Four on the Floor (Kids Music Reviews for Preschoolers)

Here's the next installment of reviews of albums before I pause a bit with my reviews. Last week I covered some recent (2017) releases, but this week's roundup includes some albums more than a year old.

I wanted to take a look at some recent albums targeted at the preschool set, those kids moving close to (if not sitting directly on) the ground. This isn't a complete listing of such albums, but they are four albums that I think give a fair overview of where 21st century music for your favorite 3-year-old is at the moment.

We'll start with the most famous kids musician on this list, and arguably, the first kids music superstar -- Raffi. Most folks recognize the first wave of kids musicians -- legends like Pete Seeger, Ella Jenkins, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly -- as folksingers, including the social justice component that folksingers have often been recognized as having, especially in the United States from the '30s through the '60s. They weren't just singing about animals and playtime, they also sang about freedom and justice. (Sometimes they even did so simultaneously.)

It took awhile, but Raffi has become every bit the political folksinger his predecessors were. When he first burst onto the scene in the mid-1970s, his first albums were classic sing-along stuff, but he avoided political items. Gradually, however, he mixed in songs celebrating the natural world, with "Baby Beluga" becoming a touchstone song for hundreds of thousands of kids in the early '80s.

His 2016 album Owl Singalong came comparatively quickly on the heels of his previous album, 2014's Love Bug, signifying new inspiration after more than a decade away from the genre, and this album is filled with lots of songs celebrating the importance of the natural world and, one senses, a new urgency from the 68-year-old Canadian singer.

There's a sprightliness to the music here, aided by Raffi's newfound discovery of the ukulele. Longtime friend and collaborator Ken Whiteley and his son Ben help out with instrumentals, his niece Kristin Cavoukian sings on a couple songs, as do a number of others, and he deftly mixes new takes on old classic music circle songs like "More We Sing Together" and "The Lion Pokey" with folk songs written with a wider circle in mind, like "The Garden Song" and "Somos El Barco." (Oddly enough, this may be the album pitched at the oldest audience of these four.) Raffi's voice is as fine as ever, though he's still willing to be very playful with his voice, too. All in all, this is a fine collection of songs, a worthy addition to Raffi's long discography.

Another artist who covers much the same ground as Raffi is Maryland's Valerie Smalkin. A ventriloquist and musician who's been performing a long time, her 2016 album Love Bug (see, a Raffi connection right there!) could easily find a home in many a preschool classroom. For the most part, the album is filled with originals with a couple more traditional songs ("Hey Betty Martin," "Bumblebee") mixed in. The physical album comes with suggestions for making listening to the songs a more interactive process as well, which is not unusual for these types of albums -- it's another common theme we often see. The execution of these songs in arrangements is just enough improved over most such albums that I think it won't wear out its welcome nearly as fast. Smalkin's appealing voice helps out as well. (I could do with less synth, but most similar types of albums lean on that synth even more than it's leaned on here.) I wouldn't listen to this album by itself as much as I would the other three albums here, but for those looking for a little more movement and interaction as part of their listening experience, this might do the trick.

Moving on to an artist clearly inspired by Raffi -- Charlie Hope. I've compared the Canadian/American Hope favorably with the Canadian legend, and her latest album, Songs for Little Ones, released late last year, does nothing to dissuade me from the comparison.

Whereas her previous albums tended to be a little more of a mix of original songs (and some darn catchy ones to boot) and classic kids' songs, this new album shifts the balance of the songs to the classic side, with only 3 originals -- still lovely -- and 22 covers. I tend to think that new families should have multiple versions of these types of albums just so those families can hear how, say, Raffi's take on "Down By the Bay" differs from Hope's here, but there are far worse voices to include on a short list of albums of classic songs than Hope's bright, clear voice. The arrangements here are more folk-pop -- no synths, but poppier perhaps than Raffi's earthier approach (just enough tasteful percussion or perhaps an occasional string instrument or recorder to liven it up).

