangements here are wide open: in addition to the music store's worth of instruments -- concertina, saxophone, cowbell, mandolin -- five of the tracks feature guest raps.

As with most music Zanes releases, this album features a couple dozen guest artists. Some are famous -- hey, there’s Billy Bragg on “Rock Island Line!”… Is that really Chuck D offering up a verse on “Skip To My Lou?" to name but a couple such appearances. But just as important to the overall feel are the guest turns by the musicians we’re probably less familiar with, like Jendog Lonewolf’s rap on “Julie Ann Johnson," while Memphis Jelks, invited onto “Skip To My Lou” by Chuck D., just about steals the show from the elder statesman.

If there’s anything I miss from the album, it’s the voices of kids. Folkways albums for kids have always had lots of participation by kids -- Lead Belly Sings for Children is no exception, as it includes a number of tracks featuring Lead Belly singing to and with kids. In contrast, aside from “More Yet,” there’s no chorus of kids on Zanes’ album. (“Little Goose” makes an appearance on the intro to “Polly Wee” along with Father Goose, but that’s not really what I mean.)

After a series of themed albums that were musically satisfactory but less than fully… party-filled, Lead Belly, Baby! most closely replicates the freewheeling spirit of his early DZAF albums, the ones that propelled him into kids music stardom. While in many ways this album will sound familiar to those fans of those albums (nearly twenty years old at this point), Dan Zanes is also walking some different musical paths than he was twenty (or thirty or forty) years ago. If looking back to one of his earliest musical idols helps kick off another series of musical explorations into the future, then by all means bring it on. Highly recommended.

Ella's Kids (Reviews of Ella Jenkins, Jazzy Ash, and Shine and the Moonbeams)

I've been thinking some about white guys with guitars.

I've got nothing against white guys with guitars -- I'm a white guy with a guitar (OK, ukulele), and as I think about my own favorite music, much of it is made by, you guessed it, white guys with guitars. But there are a lot of white guys with guitars making music for kids.

I don't want to speculate on exactly why this is, but it can't be to the advantage of kids music that the lists of artists making kids music on a national level looks -- and, in terms of the musical styles of those artists, sounds -- way less diverse than, say, the Billboard charts, which might feature Beyonce, Nicki Minaj, or Rihanna (not to mention Pitbull or Drake or whomever) near the top. I'm fully in favor of exposing kids to a wide variety of musical artists and musical genres, and right now that's not as easy as a parent might hope.

It's a little strange, especially because the very first kids music star was (and is) an African-American woman: Ella Jenkins. In 1957, she released Call-and-Response Rhythmic Group Singing on Folkways Records, and over the next 60 years, she's released more than 30 albums on Folkways, then Smithsonian Folkways. (Her 1966 album You Sing a Song and I'll Sing a Song is Smithsonian Folkways' best-selling album of all time, from any genre.) And while Jenkins is not one to toot her own horn or make a big deal out of her politics (this is an hour-long interview from a decade ago where she does neither), but it's not hard to review Jenkins' discography and think that she, too, would want to see many different types of kids' musicians making themselves visible.

Jenkins recently released Camp Songs, her first album of new music in six years, and with the recent release of albums from a couple younger artists who've taken inspiration from Ella in different ways, I thought it was a good time to take a look at all three of these albums, all of them definitely recommended.

Camp Songs is labeled as being by Ella Jenkins and Friends, and that "and Friends" appendage is definitely important. It's probably too much to expect an artist who just turned 93 years old to be up for leading a bunch of kids in song with nothing but a guitar and her voice. Indeed, as Tony Seeger noted in an interview, "her voice was not as strong as she had hoped when the time came to record." But she was definitely the animating spirit behind the album. And in some ways, Jenkins receding somewhat to the background allows for a fuller musical experience. It's not just Jenkins and a guitar, there are many more jumping in to share their voices.

As you'd suspect by the title, there are many camp favorites on the album -- "Kumbaya, "Down by the Riverside," "Michael Row the Boat Ashore," to name but three. It's led in many places by Tony and Kate Seeger, brother and sister, who have lots of experience leading a group of singing kids (read more about that here). There are also musicians from Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music (including Erin Flynn!) who lead some other songs and a children's chorus. Ella sings a bit, plays harmonica on a few songs, and generally blesses the entire affair. If Ella isn't exactly front-and-center, I have no doubt that she's very pleased with the playful and communitarian nature of the end result.

