When you listen to most kids' groups - the Wiggles from Australia, for instance - the tunes are infectious in a different way: you think you'll need a lobotomy to get them out of your head. Covert's songs, in contrast, tap into the collective unconscious of parents who grew up with rock and want to share it with their children, but who find themselves in a sticky situation trying to explain, say, why Maxwell is beating heads with a silver hammer. "To me, writing music for kids is no different than writing music for adults," said Mr. Covert, who was in New York in December for an appearance on CBS's "Early Show" and a Sunday matinee at Southpaw in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He is scheduled to play Joe's Pub in the East Village on Feb. "A Bad Examples song about heartbreak and a kids' song about wanting a pet are both songs about yearning. A kids' song is shorter and you want it to crystallize more quickly. Covert, 42, is lead singer and songwriter for the Bad Examples, a rock band that was extremely popular in his home city, Chicago, in the early 90's, but that hasn't quite broken out anywhere else. In the mid-90's he began teaching songwriting at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, which also had a toddler music division called Wiggleworms. Covert to run a different kind of class, recalling: "He said, 'Well, I won't do the folky stuff,' and I said, 'Good! Do fun rock songs!"' Its former director, Jacqueline Russell, characterized the program as "teachers with guitars singing 'Itsy-Bitsy Spider' to 12 parents with babies on their laps." "The kids would ask for 'Itsy-Bitsy Spider' and Ralph would say, 'I'll sing you another song about spiders!' And he'd do 'Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars."'īut Mr. Covert's classes caught on he began to write children's songs and then Jim Powers, president of the indie-rock label Minty Fresh, approached him to make a CD for a new children's-music subsidiary, Mini-Fresh. Covert's five CD's -"Ralph's World," "Ralph's World Under the Sea," "Happy Lemons," "Miss Peggy's Pie Parlor" and the new "Amazing Adventures of Kid Astro" - have topped 120,000. "We as parents are the consumers of this music," Ms. "We have more disposable income, fewer kids. We're putting it on the big stereo and listening to it with them." We're not putting on a record and closing the door. Covert isn't the only rock musician cultivating the juvenile audience. Dan Zanes, Laurie Berkner, Justin Roberts, Peter Himmelman and even They Might Be Giants have released entertaining, parent-friendly children's CD's. Covert will turn out to be that genre's Elvis Presley, or at the very least its Elvis Costello. Covert was losing his voice from a sinus infection he was mysteriously reluctant to treat, the downside, perhaps, of his seemingly inexhaustible can-do spirit. By the time he hit Southpaw, his warm, flexible tenor had been reduced to an eardrum-grating rasp. Covert estimates that the Bad Examples occupies only about 5 percent of his time, though he will occasionally doan adult and a child show in the same place. "We raised our glasses to the kids," said the drummer, Terry Wathen, "and they raised their juice boxes back to us." Last year, at FitzGerald's in the Berwyn suburb of Chicago, the band's booze glasses were still onstage the next morning when they came out before a horde of screaming children. Many children's performers are sickeningly solicitous of their audience, but it's not even clear that Mr. "It's more about who can get inside their heads and think like a child, and be smart the way that kids are smart. Covert had a revelation when a 7-year-old named Ben queried him about "The Amazing Romero," a song on one of his adult albums. "It's about a blind tightrope walker," Mr. I said that a blind tightrope walker would just have to fumble his way as he goes and make mistakes and hope not to fall." Covert said, "but it's really about that adult sense of having to find a balance in what seems to be a perennially desperate situation - life. Covert is so in touch with his inner kid that he merged a song he wrote 35 years ago about his lemonade stand with one that Fiona, now 9, wrote about hers. (The other is a gorgeous plaint called "Puddle of Mud.") The result is one of two songs on "Happy Lemons" with their co-credit.
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