Check out the Best of ParentMap - there are some great Seattle “bests” here, including yours truly!
Best of ParentMap 2010

A Family Christmas is Putumayo’s newest compilation, and features yours truly!  I have listened through and I’m really impressed - it is an amazing Holiday CD, trust me.  I will be playing a show to support the CD in LA at the Grammy Museum on December 12 - if you live in LA, don’t miss it!

Wow - who’d a guessed I’m a Kindie Rock Star?????  Well, I recently found out that the title track on Dragonfly was #1 on the XM Radio Kid’s Place Live charts!  Sorta crazy, but true.  In the mean time, my good friends (including Mike Derzon, who frequently plays music with me and who has played on all three CD’s) went on a vacation to Puerto Rico then to Martinique and what happened in the rental car????  Click Here!

I’m writing tonight to tell you about Louise, the girl who speaks in French at the end of Paper Airplane on my latest CD, Dragonfly. Paper Airplane is a song about a boy who makes a paper airplane and throws it, hoping it will fly a hundred miles. It is “taken up by the breeze” and it flies out the window. The next thing we find out is that the plane has landed in a foreign country - France.

As I was writing the song, I felt that I needed to do something different with this one. I wanted to tell more of a story and make kids use their imagination a bit. So I found Louise. She lives in Seattle with her family. Her father is French and her mother is American. I asked if she would be willing to read some text that I wrote in French and she was game. After a bit of grammar correction to the French text I provided, we recorded Louise reading it at her house. The english translation is approximately this:

“Dear Johnny,
I am writing to you today because I believe I have found your paper airplane. My name is Louise and I live in Saint-Malo, a small town in France. This morning, when I woke up I looked out my window and saw a paper airplane in my yard. Since your name was written on the side, I sent it back to you!”

In order to transition in and out of the reading, I added some accordian music in the background and then to make it a little more cohesive, I also put some accordian at the beginning of the song - very quietly. I tried to make it as “French provincial” as I possibly could, which adds a musical context for the change in language. Then, to return to reality, I bring back the instruments on the chorus.