Before heading into the next couple reviews, a brief shout-out to Robbi Kumalo, who performs music for kids as Robbi K, and is, as best I can recall, the only African-American woman aside from Ella with any national visibility whose main role was making music for kids in the 2000s (and before). If you like the sounds of Ella and the next two artists and want more in that vein, I'd recommend check Robbi out.

Ashli Christoval has taken the sounds of New Orleans heritage via her mother and crafted a career making music for kids as Jazzy Ash. She has spoken about her debt to Ella Jenkins -- seeing Jenkins make an appearance on Mister Rogers:

That moment was very monumental for me. I knew that I wanted to be part of the artist community that used art to preserve the wonderful the stories of culture.

On Swing Set, her fourth album, she comes the closest yet to seamlessly blending the African-American musical heritage, particularly jazz, with the singing together and movement work that Jenkins pioneered on record. It kicks off with a swinging (pun unintended) version of "Li'l Liza Jane," which features an ebullient group call-and-response. (Much more Preservation Hall Jazz Band than Elizabeth Mitchell -- to say that I like it as much as Mitchell's version is high praise from me.)

The word I kept writing down as I took notes on the album was "joyful." This is, friends, the most joyful album of the year. From Uncle Devin's hand-clapping on "Hambone" to Jazzy's insertion of "Fried! Froglegs!" as something Grandma's going to enjoy in "She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain" to her giving her band a kick in the pants in the slow intro to "When the Saints Go Marching In" ("Too slow, let's put a little swing into it!") -- there's so much happiness here. It very much honors the stories of Christoval's culture, and in songs like "Miss Mary Mack" and the brief call-and-response interludes with a children's chorus, it honors Jenkins' legacy. It's also a blast -- it's every bit as fun as that cover art above suggests.

Another artist who is walking in Ella's path, but a less-appreciated one, is Shawana Kemp. Kemp is best-known in the kids music world as Shine in Shine and the Moonbeams. On their 2013 self-titled debut album, Kemp's voice was the star, a voice that could literally stun listeners.

Kemp is back after far too long of an absence with Shooting Stars, an album released this spring that I'm hoping gets a little more notice.

The music of Shine and the Moonbeams has always been fairly complex -- jazz, R&B, and a fair share of funk. It's not an approach Jenkins has ever been much interested in. The reason I say that Kemp is also in walking in Ella's path is that the music of Shine and the Moonbeams is emphatically child-centered emotionally. It's amazing to watch Jenkins with kids, because even though she's not a parent, Jenkins is so present. It's clear that the kids are her most important audience, and she doesn't care about getting cool points from the adults in the audience. (She just wants them singing along.) And while performance-wise Kemp knows how to leave an impression on the entire room, when it comes to songwriting, the kids most definitely come first. "Shooting Star," which leads off the album, is a glorious song about everyone having their own talent. "Peekaboo Baby" is blues for the very youngest kid, and "Tough Love" is a funk rocker that explains exactly why the parent is not going to go easy on her kid.

Those songs are mixed into a set that also features some reggae ("Ace Boon Coon"), late '70s (?) funk ("Tell Me Why"), and the empathetic vocal soul of "Any Body Other Than Me." And to have songs like "Soul Food Holiday" and "These Shoes" (a straight-forward jazz song whose lyrics encourage self-acceptance, especially of body image) that speak most directly to an African-American audience on a mainstream kids music release is awesome to hear.

I know I've combined these three albums into a single review for convenience and to make some overarching points, but I'd hate to see these albums get pigeonholed for a certain audience. I'd much rather that these albums be the inspiration for future albums, for Ashli's and Shawana's kids... and Ella's grandkids.

Keep Kindie Weird

Just last week the long-running kids radio show Greasy Kid Stuff aired its last show after 22 years on the air. There are many different shows that have played an important role in giving kids music a broader audience, many with slightly different niches, but I think the niche that hosts Belinda and Hova mined particularly well was that of weird kids music. I think that more than any other kids radio show, their playlists sometimes featured songs that had a little "WTH" ("H" for "heck," because we're still running a family-friendly website here) to them. There was slightly more of an element of surprise to the shows and the playlists.

