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SING ALONG! BA BA BLACK SHEEP
Another example of a classic that has so few lyrics that it was begging to be expanded. The verse about the three bags already existed but what about the first, second and fourth bags? Now you know the REST of the story. BABY CLOUD This is based on an old African American fiddle tune called "Ballad Call and Response". I was listening to the recording of that old tune as a thunderstorm approached on a wide plain in a rural part of New York State and I started singing about a baby cloud coming over the land and moving over slowly raining. I feel like it is a metaphor for a baby feeling sad and being lulled to sleep by a reassuring parent. AHHHH....relaxing. Rachel Loshak sings beautifully and Jacob Lawson does the real strings on this recording. The final touch is Pete Droges amazing little guitar solo that we recorded out on Vashon Island. Thanks to all the payers that helped bring this song to light! It was a long ride with many many versions. BAD BLUE JAY I love this one! It is based on an old work song called "Did You Feed My Cow?" where the singer asks after the cow and the crowd lets the singer know that the cow died! I was looking out the window one day when a blue jay came and sat on the fence and complained and yelled for a while. I started to sing "Are you a bad blue jay? Yes sir!" and the old song fell into my brain. I had the blue jay decide to be good cause being good is more fun! BUTTERFLY DRIVING A TRUCK My amazing friend Tad Hutchison's daughter Mia came up with this title for a song and that is all she had. Tad and I got together and made this tiny ditty from that idea. With just ukulele and vocals and one little low clavinet I love this minimal simple little image of a butterfly driving a huge truck down the road! What a tough guy. CRAWL A lyricist from the North East named Keith Mackler from a rap duo called Rhythm Ruckus wrote this one for me to a little drum beat. He was just inspired to write something for the littles! I just changed the “I” he wrote to “you” and put it to music. Hope it inspires some crib dwellers to get out and MOVE IT! FUNNY BONE A long time ago I made up a song that didn't make ant sense called "Funny Bone" and I found it in a pile of song one day and decided that it would be a good "parent tickles kid" tune to get a tickle party started. HELICOPTER This is based on an old work chant that I came across somewhere out there in the world. I combined the feeling of that old public domain song with the joy I felt one day when I looked up in the sky and saw the CUTEST little yellow helicopter in the entire world. I was so insanely happy to see that little thing up there that I started singing in this rhythm about it and the song was born. There is something about a tiny yellow helicopter that makes me SO happy. I WANNA BE A SNOWMAN I was inspired by an old tune called "Who's Gonna Be Your Man?" that I came across in my song hunting. It has such a funky celebratory swing with a minor key twist and I loved the melody. I imagined a snowflake falling from the sky and HOPING that it would be used in the making of a snowman. Seems like a nice dream for a snowflake to have I think. LONG LONG DREAM A friend of mine taught this one to me as a round but with very different much darker lyrics and a different melody. It is an old old old English song from the middle ages I believe but it was hard to find any information on it. Of course I thought I could lighten it up by changing the words but not the melody but in the end I changed EVERYTHING about it and made it my own. The amazing "Weird" Al Yankovic plays a super satisfying accordion solo on this one! Basically my way or saying "row row row your boat"! LOUD AND QUIET Well this is pretty straight forward isn't it? I am the loud voice and the great Frances England (children's artist extraordinaire) is the quiet voice. My favorite is the loud cow. MOO!! ME AND MY ECHO I got really excited about call and response songs and wanted to have a few on this record. I made this one up just to have fun with the kids at the shows and have them (and you parents too!) sing along with my words. I love the idea that the echo wonders where I am too. Poor hollow little echo thing. MISTER WINTER BEE Kate and I were taking a winter walk in the coldness and frost when we saw a single gigantic bumble bee float by on the cold winter wind. I just burst out singing the chorus to this song and we worked on it as we walked around. The multi talented Stone Gossard from Pearl Jam came over later on and played the slappy flappy bongos on it. This is a sort of beatnik sound for me. MY FLEA HAS DOGS Oh my! I love this one. This is one of those last minute things where the songs are chosen for the album and BAM! along comes another song that is too good to pass up! I was tuning up a ukulele in the kitchen to sign and give away at an auction when Kate heard me tuning and tried to sing the famous "my dog has fleas" thing that people use to tune ukes and she instead sang "my flea has dogs" and that huge light bulb that goes on above my head when I hear a great song idea went on! I wrote this one twice with different lyrics and ended up using some of both versions in the final song. PUSSYCAT PUSSTCAT Another classic that I wrote new lyrics for. This one back to 16th century England. One of the waiting ladies of Queen Elizabeth the First had a cat which wandered free in Windsor castle. One time the cat ran beneath