ALL YOU PRETTY BABIES
I found a fragment of a song idea on an old cassette and it was the basic idea for this song. Written way before I decided to write for kids it felt like a natural fit. It is a good little counting song and I love Fred from the live Caspar band as the "mom"!

SPEEDY CENTIPEDE
This was an old song I had that was really sad and funky and I just changed all the music to be more upbeat and funny! I can almost hear all those little feet running around in the music. I wanted to have muted horns on the solo but when I did a rough version with my voice I got attached to it so it stayed.

THE LEGEND OF THE BONE
The story of a little bone and its crazy journey from something for a soup to a home for a crab! One day I just tried to write my own cause and effect type song where one thing influences another and so on and this image of a bone traveling all over the place came to mind. The response vocal things were the last part to be added as I listened to it one day they just started coming out of me.

BABY’S GETTING UP
My friend Tad and his wife Tami came to visit and Tami was warm because it was summer and she had on a sweater! We sang “Tami’s getting warm, Tami’s getting hot hot!” and the little riff was so sticky that years later I remembered it and made it about a baby getting up and down. Its a silly little activity song that you can bop to in your crib!

WHERE DO YOU GO?
My wife Kate and I were walking in the woods in Ohio when she said "lets write a song!" and we looked around at the flowers and vines around us and stared singing about how we wondered where things went in the winter and this wee song was born. Its the closest Caspar Babypants will ever come to being a rapper!

GOOGLY EYES
We love googly eyes around our house. I will often come into the kitchen to find a sweet potato with eyes staring at me that my kids or Kate has set up. One of them ended up being named Larry the Lemon. He might get his own song someday. For now this is a love song for the googly eyes and their amazing power to make things come alive.

SHOO FLY
a nice little galloping tune. I figured I would expand it beyond "morning star" and "feel like" some other things (you know me and expanding the classics!). Fred plays a mean washboard on this one. Josie and I wrote an alternate version about our favorite pie place in Seattle called Shoofly Pie Company that you can hear on my site and theirs. (http://www.shooflypiecompany.com/)

TIGER THROUGH THE TREES
I was just struck one day with this vision of a tiger playing guitar and a line of really thick green trees and tiger after tiger coming out with new instruments and playing along and making a tiger band. It is so clear in my mind that I just described the scene and a song was born.

BOUNCE YOUR BABY
I was at a family party and all four of the new babies in my family were being bounced by their moms in unison. I started bouncing in place along with them and used that rhythm as the backbone for this song about traveling around helping little babies bounce around. So theoretically you should be able to hold and bounce your little baby in perfect time to this hillbilly tune!

BABY AND THE ANIMALS
this song was originally written as a prize in an auction. I give away a custom song in auctions around the Northwest and one of the winners wanted a song for her daughter Evie who loved music, giraffes and movies! I concocted a song for her called "Evie and the Animals" and then years later I mutated it into this more universal version for ALL babies! I love that they try to be famous but end up back on the island living the simple life. It MIGHT be autobiographical!

SLIVER
What a fun song to play! so simple! I played at the Seattle Art Museum on the day that a show dedicated to Kurt Cobain opened and we did this song as a nod to Kurt. It is a song about being little and wanting something you cant have. I like the repetition of the demand to be taken home. Little kids love to sing this at the shows and Krist from Nirvana was kind enough to play bass on this version.

THE CUCKOO
An old song from the hills that I have brightened up for the babies. The original is kind of minor keyed and scary and about gambling (as so many of those old songs are) although I don't know what a bird has to do with loosing at cards! I just made it about a real bird and added a whole new chorus of "cuckoo"s!

ITS GONNA RAIN
Kate and I were walking back to our friend Audrey's house in Nantucket and it looked like it was gonna rain so we just started clapping and singing and making this song up to pass the time as we walked. I got the ideas for the atmosphere sounds from Charlie Hope and her great album "I'm Me!" That is a Casio VL-Tone on the solo (the only keyboard that doubles as a calculator).

THE FROGS
In 1986 on my to work on the roller coaster at the amusement park where I worked I found a crumpled up piece of paper with a poem on it by a little kid. The first few lines of the song are directly taken from that scrap of paper then I just expanded it (and changed a couple of lines about SMASHING the frogs!). I wonder where that kid is now?

MISTER RABBIT
Another old folk song that I gave a little face lift too. Charlie Hope sing with me on this one. She is awesome. Please check her out. I discovered this song from a version by Paul Westerberg (ex-Replacements) that was on a compilation CD that my neighbor lent me! I heard it and hoped it was old and I could mess with it and it was! YAY!

LITTLE DITTY
This is a collaboration between Frederick Babyshirt (Fred Northup, Jr), the percussionist in the live Caspar band, and me. He wrote the words while singing to his daughter, and I put them to music. It flowed so naturally and easily. His friend, Andrew Sigler, helped with some well-placed horn bits. Just a simple little ditty really.

BUCKEYE JIM
Elizabeth Mitchell plays this song on her album "You Are My Little Bird" and I loved the way they made it sparkle and feel so dreamy. Burl Ives did a famous version as well which shows up in the movie "The Fantastic Mr. Fox". In Elizabeth's version they do a little kalimba thing and I used that little melody and expanded it around 1:07 in my version because it reminded me of the opening music of Peter and The Wolf by Prokoviev. The chorus part is also new musically although those lyrics are in the old version I found but not in Elizabeth's version. So many fun ways to stretch old songs!!

LOOK AT ALL THOSE ELEPHANTS
Charlie Hope has a couple of songs on her record "I'm Me!" that are so simple and I admire that so this is my nod to her bravery at having songs be so clear and simple. Audrey Sterk from the band You Scream I Scream and I wrote this together on a lazy day in Nantucket (after the "Its Gonna Rain" walk! Wow, that was a good songwriting day).

TUMBLE
One day when things were so busy and crazy that I needed a break I just sat down on the front porch and took a second to breathe and relax and this melody came out. I put it to some lyrics I had written ten years earlier about a tree that was outside our kitchen window of my house that always held onto one little leaf all winter until May then it would fall. It happened every year and I marveled at the tenacity of the little leaf. I thought it would make an evocative lullaby of sorts about letting go of the day and tumbling off to sleep.

DARK OF NIGHT
when my son was 5 years old he wrote a poem called "the Viper" and we recorded him saying the poem to a beat. It ended up being used as a hip hop thing that I did with another band then we rewrote the lyrics to expand them and make them a little less scary and made the music more groovy and chill. The final touch is my hero Elizabeth Mitchell singing it with me as a duet trading lines. I get choked up when I hear how cool this song finally turned out and how honored I am to have Elizabeth closing out the record with her "ooooooooo"s.