As we reach the 20th anniversary of albums like Laurie Berkner's Whaddaya Think of That? and the huge wave of kindie that eventually followed, there can be little doubt that the amount and overall quality of recorded music released into the world is an improvement to the world into which dinosaur-stomping was introduced. But even though the quantity and quality and even to some extent the diversity of the music has improved, I am rarely surprised by kids music these days.

Don't get me wrong, I still think what is being released is fun and is definitely worth sharing with families. And I fully realize that listening to, what, 3,000? 4,000? albums over the past 15 or so years gives me a perspective that is, for better or worse, far more exhaustive (or exhausting) than that of the typical parent, which means that I may crave novelty more than most. But I've been struck recently at how predictable -- often in good ways, but not all the time -- kids music is.

Which may explain my affinity for two of the -- let's just say it -- weirder kids music albums I've heard in some time, Froggins & Big's Dessert Island and Kleve & Davis' Music for Parents and Children. These are two weird and often unpredictable sets of songs.

Let's start with Froggins & Bug. The band is another spinoff from Dean Jones’ Dog on Fleas, which is slowly moving towards establishing a DOFMU (Dog on Fleas Musical Universe) of different bands. This band features Dean Jones and saxophonist Shane Kirsch riffing on a whole bunch of silly topics with some backup musical help from occasional Fleas Ken McGloin, Dean Sharp, and Jim Curtin. And with Dessert Island it’s odd to think of a jazz-inflected Dog on Fleas-related band that traffics heavily in spoken-word comedic riffs as being the less weird of two albums in a comparison, but here we are.

Jones tends to play the straight man to Kirsch, who’s most often the confused character. “Sports,” in which Kirsch makes up a bunch of sports that sound awfully familiar, and “Dessert Island,” which takes its inspiration from the extra “s” in the title, are perhaps the silliest, but hardly the only such goofs. (There’s also “Red Red Red Red Red,” which features Jones’ classic line, “That’s a whole lot of adjective, and not a lot of noun,” uttered after Kirsch sings the title repeatedly.)

But there’s plenty of silliness for the two of them to share, as in “Literal Red Riding Hood,” in which the two of them trade stories of the difficulties encountered by the metaphorically-challenged Red, and “Puppets Are Controlled by People,” which takes about a minute to outline the song title’s thesis. And even the occasional moment of beauty, as on “I’d Like to Live in Your Hat,” and “I Wish I Could Eat Pinecones.”

But, really, it’s 35 minutes of jazz improv that’s pitched just young enough to that kids may get hep to it. It’s odd, and miles away from generic songs about brushing teeth or pets. There are many songs about pets, but we could use a handful of songs about jokey failures to understand metaphor to even out the balance.

Music for Parents & Children, on the other hand, is a little bonkers. It’s by the Philly-area duo Klebe and Davis (who in reality are brothers Dave and Matt Amadio). This isn’t their first album, though it is their first for kids. They cite Warren Zevon, Frank Zappa, Tom Waits and Ween as inspirations, and there’s an anarchy that you just don’t hear in kids music much at all these days.

When I was listening to the album for the first time, there were parts where I honestly didn’t know where the song was heading to next. On “And Then Pretend,” they leap from one improbable imaginative situation to the next. The dreamy “Fire Drill” features a surreal day where a class of schoolkids are sent outside for the fire drill, and then nobody comes to collect them at the end of the drill -- by the end of the day they haven’t reached a “Lord of the Flies” situation, but some of them are in fact eating grass. And the stomping rocker “Piece of Fuzz” makes a simple piece of fuzz positively ominous (with a kicker of a joke at the end).

Mix in 3 different fake ads (45 seconds long, enough to develop the joke, not enough to get bored with it) and other silliness and this is oddity on the level of John and Mark’s Children’s Album or Billy Kelly’s Is This Some Sort of Joke?. (One final joke worth mentioning -- “Worst Day” features the line “this is the worst day of my life so far”… sung from the viewpoint of a kid who’s just been born.) It’s a half-hour of music that captures childhood in its exhilaration and uncertainty and sounds unlike anything you’ve heard this year, I can pretty much guarantee.

