Review: Odds & Ends - Andrew & Polly

Andrew & Polly - Odds & Ends album cover

Sometimes album titles don't signify much, but in the case of the brand-new album from Los Angeles-based duo Andrew & Polly, I think it's 100% on point.

Just like the random collection of stuff on the shelf on the album cover art, the tracks here are an assortment of tiny treasures and tracks with less heft. Unlike many albums, in an interview with them, the duo noted that the album reflects a collection of songs they've written and recorded over time. Sometimes the results are magical -- "Little Bitta You," a previously-released single, is a zippy and sweet folk-pop song, for example. And their new song "Grapes" is a strong contender for catchiest kindie track of the year, with a singalong chorus filled with "la la las."

At other points, it does feel like one of those "B-Side" collections that your favorite power-pop band might have released after fifteen years together -- your XTCs, your Fountains of Wayne. There are three covers ("Forever Young," "Here Comes the Sun," and my favorite of the three, "Ghostbusters"), for example plus "Critters," their non-religious take on Bill Staines' classic "All's God's Critters" ("got a place in the choir / some sing low / some sing higher...").

Andrew & Polly have been devoting a lot of attention to their podcast for kids Ear Snacks, and some tracks feel very much like excerpts like that. "Ghostbusters," with a lot of kid-interaction, was sort of a prototype for the podcast, while "Fruitphabet" is a playful thing, more sound-and-word-play than pop song. At 28 minutes in length, the album's brevity -- it's barely more than an EP -- is one more thing that makes me think of this as a "B-side" collection.

The album is most appropriate for kids ages 3 through 6, and I should make clear that my middle-aged perspective on what an album "is" (or isn't) won't matter to the kids, who will sometimes groove and other times laugh to the folky, smart, and weird stuff on Odds & Ends. Ear Snacks is a genuinely original podcast as well. Andrew & Polly can write such sharp music, that I'm very much looking forward to the next set of songs from the duo, which they say will be a coherent concept album. In the meantime, there are some tiny treasures on this album, and those will do just fine. Recommended.

Note: I was given a copy of the album for possible review.

Andrew & Polly with accordion and ukulele

Interview: Andrew Barkan and Polly Hall (Andrew & Polly)

Like most working musicians, Andrew Barkan and Polly Hall -- the married couple best known to the sippy cup set as Andrew and Polly -- wear many hats. They're kids musicians, sure, but also children's show music writers, commercial jingle writers, and more. And this month, while the Los Angeles-based duo release their second full-length kids' album Odds and Ends, they're also continuing to release episodes of their brand new podcast for kids, Ear Snacks. (Appropriately enough for these multi-hat musicians, Episode 2 is all about hats.)

I chatted with them by phone last week about how they met, how they found their way to kids music, their new releases, and the birthday party that spurred the release of Odds and Ends.

Zooglobble: What are your earliest musical memories?

Polly Hall: When I was very little, my next-door neighbor took violin lessons. I was two years old, and I asked to play the violin "just like Mary Beth." So at three, I got a violin and started taking lessons. I took lessons using the Suzuki method, and when you practice violin, you stand on this mat with an outline of feet... I remember singing with my family on holidays -- I grew up in a Jewish family and music was really important. My mom would sing, and we sang in groups, singing about the history.

Andrew Barkan: I remember my dad making up songs in the car to keep us from destroying the car. Mom sang, too, but Dad was the chief song-maker-upper.... I remember visiting this huge cathedral in San Francisco called Grace Cathedral and hearing music there. It's seven, eight stories high -- it's cavernous, and sounds take seven seconds to fade away.

How did you meet?

Polly: We met in college -- both of us sang in a cappella groups. Andrew played the piano. At 16, I had got a guitar, and at 19 I was writing folk songs and wanted to make a record. A mutual friend introduced us.

As a violinist you play melody, but in college I studied theory. I got interested in electronic and computer music, and production. So I went to grad school for [electronic and computer music]. Andrew went to grad school for film scoring.

Andrew: I taught for a while...

Polly: We both taught.

Andrew: I was teaching and being in the studio. I realized that being in the studio for eight to ten hours -- I could do that.