Finally we have Caspar Babypants. Chris Ballew has been remarkably consistent and productive in making remarkably good music for preschoolers over the past decade, and there's nothing in his latest, 2016's Away We Go!, that changes that assessment. Ballew heads the other direction as Hope, as this new album leans more heavily towards original tunes than reworking classic kids' songs. There are some nifty new takes, like the concluding track "If You're Sleepy," which converts "If You're Happy and You Know It" into a very sleepy (and very Beatles-esque) wind-down track. It's mostly a solo effort from Ballew, with only Jen Wood providing vocals on "If You're Sleepy" and the Okee Dokee Brothers pitching in on a couple tracks, but his poppy arrangements are, as always, filled with verve and occasional surprises. And as always, Ballew's lyrics are fanciful (tiny horses, runaway pancakes, best friends snail and spider) and playful.

If I were to pick the album I'd listen to most on repeat, it'd probably be the Caspar Babypants album just because it's the most varied in melody and words, with the Raffi a close, close second. But Songs For Little Ones would make a fine addition to any home or preschool classroom, and I think Love Bug could find a good home in a classroom as well. They're all recommended to varying degrees.

Note: I was given a copy of these albums for possible review.

Two Unnecessary (Albeit Necessary) Kids' Albums

Lisa Loeb - Nursery Rhyme Parade album cover

In one sense, I place albums of nursery rhymes in approximately the same category as entire albums of Beatles covers -- pretty much unnecessary. The Fab Four's originals are so iconic (and often perfect) that redoing them seems pointless unless the artist is doing something entirely novel with the songs. A single Beatles song mixed among originals or covers of other artists? Sure. But an entire album? Even if it's really good, they're more likely to send the families to dig out what Beatles music they have.

With nursery rhymes and classic kids' songs, I have the same basic issue, but with a different spin. With albums covering classic songs like "London Bridge," "The Wheels on the Bus," and "Row Row Row Your Boat," and so on, artists have two possible approaches: 1) simple renditions that put the melody and lyrics up front, and 2) entire reworkings of the songs whose elaborate arrangements, rather than the song itself, become the point ("Pop Goes The Weasel"... gone metal!).

The latter approach isn't without merit -- such arrangements can sometimes help listeners of all ages hear an overly familiar song with new ears, or introduce those listeners to a genre they might not typically spin. As you might expect, the former approach -- simple songs done (relatively) simply -- is my preferred approach, but the problem here is that, well, exactly how many such albums does a family need?

Besides the fact that the only member of our family in single-digits age-wise is our youngest Boston Terrier, we are also card-carrying members of Team Wiggleworms and Team Raffi. Songs for Wiggleworms and Singable Songs for the Very Young (and their immediate successors) met our need for collections of nursery rhymes and familiar kids' songs a decade ago and, well, there's no need for anything new. That's overstating things maybe a bit, but not a lot. Songs for Wiggleworms features dozens of classic songs, usually with nothing more than a guitar for accompaniment. Singable Songs for the Very Young is more expansive -- some original songs amidst the classics, with more elaborate arrangements -- but at its heart, it's still an album of classic kids' songs.

Laurie Berkner - Favorite Classic Kids' Songs album cover

So from one perspective -- my own family's, reviewer's hat aside -- the latest releases from Laurie Berkner and Lisa Loeb, are utterly unnecessary. We have the unadorned collection of songs, we have the slightly adorned collection of songs, and we've been listening to them for so long that they feel like much-loved stuffed animals. Why anyone would throw those stuffed animals away for lovely new stuffed animals is beyond me.

But there are lots of families who haven't yet found that stuffed animal, and perhaps some of those families will find in Laurie Berkner's Favorite Classic Kids' Songs and Loeb's Nursery Rhyme Parade a stuffed animal that they can rely on.

Because make no mistake, these types of albums should be in the collection of every family with a preschooler in the house. These are the foundational songs of childhood, with melodies (and often lyrics) that have lasted for literally centuries. These are the songs that parents and caregivers should be singing to (and hopefully with) the young ones in their midst, and good collections of classic songs help families do that, by reminding the adults of songs (both lyrics and melodies) and offering the kids repetition to solidify their knowledge of the song.

Of the two albums Berkner's is more reminiscent of Raffi's fuller arrangements and approaches. Her band appears on many tracks, and she shares vocals with a number of musicians. Sometimes she sings a cappella, and some tracks end up on the other end of the production spectrum ("Shoo-Fly" features strings), but all the arrangements put the song first. And Berkner still has one of the best female voices in kindie.

On her album, Loeb goes the more minimalist Wiggleworms route. More a cappella, and when she is accompanied, it's usually just with a simple guitar. If the listener wants the song, just the song with as little embroidery as possible, then Nursery Rhyme Parade is the album more likely to meet that listener's expectations. To be clear, Loeb has a fine voice herself, and it's produced well, but it's hard to envision a much simpler album.