Obviously albums that are a little further “out there” in terms of their musical, lyrical, and thematic approaches generally self-limit their audiences. (By being a little brainier than most, they already probably limit their target audience to kids ages 6 and up.) And listening to nothing but these two albums would deny your family the pleasures of a 3-minute pop or R&B song, a folk music standard, or a classical piece centuries old. But I’d suggest that the weirdness heard within is just as important to a well-rounded musical and cultural life as hearing those different musical genres. In a time when breaking through your own personal bubbles is important to understand the world around our families, giving albums like these two a louder voice has merit, too.

Dad Jokes (Billy Kelly's "My First Comedy Album")

Kids music is filled with funny people, probably because the ability to make kids laugh is vital to survival in dealing with kids all day long. (Also probably because the ability to make yourself laugh is also vital to survival in dealing with kids all day long.) But in a world of funny people, only one person has earned the title Funniest Person in Kids Music, and that would be Billy Kelly.

Thank You for Joining the Happy Club cover

From the very first track of his very first album for kids ("This Is the First Song" off of 2009's Thank You for Joining the Happy Club), Kelly has amused listeners with his deadpan humor and occasionally meta-fictional takedowns of songwriting tropes. Over time his humor has swerved a bit from earnest to dark (something which he readily admits), and his albums have contained varying amounts of humorous and non-humorous material.

Is it possible to chart his albums on a matrix with those two axes? Yes. Will I do that for you here? No. Instead, I will use words in lieu of graphs, even though I love myself some graphs. (I honestly do.)

Is This Some Sort of Joke?, his second and most comedy-heavy musical album, required serious attention to process all the levels of humor being laid on the listener's plate. It was also in parts his darkest album (comparatively speaking -- it's still kids music) as it featured not one but two songs about the potential end of the planet and the human race.

Kelly's third album The Family Garden was his most earnest, a correction, or possibly overcorrection, to the joke-filled and dark approach on Joke?. It's not devoid of humor, but with songs celebrating gardens, American flags, and pen pals ("We Could Be Pen Pals," which featured Molly Ledford), it was definitely a detour from what Kelly's fans -- at least this one -- had grown accustomed to based on his previous two albums. The album does, however, underscore Kelly's basically optimistic nature, a nature that, while present on the first two albums (he sang a song with the Monkees' Davy Jones about the joy of getting a new haircut, after all, on Joke?), could be buried under the jokes and cleverness.

For my tastes, I think the two albums that followed -- 2013's Again! and his Grammy-nominated effort with Molly Ledford from the band Lunch Money, the 2015 album Trees -- were probably the high points thus far of his output. With Again!, Kelly melds the silly ("Ode to Butter") with the sweet ("There's Nothing Like My Town"), with nothing too mend-bending, except for "Don't Tell Me That I Don't Know What I Know (When You Know That You Don't Know What I Know That I Know)," which I'm still trying to work through the logic of.

And the universally-loved Trees finds Kelly's silly songs like "The National Tree of England" and "(It's Just a) Dumb Ol' Stick" nestled in amongst Ledford's earnest and tender rockers. Ledford, in fact, basically inserted herself into the album after Kelly had been talking about recording such an album for years. And it's amusing to hear Ledford's drier wit make Kelly laugh, like on the gentle putdown Ledford uses on "Coniferous Trees," a joke that it takes Kelly 4 or 5 seconds to hear ("I just got that," he chuckles while trying to continue to sing his verse.)

From there, Kelly's 2016 Welp (oh, that title -- that's a dad word, for sure) covers the same tonal ground that Again! covered, perhaps a little more comedic, and with slightly less of a poppy sound. The narrators on tracks like "If I Could Have Your Attention," "My First Protest Song," and "You Remember Steve," which lead off the album, sound like clueless buffoons, which isn't necessarily an approach your hear on a lot of kids music -- you hear buffoons, sure, but they're rarely the ones singing the music. But of course he does have earnest tracks, like "Might It Be Love?" (though I'll admit to probably preferring an earlier, robot-attacking, self-sabotaged attempt at the track).

But on his most recent album, Kelly decides to go all in with the comedy and go where no kids' musician has gone before -- the standup comedy club. The album titled My First Comedy Album is a misnomer, because most of his albums have been comedic at their core, but it is his first attempt at recording a show in a comedy club. (With a two juice-box minimum? Unclear.)

