I hate kids music. With a passion. Since Baby Bee was born I’ve made it my mission to immerse her in “good” pop music. She likes to jump around to The Pogues, she can sing along to Sufjan Stevens, she’s partial to The Beatles’ Rubber Soul album, she enjoys Natalia Lafourcade and She & Him are the biggest rock stars in her world. Yet she betrays me and breaks my barely existing heart by learning the words to the songs on that insipid show The Fresh Beat Band and sings along with Dora the Explorer much to my dismay. Other than the Yo Gabba Gabba soundtracks, there really isn’t much out there for kids that won’t annoy adults (*ahem* me).
Praise your god for the fine folks (and my darling friends) at Toy Block Music. TBM was founded on a simple idea: kids deserve real music done by great musicians, i.e. music that isn’t condescending or boring. Toy Block president and founder Joanna Quargnali-Linsley feels the same as yours truly: kids music sucks. Along with her husband and Toy Block VP Alessandro Quargnali-Linsley, they sought to remedy that with the release of the label’s first EP “Eats Paste” earlier this year (see what they did there?). Eats Paste puts a rocking spin on classic children’s songs and is an album I’m not embarrassed to blast when I’m hanging out with the kid, an album I’ll listen to when the kid isn’t around.
Not too shabby, right? Well there’s more: a portion of the proceeds of Eats Paste goes to the children’s charity PAGER. After their daughter was diagnosed with GERD as an infant, Joanna and Alessandro turned to PAGER and its online community and found answers and help they desperately needed. This is their way of giving back.
The EP was produced by Grammy award winning engineers Ricco Lumpkins and Matt Shane and recorded at Chicago’s own Rax Trax Studio. Tracks include a surf guitar version of “The Cat Came Back” by Alex Sanders, a folksy version of “There Was An Old Woman” by the lovely Anna Soltys and the dynamic duo Stereo Sinai taking on “Wynken, Blynken and Nod” to name a few. But the most inspired of the recordings has to be Olin Langley’s funked out “The Wheels On The Bus.”
I can tell you all day how great this EP is but the best endorsement I can give is this: it makes Baby Bee happy. As any parent will tell you, whatever keeps a kid happy (and out of your hair) is simply awesome.
Tracklist:
Alice the Camel – David Kav
Oh Susannah – Arlen Ginsburg
The Cat Came Back – Alex Sanders
The Crawdad Man – Austin Collins
The Wheels On The Bus – Olin Langley
There Was An Old Woman – Anna Soltys
Wynken, Blynken and Nod – Stereo Sinai