the throne and its tail brushed against the Queen's foot. I wanted to let the pussycat have a little more adventure than JUST going under the Queens chair and brushing her foot. Although that would be pretty amazing for the average pussycat! I figured if it got that far it might as well get into some trouble and WOW does it ever! RING AROUND THE ROSIE We all know this one as a traditional round. It first appeared in print in 1881 but there is evidence that another version was around in the 1790s. Again I noticed the limitations of only one verse for this little thing and brought in a whole bunch of different flowers and activities to make it have more variety. Frances England did the little vocal break and the last part to be added was the funky bass line which I love! SHADOW Originally title "PILLOW" this was about finding a pillow in the woods and sleeping on it but it just didn't make any sense! So I changed it to be a love song for my shadow. I really do love how my shadow is always there for me and changes shape as the sun goes down. The middle part of the song makes me see a shadow that has left my side and is running free by itself in the dark woods. CREEPY! SPIDER JOHN This song is dedicated Spider John Koerner who is to one of my musical heroes. I have always loved his style and it was his repertoire of interpretations old public domain folk tunes that really turned me on to the entire genre. He came to Seattle last winter and played an opening set for my grownup band The Presidents of the United States of America. I was lucky enough to pick him up at the airport and we got to talk and exchange some notions about music and story telling and life in general. His laid back ways inspired this metaphorical song about an actual spider that makes his way around the globe singing and playing for his supper. SUN GO Long ago there was a time when I could not write songs. I had no ideas and no clear vision for what to sing about. I made music anyway and just sang gibberish over the grooves. I had one called "Sun Yo" that I found one day while sifting through my old recordings and it reworked itself into this end of the day love song for the sunset. Frances England sing this as a duet with me and she added that perfect high harmony. THEM BONES Another old classic originally title "Dem Bones" and it was used to teach basic anatomy to children through song. I prefer to think about a skeleton building himself up and taking himself apart! This is meant to be a little dance number for the dancers out there. My good buddy Mike "Outtasite" Singleton does a turn here as "THE SKELETON"! WILD WILD TIME I based the melody for the verse in this one on a piano sonata by Ludwig Van Beethoven called Adagio Cantabile. I just love that melody and always have and it is so fun to use it this way in an upbeat song about animals having a party! I can just see Harold the horse and Patty the pig walking Daniel the dog at the end. AW poor tiny Daniel. |
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THIS IS FUN! ALL YOU PRETTY BABIES I found a fragment of a song idea on an old cassette and it was the basic idea for this song. Written way before I decided to write for kids it felt like a natural fit. It is a good little counting song and I love Fred from the live Caspar band as the "mom"! BABY AND THE ANIMALS this song was originally written as a prize in an auction. I give away a custom song in auctions around the Northwest and one of the winners wanted a song for her daughter Evie who loved music, giraffes and movies! I concocted a song for her called "Evie and the Animals" and then years later I mutated it into this more universal version for ALL babies! I love that they try to be famous but end up back on the island living the simple life. It MIGHT be autobiographical! BABY’S GETTING UP My friend Tad and his wife Tami came to visit and Tami was warm because it was summer and she had on a sweater! We sang “Tami’s getting warm, Tami’s getting hot hot!” and the little riff was so sticky that years later I remembered it and made it about a baby getting up and down. Its a silly little activity song that you can bop to in your crib! BOUNCE YOUR BABY I was at a family party and all four of the new babies in my family were being bounced by their moms in unison. I started bouncing in place along with them and used that rhythm as the backbone for this song about traveling around helping little babies bounce around. So theoretically you should be able to hold and bounce your little baby in perfect time to this hillbilly tune! BUCKEYE JIM Elizabeth Mitchell plays this song on her album "You Are My Little Bird" and I loved the way they made it sparkle and feel so dreamy. Burl Ives did a famous version as well which shows up in the movie "The Fantastic Mr. Fox". In Elizabeth's version they do a little kalimba thing and I used that little melody and expanded it around 1:07 in my version because it reminded me of the opening music of Peter and The Wolf by Prokoviev. The chorus part is also new musically although those lyrics are in the old version I found but not in Elizabeth's version. So many fun ways to stretch old songs!! THE CUCKOO An old song from the hills that I have brightened up for the babies. The original is kind of minor keyed and scary and about gambling (as so many of those old songs are) although I don't know what a bird has to do with loosing at cards! I just made it about a real bird and added a whole new chorus of "cuckoo"s! DARK OF NIGHT when my