Billy Kelly is hardly the only artist to provide a healthy dose of humor on their albums for the single-digit set. Recess Monkey, for example, have been on the jokier end of the musical spectrum, and wrote an entire song ("Knocktopus") revolving around the first jokes most preschoolers learn -- knock-knock jokes. Josh and the Jamtones did an entire album called Bear Hunt that was essentially a long set of riffs loosely connected by songs that eventually became a movie, as if one of those two-guys-talking-in-front-of-a-microphone podcasts became an animated production. The latest Michael and the Rockness Monsters album Funny Faces features a handful of silly songs that harken back to the era of novelty songs. Cory Cullinan and Richard Perlmutter use comedy to carve an entrance for kids into classical music. And Eric Herman did an entire sketch and music comedy album titled The Incredibly Spaced-Out Adventures of Jupiter Jackson.

One thing you might notice scanning down that list is that it's made up entirely of males. And my perception is that guys tend to be given more leeway to do silly things in kids music, which means that female artists like Joanie Leeds, Sirius-XM's/Wow in the World's Mindy Thomas, or the much-missed-in-kindie Ashley Albert of The Jimmies who traffic in broader humor like their male counterparts above are more the exception. (And women such as Molly Ledford who use humor sometimes more subtly are often overlooked.) It's a little disappointing, to be sure.

Both lists above also highlight the fact that comedy crafted specifically for kids is pretty hard to find. Find someone to animate your jokes and craft a 6-, 11-, or 22-minute story around them, and you too can get your own development deal. But sketch comedy for kids, especially audio-only sketch comedy for kids, is reaaally hard to find. As best I can tell, the only folks doing that full-time are The Listies, who are based in Australia, so even though they tour a lot, it's probably too much to expect that they just criss-cross the United States week after week. (Note: I very much recommend listening to The Listies. Maybe they'll change their minds about the States.)

Into this void, then, jumps Billy Kelly, father of two, purveyor of dad jokes, whose puns earn groans from the audience (when was the last time you heard that on a comedy album?). And Kelly certainly does take a few opportunities to speak directly to the kids who are sitting in his mixed age audience, noting that he got them into the [comedy] club and noting that kids do, in fact, catch a break. Like, a lot.

But for the most part, Kelly trains his eye on more absurdist topics, like deciding to forego bird-watching for bird watcher-watching.

He eschews the often dense wordplay and allusion-filled approach of his music for a more laid-back take, like Steven Wright with a higher-pitched voice. (No complaints about airplane food or relationship woes, thankfully.) Kelly plays with the conventions of standup, humor which might work a little better with the adults who know when he's slightly subverting the form. And some bits like "Auditordium" start out sounding like they're just mistakes until you realize that they're well-plotted jokes.

Only once does he break down and turn to music as a frame for his comedy, and that's on the cut called "Dictionary." It's actually a recycled bit from Welp. The music isn't necessary at all for the basic structure of the jokes, though the structure of the song -- whereby the spoken jokes essentially fill the role of verses, and the wordless do-do-do-dooooos the chorus -- probably helps the listener process the jokes themselves, which require a little thinking.

The whole album requires a little thinking, actually. While there are definitely some simpler jokes on the album, this is not something that will amuse your kindergartener. Rather, it requires a level of attention and smarts that may even be out of the range of your second-grader. Unlike the Listies, Kelly offers no fart jokes. This is neither good nor bad, just noting that fart jokes are the fastest method known to science for getting a second-grader, especially a boy, to laugh. In some ways, My First... is most reminiscent of Is This Some Sort of Joke?, his most comedic album up 'til now and the one that needed the highest level of listener attention, though the humor is lighter in tone on this new album.

There are a ton of jokes on the 45-minute-long My First Comedy Album and with it Billy Kelly safely retains his title of Funniest Person in Kids Music, unlikely to give it up until he chooses to retire as GOAT. I hope that there's a second album of standup or pure comedy from him (current odds of him naming it My Second Comedy Album: 50/50?). But I like what happens when he works with artists like Ledford who pushed back on "Coniferous Trees" or with other musicians generally. So I also hope he continues working with others to produce funny stuff as well, because I think that feedback makes the humor sharper. Dad jokes work even better if there's an occasional mom or group of dads to offer up some eye rolls... or make an even worse dad joke. And if other dads and moms want record their own albums of comedy just for the kids and their adults, I think it's time it becomes an actual field.

