|
HERE I AM!
BABIES LITTLE SELF This is an original song that I wrote for parents to sing to their child to illustrate the parts of the body and times of the day and year. Its a good one for just hanging out with the baby having chill out time together. Jen Wood is the singer. She is great and her website is right HERE. BABY BEAR Just another love song from parent to child. Sing this to your kids while you jump around or excercise your babies legs in the crib. This one went through a bunch of revisions while I was making it trying to make is sipler and simpler. Originally it had drums and all this stuff so this is the bare bones version! BABY IN A CORN TREE My friends child Petra wrote this ditty. Her lyrics are so surreal and fun I had this song stuck in my head for years before I even started this project. It was an obvious choice for this record. She originally used a very famous song as the melody and I had to mutate it so that it would not be a problem. I love the imagery of a baby in a corn tree (whatever that is!) doing all these funny things that barely make sense! Her parents are artists and her dads site is right HERE. BILLY PRIGLE This is an old English folk song that I found while I was searching for lyrics on the internet. I still have no idea how the original melody goes at all but I just started playing it this way one day and it stuck. It is sort of a minimal mowtown feel to me!. A little sad in the lyric department but sometimes things go wrong in life I guess and poor Billy Pringle found that out the hard way! BRIGHT BUG You can sing this to your wee one while they get cozy for bed. I just wanted to make bugs all cozy. Did I do it? I think so. This was one of the first songs I wrote for this project back when the idea was to make a book of collage by Kate and songs about birds and bugs. The project blossomed into this CD and some of those songs are on this record. I like the slight sadness in this one. But it is sweet and loving too. BROWN AND LONELY WORM The original song that this uses as inspiration is called “The Leather Winged Bat” and is an old old folk song. I became aware of it through an artist named Spider John Koerner. I always loved it but thought that the words needed to be a little more baby-centric. So I rewrote them all! The information on the true origin of the song is vague but wikipedia has and entry HERE. BUG IN THE CUFF I wrote this one in the 80s about finding a bug in the cuff of my pants after a walk in a field. Pretty much what you see is what you get. I really was not sure what it was but I lost it so I will never know! Dont kill bugs kids!! Be friends with them...its better. CALLING FROM CLOUDS This is an original about a bird migrating into the winter. Its just a lonely little song that is maybe a little spooky. Just lay back and imagine the barren winter landscape and the little bird making his way. Thats what I did when I wrote it! Poor little guy all up in the clouds and stuff. FREE LIKE A BIRD Written by my daughter and her cousin and me this is a dance number for the little babies to boogie to on a warm southern California beach near the water while the parents make lunch so the babies dont have to. The recording process for this one took a long time. It went through many feels before I settled on this one. I added the acoustic guitar at the last and loosened it up a bit. Just a good time dance party song! FRERES JACQUES I love a good round and this one is a classic. A good opportunity to have some French on there. I want to do more songs in French since I can actually speak it! I put the english words in there too so you can hear both at the same time. I wonder if he really is sleeping? HEARD A BIRD My friend Tad from The Young Fresh Fellows came up with this title a while ago and we tried to write a rock song to fit it. Eventually I started writing it as a kids song about simple love and it clicked. I wonder how little birds know so much stuff and why they go around telling all their secrets!? Those crazy little things need to keep it zipped. LET THE S GO When my daughter was little she did not say the “S” in words like spider and sparkle. She said “_pider” and “_parkle”. I thought it would be fun to have a song that plays with parts of words. Its fun to sing and good for little brains to play with parts of words so there you go! It might be a little hard to get at first but after you do you can sing your own version with whatever replacement letters you want...have fun! LITTLE BROKEN TRUCK I was on a road trip with my girlfriend Kate and we were on an island driving around and saw all these rusted out trucks. She said “poor little broken truck” and before you knew it I was writing verses on the back of a book I was reading. My daughter Josie and her cousin Claire are the little voices in the chorus. This is a great one to get the kids to sing along with. I wonder how that truck found itself in that field in the first place? Who owned it before? MONKEY RIVER When I was a wee child I wanted desperately to jump into the monkey exbit at the seattle zoo and live on the island in the middle with the monkeys. There is old super 8 footage of me trying to climb in over and over! My mom eventually convinced me that I would be better off with her at home so I gave up on that but put all that wanting into this song. This version is an adaptation of the original. We also did a version on the Presidents record Love Everybody that we put out in 2004. I have chopped off some lyrics and changed the music completely to feel more country and little and groovy and more smokey and like the memory I have. I might like this one better than the original! I also have released an entire record of 12 versions of this song (this one is number 15!) and you can see that here at presidentsrock.com POOR DUST BUNNIES Originally written for a play about a vacuum cleaner a sock and a lamp that start a band. I thought the lonely little dust bunnies were a great image to play with. It is sad but sweet. Those poor things cant move and they need to be protected. We need to start a dust bunny protection service! They could be rounded up and protected in little shelters away from the evil vaccuum cleaners. I found one under my couch once that was 5 inches wide! RUN AWAY This was written by a little boy named Griffin Lang. I brought this one to life using his lyrics live in front of an audience at a show in Detroit. I was handed the lyrics before the show and it just popped out while we were playing. Then I recorded it at home with some additional lyrics and Jen Wood singing back up. I love how it makes no sense but makes PERFECT sense at the same time! SHORTNIN BREAD My friend Fysah Thomas was in the studio doing another song and sang a couple of bars of this song and we found the lyrics on the internet and immediately recorded this bouncy version in 10 minutes. Easy and fun. We had to modify some lyrics that were to weird to sing so you may hear some different words in there. I like the babies pretending to be sick and then suddenly getting all better when the shortnin bread comes out of the oven! Tricky babies. SLEEPING BABY I wanted to try to write a very very relaxing simple lullaby for bedtime. I like the idea of a baby floating over the land while the parent watches the baby in its bed...sort of like that sensation of falling asleep when you feel like you are in two places at once...awake and drifting...where are you? SMALL BLACK ANT I wrote this one using a melody that my mom used to sing to me when I was little about how she found my brother and I in the woods. It was sort of a creation myth that told the story of feeding us in the woods and discovering us under stumps. The melody used to give me the chills for some reason. My mom is not doing well these days and I wanted to honor her with this song that uses her melody in a new way. I love you Mom. Here is a song for you. THE ISLAND HOP I sang this little thing to my daughter when she was really really little as we packed for a family vacation to Hawaii. She was sitting there with her yellow pyjamas on and a big binky (pacifier for those that dont know that word) in her mouth sucking away unaware of the pleasures of the islands that awaited her. The original used her name (Josie) so I switched it out for “baby”. THREE BLIND MICE This is a case of those mice needing to have more adventures than JUST getting their tails chopped off! So I wrote new verses and messed with the feel to make it upbeat and kind of 1960s. The original lyric was written about the daughter of King Henry the Eighth, Queen Mary the Frist. She is the “farmers wife” because she owned a bunch of land as queen. The three blind mice are three noblemen who were plotting against her and she dealt with them pretty harshly. More info on that story HERE. UNDER A ROCK This is the last song I wrote for the record and it just fell together as I imagined all the fun stuff you can find under rocks. Turning over rocks is still one of my favorite things to do but you gotta make sure you put them back real gently so the critters dont get sad! Even the spiders with bright yellow hair. I put a little Bo Diddley beat underneath the keep it snappy. |
|
|
|