Besides writing kids' music, we write commercials and other things. We get to write in many different genres, it's a mind challenge.

How did Andrew & Polly come about?

Polly: In 2006 we were living in Providence, finished with grad school, and were stuck there for a couple weeks. We're always singing together and could sing in harmony. We had lots of friends with kids, my sister, so we made a recording that we gave to friends. They'd say that they couldn't get through car rides without it, or they'd listen before bed. These were all covers, but we began writing songs. I [Polly] was co-owner of a music studio at the time, and so we moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 2010, and released our album (Up and At 'Em) right then.

We decided to play some shows.... Los Angeles has a great scene for kids and families -- they like being in a place with music. It was liberating to find joy in performing.

Andrew: Life on the road, playing... the west side of Los Angeles is not that. It was a break from the studio to play in front of a hundred kids, it let us reflect on what we were doing.

Polly: How did it begin?... In college, I did a radio show, and my co-host babysat in Manhattan. My mom constantly resourced awesome children's music. There was this one guy from Kentucky named Joe Wise...

Andrew: He was folky and smart and weird. He told stories, too.

Polly: Even just a little story that went nowhere. He had a lovely song called "Show Me Your Smile."

Andrew: No AutoTuning.

So Odds and Ends -- it's folky and smart and weird, by the way -- is the title significant in that it signifies that these are random songs written through the years, or was it recorded with the specific album in mind?

Polly: Somewhere in the middle. After we won the Joe Raposo Children's Music Award in 2012 and Sirius-XM radio started playing our music, we wrote and recorded "Little Bitta You" in a flash of inspiration. Mindy Thomas at Sirius-XM loved it. So we'd write and record and ask ourselves, "Should we wait?" And we'd say, "No, let's release it now." The downside is we wouldn't have the content for a full-length album. But the upside is there's new content all the time.

Andrew: So we'd get the next one out when it was ready.

Polly: Children get obsessed for periods of time, so the singles do well.

Andrew: We do it in our home studio.

Polly: Here's the reason we finally had to do a full album. [In 2013], we played a birthday party for one-year-olds in San Francisco, and as a party favor, all five families hosting gave copies of Up and At 'Em. Two years later [this spring], the five families had us back for the three-year-old birthday party, and we couldn't not have a new CD for them.

Andrew: We had to create the CDs before the tracks were done.

Polly: We created the test run for them -- gave them 80 copies, and the other 70 we sold at shows.

Andrew: Polly does all the artwork.

Polly: We added a couple tracks, reworked some songs. We're reaching a new audience and we're really pleased.

How come you wanted to create Ear Snacks?

Andrew: We love podcasts. I in particular -- listen while walking the dog, and so on.

Polly: Andrew is also legally blind, he reads with his ears.

Andrew: We have a son who's 18 months old. Knows about headphones, but the TV is off. He knows we play shows and with kids, we do things with imagination.

Polly: We hope we're writing songs that are folky, smart, and weird. We can sing loud in the car, but don't they also deserve more fundamental, thoughtful things of their own?

Andrew: I had Fisher-Price "American Revolution" tapes and Polly had "Little Thinker Tapes," with a host who'd say things like, "let's go to Mars!"

Polly: They were lots of character-based stuff. We wanted something that was more based on our relationships, something that honored that [type of recording].

Andrew: "Ghostbusters" [from Odds and Ends] was more of an Ear Snacks prototype.

Polly: You know, the podcast is not wholly different from five families asking us to do an album. We made two episodes, but families wrote us asking to be in the show. [Episode 3 is now out.] It's like doing a half-album every month. We have high standards.

Andrew: The only thing close in the category is Story Pirates.

Polly: The top podcasts list is a very confusing place. Sesame Street, lots of parenting podcasts. Some are original, but there are also podcasts that are rebroadcasts of Nick[elodeon] and Disney shows. I understand why that is...

I don't really know what the end goal is. It's really fun for kids -- some of them are conducting the interviews with parents. And if that's all, that's great. We hope we make it a year.

What's next?

Polly: We want to finish the season, and we're recording the next album -- we're not going to wait five years.

