Music and Kids

We revamped one of our old iPhones into an iPod for our son as a birthday gift. He's 6. With that we also gave him a pair of headphones.  This morning I heard him singing Moves Like Jagger  by Maroon 5 very loud and clear.  It's very different hearing those lyrics out of the mouth of a 6 year old isn't it?

INXS Revival at my house!

2 days ago I was browsing at Home Sense, thinking about ways to spruce up my living room when I realized I was singing along with the piped in music. "Do do do do do, do do do, do do do do do do, do do do do..."  You get the picture and if you're really good, you get the song too.  INXS!  I haven't heard INXS in years.  They were once a mainstay in my musical rotation.  One of my favorite bands from Listen Like Thieves to Elegantly Wasted I was there.  I know they are still around and performing, but not like they once were.  Sorry J.D. Fortune and Jon Stevens, but Michael Hutchence will forever be missed and it's just not the same.  I had the privilege of seeing INXS live in Sept. 1997, 2 months before Hutchence died.  Ironically that was the weekend of Princess Diana's death and he paid tribute to her as a terrible, tragic loss.  The show was forever memorable as Hutchence had the magnetism to hold the crowd captive and wow them with the largeness of the music and yet still make it personal, taking an arena event to feel like a small cafe at times.  He was a fantastic performer.
Two nights ago I pulled out a couple of my old INXS CDs and imported them to my itunes and had a little INXS revival of my own.  The music was just so good.  No auto tune, no computer gimmicks, just good, solid music.  Love it, miss it.
For anyone wondering about my mystery song that kicked in memory over this way and haven't figured it out yet, here it is.  Feel free to sing along.

 

Charlotte Diamond!

Charlotte Diamond called me at my house this week! I'm seriously excited by this. For those of you who are not relating to kids music on a regular basis you may be going Charlotte who? She is a fantastic children's singer from BC. I've known her music for years now. Her songs are by far the most requested for re-visits from my littlest students. So how did it happen that she called me this week? Well, I'm getting my choirs ready for Music Festival. There was a song I really wanted my junior choir to perform but I could not find it in sheet music format. You have to have 3 legal copies of the song for use in festival (one for the adjudicator, one for the accompanist and one for yourself). So I had given up and selected a different song. That song simply was not working with the choir and this other song kept popping in my head. So I headed back on over to Charlotte Diamond's website and sent a message explaining my situation and asked it there was any way I could purchase single copies of the song I wished to use. At lunch there was an email from my husband, "Charlotte Diamond called, you can photocopy her song from the book, she will write you a letter of permission". What? She called my house herself! How fantastic is that!!!
He knew I would be excited to hear the whole story. He did clue in during the conversation that it was Charlotte Diamond, the children's singer. He didn't realize until I got home that she is the one who sings "I am a Pizza" - that thrilled him - it's his favorite to sing with our kids. Anyways she and I emailed a couple of times over the next day as I found out that the festival will in fact accept a photocopy of the music as long as I attach an original letter from her. She very kindly and graciously wrote the letter of permission for me and I'm just so happy about the whole darn thing!

 http://www.charlottediamond.com/