Recent Spanish-Language Kids Music Albums (and One Portuguese Album)

While the flood of kids music designed to teach kids a foreign language has thankfully slowed down somewhat (the results were usually very dry, musically-speaking), what's left over is generally of higher quality. I wanted to highlight ever so briefly some recent Spanish-language (or mostly Spanish-language) albums for kids. I've even thrown in a Portuguese-language album for good measure. Whether any of these would sneak into my 2015 list of ten great Spanish-language kids music albums, I'd need to spend a little more time thinking about, but all of these five albums are worth listening to in one way or another.

The highest-profile of the five albums here is probably 123 Andres' Arriba Abajo, which picked up the 2016 Latin Grammy. Based in Washington DC, Colombian-born Andrés Salguero has carved a niche by playing Spanish-language music that features more sounds of Central and South America than just Mexico. This album features 10 songs sung entirely in Spanish, then the same 10 songs with English lyrics. The lyrics are targeted at a preschool age (see "Cosquillas," or "Tickles"), so they are simple and direct, while the music is definitely more sophisticated. (I particularly enjoyed "El danzon y al cha cha cha" and "Vuela, vuela" for the music.) You can stream the album here and elsewhere. I'm not sure kids would learn Spanish just by listening, but there have been far, far worse attempts at these sorts of album -- this is far more tuneful.

Los Angeles-based Sandra Sandia took a long time between albums. The late 2015 album ¡Alegria! arrived about 7 years after its predecessor. The inspiration for the project was some drum loops produced by a musician called DJ Salada, all with a Brazilian flavor. The vast majority of the lyrics are in Spanish, and unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective) translations are nowhere to be found. But as a pure listening experience, that may help. And with songs about cats, snakes, whales, and, erm, flying saucers ("Platillo Volador"), the album is clearly targeted at kids. With a more modern South American sound, this album might serve as a useful counterpoint to the more traditional sound of 123 Andres.

The most adventurous album (subject-wise, but also musically) of the bunch may be Moona Luna's early 2016 album PANORAMA. It loosely tells the story of a family bus trip through South America, which means it has the time for songs about traveling (the title track), walking around cities at dusk ("Atardecer (Sunset)"), or just being with family ("Llevame (Take Me with You)"). Moona Luna's mastermind Sandra Velasquez has crafted some memorable melodies and, like all of these albums, a nicely-layered production. And while Moona Luna's first songs were much more rigid in featuring Spanish-language verses and then direct-translation English-language verses (or vice versa), these latest songs are more flexible. It means that you could take just about any song out of the context of the album, and still want to listen to it amidst a bunch of English-language kids music with more of a pop-rock flair. (Stream it here and elsewhere.) It's my favorite album of the bunch, but if it's yours depends on what you and your family are trying to get out of listening to Spanish-language albums.

For a shinier, poppier (albeit still Latin-influenced) take on the bilingual album look to Los Angeles’ Nathalia Palis (aka Nathalia). On her 2016 album Cuando Era Pequeña (When I Was Your Age), the Colombian-born Palis switches from English to Spanish nimbly, sometimes within the same chorus, but also leaves room for songs sung entirely in one or the other language. There is no (overt) language acquisition goal here, just themes that’ll sound familiar to anyone who’s spent time in the kids music world -- dancing like dinosaurs (“Dinosaur Dance,” natch), birthdays (the all-English “It’s My Birthday”), and perseverance (the pop-rocker “Otra Vez”). There’s a big distance between this album and, say, the Paulinho Garcia album below, one that’s bigger than the language difference, but it’s also healthy that non-English language music for kids and families can cover such a wide range of styles and subjects.

Finally, unlike the other albums here, Aquarela from Brazilian-born, Chicago-based Paulinho Garcia is sung in Brazilian Portuguese. (It's a release from the Global Language Project, which encourages the study and learning by kids of languages other than English.) The melodies are sung by Garcia, accompanied by a small number of musicians who lay down the barest of musical accompaniments. For any of you who have heard, say, Getz/Gilberto (and many probably have, even if you don’t know it), the samba sounds here (and the accompanying female vocals of Silvia Manrique) will have a soothing, familiar feel. The title track is delightful, as is “Meu Limao, Meu Limoeiro,” but those are only a couple of the highlights. If you want to learn Portuguese, the physical album includes lyrics in both the Portuguese and the English translation, but the relaxed take on these traditional Brazilian kids’ songs make for a pleasant spin regardless of whether you've got a second language in mind.