The albums are different enough -- beyond the arrangements, surprisingly enough there are a number of songs that are featured on only one album or the other -- that you could conceivably get both. But assuming you only want one, there are other differences that might influence your choice. For example, Berkner's album is actually a 57-track collection that stretches to 2 hours and 9 minutes in length. About half of those are remastered previously-released tracks (including 6 Berkner songs included as "bonus" tracks), but even then you'd get 27 new songs. Loeb's collection zips by, 37 tracks in 31 minutes, and, perhaps more importantly, it's featured on Amazon Prime Music, which means that you're not going to be able to hear it on streaming services like Rhapsody and Spotify (both of which are streaming Berkner's new disk). It's part of what appears to be a new effort by Amazon to target family audiences, and while you can buy Loeb's album from Amazon, either in mp3 or physical format, I think much of the audience will be Amazon Prime customers streaming it. (There are very few albums of classic kids' songs in the Amazon Prime collection that won't induce parental frustration -- Loeb's is one of the few that passes muster.)

So, do you need these albums? If you're a Laurie Berkner fan or a Lisa Loeb fan and you have kids still in preschool, then I think their albums will be an excellent fit for your family, even if maybe you already have a preschool song collection. If you have preschoolers, but don't have a preschool song collection, then both these albums are worth exploring. There are other albums that serve the same audience, but the arguments I might make for favoring one over another would be mostly my own particular biases. You don't need these albums at all, but you do need albums like these -- perhaps even these albums -- very much so. With those caveats, these are both definitely recommended.

Note: I received copies of both albums for possible review.

Review: Rise and Shine! - Caspar Babypants

Music writers -- at the very least, this one -- aren't necessarily fans of consistency in their artists. It stretches our ability to find something new to say about an artist when she constantly turns out the same type of thing.

Sometimes it's consistently bad, and I imagine that some writers could have fun picking apart those albums exhibiting significant failures of imagination, talent, or quality control, if not all three. (I am not one of those writers.)

But sometimes it's consistently good, and those are the trickier ones for me. Chris Ballew, aka Caspar Babypants -- he's one of the trickiest. His seven Caspar Babypants albums have been uniformly excellent, with only his most recent, Baby Beatles, a collection of Fab Four covers, at all deviating from the norm of well-crafted, lightly-arranged collections of gentle and gently skewed originals mixed with covers of folk classics that, like looking through a prism at different angles, retained the essence of the original but let you see (or hear) it in a different way.

So how does his latest album, Rise and Shine, differ from the rest of the CB work? Hmmm… to begin with, it felt to me like it's his most toddler-focused album in quite some time, songs like the strings-laden Beatlesque "Rise and Shine" and the handclapp-y jam "Littlest Worm" with the hint of lessons might be most… useful for your almost-three-year-old.

But that's the barest of distinctions, and the album feels every bit part of the Caspar Babypants world we have come to know and love. It celebrates the natural world, with songs featuring birds, worms, mice, and squirrels -- sometimes acting more or less like they actually do in the real world, in the crisp "Pretty Crabby," and sometimes acting more anthropomorphically, as in what is probably one of my top 5 Caspar Babypants songs, "Bird in an Airplane Suit" ("Look up / look up / you can sometimes see / a bird in an airplane suit"). (I also quite enjoy the simple and wistful "Girl With a Squirrel in Her Hat.")

Ballew's ear for reworking traditional songs and mixing those new arrangements amongst his sometimes whimsical originals remains as sharp as ever. "Rain Rain Come Today" is very much reworked, something you might have heard in the '60s. And while the traditional lullabies on the disk are hardly lullabies - "Hush Little Baby" is funky, and "Rock a Bye Baby" also fails the sleep test, he does end the album on a slow note, tempo-wise.

I'll peg this album as most appropriate for kids ages 2 through 6. You can hear samples from the 50-minute album here.

In the end, Rise and Shine is another solid entry in Ballew's kid-canon, as strong as any over the past decade, perfect for your youngest kid or niece or nephew, but still just as delightful to their older siblings (or their parents). Sometimes novelty is overrated, but Caspar Babypants isn't. Highly recommended.

