Best Kids' Music of 2009: # 4 Get Fruity!! by Apple Brains

With the innocent enthusiasm of Jonathan Richman, the eclectic inventiveness of Mr. David, and the general kookiness of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Apple Brains bursts upon the kids' music scene with their debut album Get Fruity!! L.A.-based Allen Bleyle is the brainy apple behind Apple Brains, and his free-for-all, lo-fi, indie rock style is a refreshing addition to the children's music world. Some of the best kids' music of 2009, and definitely some of the most unique!

Number 4: Get Fruity!! by Apple Brains

***Apple Brains***

With the innocent enthusiasm of Jonathan Richman, the eclectic inventiveness of Mr. David, and the general kookiness of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Apple Brains bursts upon the kids' music scene with their debut album Get Fruity!!

L.A.-based Allen Bleyle is the brainy apple behind Apple Brains, and his free-for-all, lo-fi, indie rock style is a refreshing addition to the children's music world. Get Fruity!! is a concept album of sorts, with every track highlighting fruits, vegetables, water, and healthy eating in general. But this isn't a preachy, stick-in-the-mud, instructional album by any means: Peanut Butter and Jelly show up as characters who tell the story of how they met; a little girl carries around a mango like a baby; a little boy weeps at the wonderfulness of tomatoes. Far Out!

Get Fruity!! kicks off with the sunny anthem "Apple x3," which begins as a cheerful ode and ends as a manic scream-along, followed by the awesomely weird story tune "Peanut Butter and Jelly How They Met Song." A wobbly melody line carries "Water the Loveliest Beverage," a tune that's half informational and half tribute, then comes the ridiculously catchy (and informative!) rave-up "Ba-na-nas."

The hyper-enthusiastic sing-along "Lots of Different Colors" describes the many hues of fruits and vegetables, while "The Stone Fruit Salute" celebrates peaches, plums, cherries, and apricots with a waltzing carnival-like sound of pump organs and slide whistles. The indie pop "Growing Like Crazy" features a kazoo/keyboard sound effects solo while describing the things that help us grow, and a laid-back island groove carries the mango-worshiping tune "A Mango is a Precious Egg to be Cherished."

The bilingual "Frutero" describes looking for something good to eat while walking around Los Angeles, while the brilliantly Ween-like "Tomatoes are So Wonderful That They Make Me Want to Cry" is pretty much what the title tells you, a tune that definitely needs to find its way onto The Dr. Demento Show. The entire album features guitar work by Kyle Thomas, highlighted by the goofy acid rock of "Wonder Worm," while the key-shifting "Each and Every," a song about seeds and plants, ends the album with a laugh-out-loud verse courtesy Lucia Turino.

Now, all these songs might seem a little silly, but Bleyle is serious about his enthusiasm for good eating. Check out his gushing blog post about Adam Leith Gollner's book The Fruit Hunters, and find out how it was the inspiration for one of the Apple Brains songs. And Bleyle gets indie cred with the roster of musicians used on Get Fruity!!: members of The Devil Makes Three, Feathers, Pretend You're Happy, and Witch (Dinosaur Jr.'s J. Mascis' side project) help sing and play on the album.

Bottom line: in a perfect world Get Fruity!! would be a massive hit on college radio stations, with its dadaist lyrics, overdriven vocal recording, stick-in-your-head melodies, lo-fi aesthetic, and generally earthy vibe. And I think our similarly musically open-minded little listeners will dig it, as well. One of the best kids' albums of 2009, and definitely one of the most unique!

***Shāna Barry***

Somewhere between Kimya Dawson's wordy stream-of-consciousness songs and Nick Drake's whispery dream fever tunes lies Shāna Barry's first album for kids, A Pink Whale and a Very Tall Tree.

The Frances England-sounding eight-song EP contains a group of very visual songs: close your eyes and let the lyrics tell you stories about the special secret island of fōf, described in great detail on "Around the Island" and "The Great Mystery;" and about the adventures of a curious fōfer named Otamo who encounters and befriends "The Pink Whale" named Guinivere and climbs a very tall tree to "Cloudland."

Like any normal kid, Otamo loves to talk about "The Day I Learned to Ride My Bike," but then gets philosophical with "Some are Green," an ode to diversity and acceptance. The short album is rounded off with a lullaby and an instrumental. Barry performs the songs with just her voice and guitar, and an occasional ukulele. The stark musical background is a perfect palate for lines like "I hop from rock to rock and peer into tide pools," and "The rogue wave passed us by," and "Who wants a humdrum earth when it can be vibrant and grand," and words like chicory, anemones, cumulonimbus, and centripetal.

A beautiful, quiet, mysterious album that honors kids by challenging their perceptions and vocabularies. Kudos to Shāna Barry.

***Mo Phillips***

I'm diggin' the lo-fi movement goin' on in Kids' Music right now: Kimya Dawson's Alphabutt, String Bean Jones' Live from the Bathtub, Mr. David's Jump in the Jumpy House, and now Mo Phillips' Train Beard. Now, lo-fi doesn't mean low quality, as evidenced by the great material and performances on all the above CDs. It just means presenting songs from a different angle, thinking outside the musical box, so to speak. And who better to spring this "experimental" approach on than kids, the most open-minded and receptive audience to all things different, sublime, weird, magical, and ridiculous.

Mo Phillips is a musician based in Portland, OR, who has released a couple of Americana/Neil Young-like albums for grownups (The Boat, 2004; Homemade, 2006), and Train Beard follows his stylistic leanings, except with kid subjects and lyrics this time 'round. Guitars, harmonica, organ, and the occasional bongo provide the majority of the instrumentation on Train Beard, supplemented by Phillips' down-to-earth vocals.

"Supa Dupa Race Car" sounds like Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show singing one of those songs Shel Silverstein used to give them; and "I Ain't Gonna Clean My Room" is exactly the kind of poem Silverstein loved to write, as a kid's excessively messy room starts to rebel against him. The title tune is, or should become, a bona fide folk classic: a train travels from head to foot in this a cappella song, sounding like a long-lost Appalachian field holler.

The guitar/organ nonsense song "Cat and Dog" boats lines like "D-O-G dog riding on a bike / B-I-K-E bikin' through the night," while "Change Like a Cloud" uses organ, guitar, and fuzz bass to convey a sense of dreamy imagination. "Leche" is a short nonsense song en Espanol, and "My Ninja Move" battles bedtime fears via a Dave Matthews-like tune.

Other standouts include the playful folk song "Best Friends" and the silly beat poem "The Garbage Man." The only tune that features heavy percussion is "Pizza in a Cup," a drum machine-driven song about a very specific way of serving a slice. That tune then fades into a live performance of the same song, which closes out the album.

Great kids' debut from a unique talent. Check out Train Beard and encourage Mo to keep up the good work!