Here are some reflections from Two of a Kind, our June Artist of the Month.
A couple of my favorite things happen in the month of June: Father’s Day, and the beginning of library summer reading programs. As the father of twins (our sons Ari & Jason came after our name “Two of a Kind”!), I look forward to this holiday. At one point, I looked around in vain for songs for Father’s Day, and so I decided to write one of my own. However, I got a bit side-tracked, and I ended up writing a song about other species of dads, called Animal Dads. This song features facts about cotton-top tamarins, emperor penguins, seahorses, and Darwin’s frogs – all species in which the dads play a special role.
I have also written songs celebrating various aspects of my experience of being a parent, including This Old Rocking Chair (a lullaby), Family Harmony (tracing the history of singing in my family), Think of it as an Adventure (when things go wrong on family vacations), Gotta Go (trouble getting out the door), I Have 2 Stomachs (our sons’ explanation for why they could be full but still have room for dessert), Are You Listening? (selective hearing), and (All I Have To Do Is) Scream (a parody of the Everly Brothers’ song about infants).
Every June, we start a summer full of summer reading program performances at libraries, and we particularly love this year’s theme of “Build a Better World”. We’ll be doing lots of reading/library/book songs, including Tom Chapin’s Library Song, Seven Nights to Read, Author, and Monty Harper’s Hangin’ Out with Heroes at the Library. We’ll also be including lots of songs about making the world a better place, such as We’re All in this Together, Sally Rogers’ What Can One Little Person Do?, Bill Harley’s It’s a Long Way, The World is Not Your Garbage Can, Ruth Pelham’s Under One Sky, and of course Peter & Ellen Allard’s Building a Better World. We also love including our song I Dig Reading, for the intersection between the reading themes and the literal take on “building”.