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

Review: Sing As We Go! - Charlie Hope

Singer-songwriting Charlie Hope has a bright, clear voice that appeals to many ears. In attitude, temperament, and vocal quality, I've previously compared her to Raffi, and I think the analogy still holds.

On her recent release, Sing As We Go!, Hope continues with the formula that has won her fans on both sides of the Canadian-United States border. Take a batch traditional songs, mix in a handful of poppy folk originals, add a dash of kindie royalty, and stir. Hope's voice and producer Dean Jones' unfussy musical choices give a fresh spin to the traditionals. A simple touch like the toy piano on the old camp chestnut "I Love the Mountains" helps give the song new life to the adult listener who may have heard the song more times than they probably should. While some of the titles like "When the Ice Worm Nests Again" and "Little Rooster" might not sound familiar, the melodies probably will, with Hope occasionally writing some new lyrics for the songs.

The originals here are lovely -- from the lost '70s AM-radio tune "With You" (co-written and performed by Hope and Gustafer Yellowgold's Morgan Taylor) to Jones' "Harmony" (a duet between Hope and Elizabeth Mitchell) and Hope's own gentle ode to the parent-child bond "From You" -- and feel just as timeless as the actual classics they're next to. (And speaking of kindie royalty, Molly Ledford, Randy Kaplan, and Chris Ballew aka Caspar Babypants also appear on the album.)

The album is most appropriate for kids ages 3 through 7. You can listen to extended clips from each song on the album here. Also, I happen to find the album art here particularly delightful, an artful mix of hand-drawn, computer-drawn, and knitted illustration from Zooglobble favorite Charlotte Blacker.

I first listened to this album months ago, set it aside as real life took over, and when I came back to it recently in preparation for writing this review, I was struck by just how delightful this is. It's traditional but not musty, sweet but not cloying, engaging but not pandering. It's a gem of an album, definitely worthy of a comparison to Raffi. Highly recommended.

Itty-Bitty Review: First Songs - Danny Lion

Dan Flannery may be best known in the kindie world for being half of the well-loved duo the Flannery Brothers, but he has an alter ego as a dandelion-brandishing lion superhero.

Wait, what? I must've been confused by the album cover.

The Flannery Brothers aren't defunct by any means, but Dan has taken his master's degree in Child Development and job teaching preschool classes and music and turned that into Danny Lion, his very preschool-focused music alter ego. His debut DL album First Songs from late last year is a half-hour and a dozen songs of genial silliness for your favorite preschooler. Super-simple -- there's a song about having a "Banana on the Head" that is exactly about that -- but that's the point (and the charm) of the album. The instrument list includes ukulele, bass, and cajon, and… well, that's it, really. It's just songs like and "Puppies in Cars" and "Dance Happy" which will, well, put a smile on your and maybe even Pharrell's face.

The album will appeal to kids ages 2 through 6. You can listen to the whole album here. This is simplicity done right -- letting the humor and happiness shine through. Definitely recommended.

Itty-Bitty Review: In a Heartbeat - Laura Doherty

Chicago-based musician Laura Doherty is one of a number of kids musicians who should probably be more well-known nationally than they are. Doherty makes the same kind of gentle folk-pop for preschoolers that has helped make Raffi and Laurie Berkner superstars, but without all the attention they receive.

I would be surprised if fans of Raffi and Berkner -- no matter if they're 4 years old or the minder of such 4 year olds -- didn't recognize in Doherty's music many of the same things that give those two a timeless appeal. On her new album In a Heartbeat, Doherty uses her warm, inviting voice to sing simple (in a good way) songs about ocean creatures (the wonderful leadoff track "I'm a Little Fish"), feelings ("It's OK To Be Shy," "Butterfly"), and making music ("Electric Guitar" and "Drum Kit," the latter of which features Wilco's Glenn Kotche on yes, the drums). Doherty and producer Rich Rankin have surrounded themselves with musicians who give the songs are solid musical footing, unfussy but sophisticated.

The album is most appropriate for kids ages 3 through 7. There are many kindie artists who are producing (wonderful) kids music that stretch the boundaries of the form in topic and musical approach -- Doherty is not traveling this path. Which is perfectly OK. This is reassuring music and what it lacks in "edge" it makes up for with the warm fuzzies. I like it a lot, and there's no reason why your favorite preschooler with a pig on her head wouldn't groove to the music here, too. Definitely recommended.