Tennessean.com
Saturday, 01/20/07
By Nicole Keiper and Ryan Underwood

Rockers now play to sippy cup set:
Parents wean kids on tunes for tots that they like, too

Twenty years back, Jason Ringenberg was best-known in Nashville for ping-ponging on grimy rock club stages at 2 a.m., howling "I can't go on living in your broken whiskey glass" to a sweaty, beer-drenched horde with Jason and the Scorchers.

When Ringenberg climbs on stage at the Belcourt come 10 a.m. today, he'll still play for a crowd of heavy drinkers. Only this horde holds sippy cups instead of pint glasses, and they want to hear him sing "He's a hog hog hog/ He likes to root root root," as his children's-music star alter-ego, Farmer Jason.

"It's a whole new modus operandi for me," Ringenberg says, "and I'm enjoying every second of it."

Ringenberg is hardly the only grown-up rocker to trade smoke- and booze-filled Friday night club gigs for Saturday morning sing-a-longs.

Folk-pop favorite Jack Johnson's soundtrack for last summer's children's movie Curious George ranked as one of 2006's top sellers, with 1.1 million units sold. Replacements front man Paul Westerberg, Lisa Loeb, They Might Be Giants, and former Del Fuegos principal Dan Zanes have all cut albums for the under-10 set in recent years, too.

"It's an explosion, there's no question about that," says Ringenberg, who has three daughters. "There's literally dozens, maybe now hundreds, of pretty good children's performers out there doing good music. And venues (to perform that music in) now are popping up everywhere."

And because of those folks' forays into kid rock, discerning, music-loving parents like Nashville's Meg Giuffrida, who is married to Americana singer/songwriter Paul Burch, feel relieved to now see "much better options than Barney and Raffi" emerging.

Belcourt series draws

According to Belcourt marketing director Josh Hayes, cool-kids-music-loving parents are a growing group, too.

The historic venue's Saturday-morning children's series, in which Ringenberg will perform today, has grown steadily in recent years.

"Live events like Farmer Jason and some of the plays that we have tend to be big sellers," Hayes says.

Neal Pollack, author of Alternadad: The True Story of One Family's Struggle to Raise a Cool Kid in America and father of 4-year-old son Elijah, says the new wave of interest in cool music for kids reflects a wider trend among a new generation of parents.

"I think there is a semi-profound movement afoot. And yeah, some of it is superficial — especially those annoying Ramones onesies," he says. "But I think parents in their 30s and 40s, who themselves had an extended youth, want to share something that was meaningful in their lives with their kids, something that made them who they are."

Susan Tyler, co-owner of local specialty children's store Popo, sees a growing market for well-designed kids products that fit today's tastes.

"The music fits into a whole modern aesthetic," says Tyler, whose daughter's favorite musicians include cool-kids-music creators Elizabeth Mitchell and Laurie Berkner.

Los Angeles-based Baby Rock Records this year launched a CD series called Rockabye Baby! in keeping with that movement, setting music from bands like Metallica, Nirvana and Coldplay to muzak-like lullaby melodies. Those discs have since become the best-selling albums in the 30-year history of Baby Rock's parent company, CMH Records.

"I wish I had some startling piece of business research to explain what's happening with parents' buying habits, but I don't," said Lisa Roth, Baby Rock's vice president. "(Rockabye Baby!) started because I was shopping for a baby-shower present and was completely underwhelmed with what was available. I wanted something with a little edge, a little irony, something that would mirror my own sentiments."

Parents lacked choices

Ringenberg and Zanes had similar experiences when they began their youth-oriented endeavors.

"When my daughter was born, what I really was interested in was music that we could listen to together and both have some kind of emotional attachment to and both be excited by," Zanes says of Anna, who's now 12. "I wouldn't have started doing this if I had found what I was looking for. But I didn't."

Plenty of other music-loving parents also found the options lacking.

Giuffrida has generally avoided playing children's music for 4-year-old son Henry "because I didn't want to listen to it."

La Vergne mom Emily Hartley, 28, turned off by the same mainstream fare, opted to put twin 3-year-old sons Cash and Hayden to bed with harmonious grown-up sounds from The Shins or The Beatles.

New York Public Library children's librarian and new parent Warren Truitt started a blog, Kidsmusicthatrocks.blogspot.com, to help tip parents like Giuffrida and Hartley to other musical options. And since launching it last March, Truitt says he's stumbled on a whole subculture of bloggers and parents searching for and sharing kids music that rocks.

"I had no idea," he says. "I went into it thinking, 'How am I gonna do this?' Because I didn't know anybody else really cared. But there's a whole underground community of people who are just really into this stuff… There's a generation now where parents, they don't want to hear (hokey children's music), so they started digging, or they started creating music themselves."

Zanes figures that parents search for cool children's music because, while Beatles and Shins records score melodically, as kids start to talk and understand words, there's a lyrical disconnect.

"The one thing that I think doesn't work or doesn't mean anything, particularly to kids, are themes of romantic love or sexual love — that's gonna be a stretch for any 3-year-old," he says. "So that rules out a lot of pop music right there."

Kids music is throwback

To Zanes, it's not so much that intelligent children's music is a new trend; Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and others were making it more than a half-century back. The recent proliferation is more akin to a return.

"The idea of all ages participating in the music and enjoying the music, it's a fairly ancient concept," Zanes says. "I think the thing that's recent is that segregation — 'There are things that are for children, and then there's things that are for grown-ups.' We're just trying to get back into, 'What can you do that includes everybody? What's the most inclusive thing we could possibly do?' "

Local rock singer Will Hoge, who contributed to last year's Kid Pan Alley album pairing songwriters with classrooms of kids to create youngster-friendly songs, says the idea of kids and adults finding common musical ground shouldn't be that tough a concept.

"I think kids are much more advanced musically sometimes than they're given credit for," Hoge says. "I don't think they just have to listen to The Wiggles or something like that to enjoy music. I don't think you have to dumb things down."

Zanes, whose 2006 album Catch That Train! is up for a Grammy Award next month in the best musical album for children category, doesn't actually bill his material as children's music, but as "21st Century All-Ages Social Music." And he's found that, at his shows, "all-ages social music" offers the bonus of letting adults feel that they can act like kids.

Ringenberg sees his Farmer Jason songs spanning generations, even of his own career.

"I've had experiences where a grandparent will bring a child up and say, 'Will you sign this (Farmer Jason) CD?' And then they'll pull out an old Jason and The Scorchers LP (too)," he says. "Some families, now three generations of folks have listened to my music — starting with grandparents who listened to Jason and The Scorchers, and then maybe their children had listened to Jason Ringenberg solo stuff, and now the third generation is listening to Farmer Jason. That's a profoundly wonderful experience."