Jump to the Beat!

As has been mentioned here on several occasions, I've been listening to my music more consistently in the last couple years. The consequence of this is, of course, that so have my kids. While Kid One is largely agnostic toward music (they do occasionally enjoy a bit of They Might Be Giants), Kid Two, like me, is the kind of person who will get a song stuck in their head and begin singing it randomly later on.

A particular favorite of Kid Two's in this regard is Belle and Sebastian's "The Party Line." I know Belle and Sebastian has been around for a while, and plays the kind of music that is very much to my taste, but I only got into them within the past six months, and have listened to their album Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance (2015) a decent amount. Kid Two would randomly bust out with "jump to the beat of the party line!" and begin jumping around. It actually hit the point where I could be listening to a different Belle and Sebastian track and he would start going, "Put on 'Party Line'!" (I do not think Kid One has this capacity to recognize different artists' styles yet.)

This wasn't the only song Kid Two would bust out with at random; in particular, the other was Goldfish's "Show You How," where he would just start going "get up and shake it now!" To a lesser extent, he'd sometimes also do the "oooh waaah oooh waaah oooooh oooh waaah oooh waaah oooh" bit from Goldfish's "This Is How It Goes."

Additionally, at his daycare, he somehow picked up "We Will Rock You," though he thought it was "We will, we will, we will rock and roll you," and would often ask for "rock and roll"... and would accept literally no other song as "rock and roll" because it didn't say "rock and roll" in it! I don't have any Queen on my iPod, but I did persuade him to accept "We Built This City" as a substitute... though the version I own is from 2011's The Muppets!

This seemed like enough songs for a critical mass, so I ended up making Kid Two a Yoto card. A Yoto, if you don't know, is a kid-friendly, screen-free audio player. Both of our kids own Yoto Minis, which allow them to place various cards in them that stream audio content: music, audiobooks, podcasts, and such. You can purchase premade cards from Yoto (we have bought a number of audiobooks from them especially), but you can also build your own playlists and link them to "make-your-own cards"; for Kid One, I have made a card of Pokémon theme songs, for example, and both kids have copies of a card of songs from Colourblocks and Numberblocks.

Kid Two was into the card. This was back in January, I think, and as time has passed, I have added songs to it either when I notice him singing them a lot or when he specifically requests I do so. He listened to it a lot early on, less so recently, but I'm sure he'll rediscover it sooner or later. Here's the current track listing:

1. "The Party Line" by Belle and Sebastian, from Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance (2015)
2. "Show You How" by Goldfish, from Get Busy Living (2010)
3. "This Is How It Goes" by Goldfish, from Perceptions of Pacha (2008)
4. "We Built This City" by the Muppets, from The Muppets (2011)
5. "Shake It Up" by Nortec Collective, from Tijuana Sound Machine (2008)
6. "Mouthwash" by Kate Nash, from Made Of Bricks (2007)
7. "Up the Mountain" by Regina Spektor, from Home, before and after (2022)
8. "Talk to Me" by Goldfish, from Late Night People (2017)
9. "If I Could Find" by Goldfish, from Late Night People (2017)
10. "What Might Have Been" by Regina Spektor, from Home, before and after (2022)
11. "They Might Be Giants" by They Might Be Giants, from Flood (1990)
12. "Watching You" by Rogue Traders, from Here Come the Drums (2005)

Forty-eight minutes of excellent taste! Clearly a fan of South African house music in particular. His interest can often turn on very small things, in all seriousness; "Mouthwash" is on there because he likes the bit where Kate Nash goes "and I'm singing 'uh oh' on a Friday night..."

I do have to double-check lyrics before loading them onto the card (thankfully the Kate Nash song is appropriate for example! on the other hand, "The Party Line" includes the lyric, "People like to drive their cars and smoke up / People like to sit inside and toke up").

I recently asked him which of the songs on the card was his favorite, and he told me it was "Up the Mountain" by Regina Spektor. That one is a hit with both kids!