son was 5 years old he wrote a poem called "the Viper" and we recorded him saying the poem to a beat. It ended up being used as a hip hop thing that I did with another band then we rewrote the lyrics to expand them and make them a little less scary and made the music more groovy and chill. The final touch is my hero Elizabeth Mitchell singing it with me as a duet trading lines. I get choked up when I hear how cool this song finally turned out and how honored I am to have Elizabeth closing out the record with her "ooooooooo"s. THE FROGS In 1986 on my to work on the roller coaster at the amusement park where I worked I found a crumpled up piece of paper with a poem on it by a little kid. The first few lines of the song are directly taken from that scrap of paper then I just expanded it (and changed a couple of lines about SMASHING the frogs!). I wonder where that kid is now? GOOGLY EYES We love googly eyes around our house. I will often come into the kitchen to find a sweet potato with eyes staring at me that my kids or Kate has set up. One of them ended up being named Larry the Lemon. He might get his own song someday. For now this is a love song for the googly eyes and their amazing power to make things come alive. ITS GONNA RAIN Kate and I were walking back to our friend Audrey's house in Nantucket and it looked like it was gonna rain so we just started clapping and singing and making this song up to pass the time as we walked. I got the ideas for the atmosphere sounds from Charlie Hope and her great album "I'm Me!" That is a Casio VL-Tone on the solo (the only keyboard that doubles as a calculator). THE LEGEND OF THE BONE The story of a little bone and its crazy journey from something for a soup to a home for a crab! One day I just tried to write my own cause and effect type song where one thing influences another and so on and this image of a bone traveling all over the place came to mind. The response vocal things were the last part to be added as I listened to it one day they just started coming out of me. LITTLE DITTY This is a collaboration between Frederick Babyshirt (Fred Northup, Jr), the percussionist in the live Caspar band, and me. He wrote the words while singing to his daughter, and I put them to music. It flowed so naturally and easily. His friend, Andrew Sigler, helped with some well-placed horn bits. Just a simple little ditty really. LOOK AT ALL THOSE ELEPHANTS Charlie Hope has a couple of songs on her record "I'm Me!" that are so simple and I admire that so this is my nod to her bravery at having songs be so clear and simple. Audrey Sterk from the band You Scream I Scream and I wrote this together on a lazy day in Nantucket (after the "Its Gonna Rain" walk! Wow, that was a good songwriting day). MISTER RABBIT Another old folk song that I gave a little face lift too. Charlie Hope sing with me on this one. She is awesome. Please check her out. I discovered this song from a version by Paul Westerberg (ex-Replacements) that was on a compilation CD that my neighbor lent me! I heard it and hoped it was old and I could mess with it and it was! YAY! SHOO FLY a nice little galloping tune. I figured I would expand it beyond "morning star" and "feel like" some other things (you know me and expanding the classics!). Fred plays a mean washboard on this one. Josie and I wrote an alternate version about our favorite pie place in Seattle called Shoofly Pie Company that you can hear on my site and theirs. (http://www.shooflypiecompany.com/) SLIVER What a fun song to play! so simple! I played at the Seattle Art Museum on the day that a show dedicated to Kurt Cobain opened and we did this song as a nod to Kurt. It is a song about being little and wanting something you cant have. I like the repetition of the demand to be taken home. Little kids love to sing this at the shows and Krist from Nirvana was kind enough to play bass on this version. SPEEDY CENTIPEDE This was an old song I had that was really sad and funky and I just changed all the music to be more upbeat and funny! I can almost hear all those little feet running around in the music. I wanted to have muted horns on the solo but when I did a rough version with my voice I got attached to it so it stayed. TIGER THROUGH THE TREES I was just struck one day with this vision of a tiger playing guitar and a line of really thick green trees and tiger after tiger coming out with new instruments and playing along and making a tiger band. It is so clear in my mind that I jsut described the scene and a song was born. TUMBLE One day when things were so busy and crazy that I needed a break I just sat down on the front porch and took a second to breathe and relax and this melody came out. I put it to some lyrics I had written ten years earlier about a tree that was outside our kitchen window of my house that always held onto one little leaf all winter until May then it would fall. It happened every year and I marveled at the tenacity of the little leaf. I thought it would make an evocative lullaby of sorts about letting go of the day and tumbling off to sleep. WHERE DO YOU GO? My wife Kate and I were walking in the woods in Ohio when she said "lets write a song!" and we looked around at the flowers and vines around us and stared singing about how we wondered where things went in the winter and this wee song was born. Its the closest Caspar Babypants will ever come to being a rapper! |
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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. |