DadJokeFun Intended

An interactive song to get kids up and moving. It also involves memorizing all of the movements as they accumulate over the course of the song. If kids engage with the song, it's guaranteed to exhaust them. The instrumentation changes with each new verse and each new movement, resulting in way too many instrumental tracks — close to 50, I think.

A very silly post-punk song about fowl, specifically ducks, chickens, geese and turkeys. There's lots of yelling in this one, and it sounds exactly like my band Paper Mice. Very Chicago.

I wrote this song with my daughter, Daniela. In contrast to some of the thicker arrangements on the album, the recording is just me and my electric guitar. It's a completely absurd song about a ridiculous fear of mine that no real person would ever be afraid of: someone dropping a big red rubber horse on my head. And yes, I do in fact end up getting hit in the head with a horse at the end of the song. Don't worry, I was wearing a helmet.

I wrote this song to make waking up in the morning easier and more fun for kids and their grownups. A motley crew of creatures arrives to help wake up the child, including a rooster, a family of monsters, and a lot of mice. Toward the end, a single solitary mouse sets up a microphone and invites all the other mice before the scene transforms into a full-on lounge act. The music changes with each scene, including a metal section — dropped C tuning, double bass pedal — for the monsters, and a small jazz band for the mice.

A fun, upbeat song about birds. Thirty-three of them, to be exact. The song is fairly straightforward at first, but recurring syncopations and metric ambiguities eventually culminate in a section where I sing 13 alliterative bird names over a polymetric overlay, with the voice in 4/4 and 2/4 and the rest of the band in 5/4, 9/16, 11/16 and 3/4. It ends with me singing "and then I heard another one" on repeat, getting faster and faster until I have to give up trying to form actual words.

A sweet little duet about friendship, performed with my close friend Amanda DeBoer Bartlett. The general vibe evokes 80s sitcom theme songs, and even though the rhythms get pretty syncopated in the chorus, it's probably the tamest song on the album. Straightforward lyrically, but sincere. My favorite line: "You don't need a map to discover that it's a treasure having friends who like you just the way you are."

A song I wrote for my daughter about how much I love spending time with her, especially playing pretend. I sing about the different things we pretend to be — space explorers, princesses, dinosaurs, and finally unicorns. Each time the scene changes, the music changes to a completely new sonic environment with its own instrumentation, and usually a new key. The scenes keep getting longer, and by the middle of the dinosaur scene my hope is that the listener has become so invested in the dinosaurs' storyline that they forget we were just pretending — that this was one part of a larger song.

An extremely silly song about the sounds dinosaurs made, or didn't. Since it's virtually impossible to know what dinosaurs actually sounded like, I posit that they all sounded like domestic animals: a tyrannosaurus that quacks, a stegosaurus that meows, and an apatosaurus that moos, interrupting the song like the interrupting cow from the classic dad joke. The music uses 1980s 8-bit sounds, evoking early Nintendo games.

My Halloween song about the very relatable situation of waiting until the last minute to buy a costume. I try everything — making one, buying one, looking through old costumes — until I inadvertently wish for one. But I wasn't careful enough with my words, pleading, "If I can't have my first choice, then I wish someone would bring my number two." I'm then surrounded by a soft spooky light and greeted by a voice from the beyond, which grants the wish, though not as I intended it. Musically the song plays on a lot of scary-music tropes: spooky keyboards with heavy vibrato, ghostly voices, tack piano and saxophones that for some reason evoke Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and harmonically, diminished seventh chords and chromatic mediant relationships.

Electro-punk, pop-punk-adjacent, inspired by the great Parry Gripp. The idea is that bravery isn't something we're born with — we have to choose it. I wanted the music to sound heroic and to inspire kids to face their fears, whether that's trying an intimidating food, going down the big slide, or apologizing to a peer. It ended up sounding heroic enough that it went well beyond what I perceived as my capacity as a singer, so I enlisted Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, and boy did she ever. One detail: following the first chorus, the second verse arrives on the line "and now I've got the feeling the world is somehow a bigger place." Up to that point I had only used electronic drum sounds. A real acoustic kit enters there for the first time in the song.

This song came out of my own kid's potty training. She has always been obsessed with animals, so I used animals to help her get over her fears. Whenever she felt nervous, I'd sing her the chorus — it was all I had written — and she loved singing along and coming up with new suggestions for animals who have to go potty. It's probably not what most people imagine when they imagine a potty training song: it's funky, with a gently swinging groove, a Rhodes, a clavinet, a guitar solo, and goofy background vocals that I imagine being sung by a bunch of toilets.

The most ambitious song on the album, and it deals with something I find troubling: the increasing presence of artificial intelligence in music and the other arts. The idea came a few years ago, when my daughter and I were messing around with a generative AI that had just come out. We asked it for a bunch of ridiculous things, including "a bunny riding on a horse." What came back was a half-rabbit, half-horse creature, seemingly dressed for war and — for some reason — holding a knife. We looked at each other and in unison yelled "WHAT?!" In that moment we both knew it had to be a song. The video features the actual AI images, made from the exact prompts in the lyrics. The music goes all sorts of places: a distorted and aggressive opening, a dreamy middle section where I wonder how humans might have answered the same prompts, a brief dip into 70s folk guitar, a full orchestra with me singing dramatically over it, and finally a moment of sincere reflection with just me and a piano.