Andrew: This will be a coherent concept album.

Polly: We're having lots of fun with it... Digital projects with Nick in the next year or two. Shows booked through the end of the year.

Andrew: And swimming lessons.

Photo credits: Josh Piha

Video: "Los Planetas" - Nathalia

There are lots of reasons kids of various might enjoy "Los Planetas," the first video from Los Angeles-based Nathalia and the opening track on her new album Dream a Little: the self-empowerment message, watching kids messing around with science experiments, the slight revenge plot, all done with high-quality production values.

But if I had to pick the most appealing thing about the bilingual pop song's video, it would be the offhand moments shown here -- the kids dancing, or just interacting with each other.

Nathalia - "Los Planetas" [Vimeo]

Review: Super Audio Sunshine - Todd McHatton

If Dan Zanes coined the phrase "age-desegregated music" for his folk-rock take on traditional songs from across the country (and globe), Southern California's Todd McHatton has taken that attitude and applied it to psychedelic power-pop. While some of his music has occasionally tapped into a more childlike part of the brain as in his massive kindie hit "I Think I'm a Bunny," which featured the winsomely squeaky monster Marvy Monstone, mostly he's recorded music accessible to all ages.

This doesn't change on his latest album, Super Audio Sunshine. Sure, Marvy makes his now traditional album appearance, this time on the (happily) existential album closer "Every Little Monster." But for the most part, the occasional song like "A Slice of Pie" -- yes, it's about eating pie -- which resides squarely in what we might think of as kindie is usually followed immediately by a song like "What Makes Me Smile," which with only the most minor of changes would be a pure pop-rock love song. (It is a pure pop rock love song, though, to be sure.)

McHatton doesn't alter his sonic approach from past work, either -- "Wonderbuzz" could be a long-lost track from XTC's long-lost kid-friendly album, and songs like "Refreshments on Neptune" and "Giraffe On a Flaming Unicycle" are every bit as far-out as those song titles imply. As a result, McHatton's music can be an acquired taste and families who prefer their kindie more conventional might not groove to the whole thing.

The album is best suited for kids ages 4 and up, with no real upper age limit (see discussion above); you can stream the entire 41-minute album here. As McHatton himself noted, he finds it "much more interesting and exciting to write about fantastical, dynamic, bizarre things than to rehash any common, tired, depressing, dark subject matter." Super Audio Sunshine is another example of that artistic principle at work, and most families will find at least a few songs exercising their bliss muscles. Recommended.

Note: I received a copy of the album for possible review.

Video: "HBD, Dude!" - Mista Cookie Jar & the Chocolate Chips (World Premiere)

Southern California's Mista Cookie Jar is testing my hyphenating abilities. His blend of hip-hop, soul sounds, Motown riffs, California vibes, and whatever else he throws in the mix can be too much for the English language too handle.

For his latest track, "HBD, Dude!," MCJ and his Chocolate Chips mix a surf-rock guitar track and some flowing verses that include the word "hashtag" to produce a very 21st-century celebration of someone's birthday. (You can buy the track via that link above, or iTunes and CD Baby as well...)

For the video, which I'm world-premiering here today, Mista Cookie Jar can't be contained to a single POV, either. He takes Beach Blanket Bingo-era footage, hand-animates it a bit, and throws in a nice Facebook/Instagram reference or three. Throw in some kids eating cake and surf-dancing, and you've got yourself a party.

I'm going with "surf-hop."

Mista Cookie Jar and the Chocolate Chips - "HBD, Dude!" [YouTube]

Video: "Crew Cut" - Randy Kaplan

One of my favorite tracks from Randy Kaplan's fine album Jam on Rye was "Crew Cut," which details many hairstyles Kaplan had, dreamed of, or dismissed over his lifetime. Like many of Kaplan's best songs, it's funny, literate, and a little bit wistful.

So I was glad to see that Kaplan enlisted the talents of animator Matt Kiel to create a video for the song, and the resulting video is just about a perfect match. Hairstyles galore and a dead-simple concept. Love it.

Randy Kaplan - "Crew Cut" [YouTube]