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Justin Roberts: A kids musician for grown-ups

By Loren Keller

Ask an adult about the music of Justin Roberts and “cute” isn’t a term that’s likely to come up.

A few words that might: sweet, funny, melodic, multi-instrumental, genre-crossing. Songs that don’t grow annoying upon the repeated listenings usually demanded by young children.

Roberts says he had no intention of becoming a kids’ musician when he began writing music for children “for fairly selfish reasons” while living in Minneapolis in the early 1990s and playing in an indie rock band called Pimentos for Gus.

“I got a day job as a preschool teacher. I was right out of college and thought it would be fun working with kids,” Roberts says from his home in Chicago. “I didn’t personally enjoy listening to the kinds of music that I was hearing around the preschool. So I started playing songs by Sam Cooke – ‘Cupid’ or songs like that, or Irish jigs or great traditional songs.”

The kids loved it, so Roberts introduced them to a song he played with his own band called “Giraffe/Nightengale” – and found that his students loved that one too.

“They learned all the words, performed it for their families,” he says. “So I started writing songs just for myself so I wouldn’t be driven crazy by what I was hearing every day.”

Roberts eventually left his day job but continued to enjoy a new-found freedom in writing songs for children -- despite having no offspring of his own or friends with kids. That led to a homemade recording of about a dozen songs that he sent to friends as a Christmas gift.

One of those recipients was Liam Davis, a college pal and music producer who suggested Roberts record the songs professionally. In 1998 Roberts released his first CD, Great Big Sun, a collection Sesame Street Parents magazine named its “best music gift of the year.”

The music and accolades continued. His records Meltdown!, Way Out and Yellow Bus have all made Amazon.com’s “top 10 children’s CDs of the year.” Listeners have compared Roberts’ music to Elvis Costello, Fountains of Wayne and Nick Lowe; Roberts says he was influenced as a kid listening to his older brother’s collection of Beatles records and “Schoolhouse Rocks” public service announcements.

His latest CD, Pop Fly, is due out April 15 and Roberts will deliver his first Iowa City performance with a full band Sunday at the Englert Theatre (at the kid-friendly, post-naptime hour of 4 p.m.) Tickets are $12 for adults, $10 for kids and are available online.

“It’s a full rock band with a trumpet player,” Roberts says. “Our electric guitarist (Davis) also plays keyboard and there are four singers in the band. I think we’re able to recreate a lot of what’s on the record with a five-piece band.”

The audience is likely to hear a wide range of musical styles performed: waltzes, bluegrass, reggae, ska, pop, country and straight-ahead rock. Roberts says it’s easier to cross genres when putting together a kids record and names the Ramones-inspired song “Daycamp” (a song from Way Out) as an example.

“It’s so silly and simple and fun but it’s the kind of thing I’d probably never do if I was writing about a grown-up audience,” he says. “But at the same I don’t feel so restrained by writing for families that I can’t write sort of a melancholy ballet or something meant a little bit more for the adults.”

Roberts’ young fans and their parents were invited to send in photos for a video of “Pop Fly” and hundreds contributed to the video, posted on Roberts’ web site last week.

“Our trumpet player, Dave Winer, volunteered to direct the video,” Roberts says. “He had this idea of sort of using tons of photos of kids to create sort of a Sgt. Pepper’s album cover kind of look to a baseball crowd. To my eye, the thing had a sort of South Park-look as well because it’s very cut-out and simple but very funny.”

Young fans are also invited to send in drawings of his songs or sing their own versions for the Justin Roberts web site. And Roberts says most of his young fans are natural participants in the band’s live performances.

“Compared to my experience playing for grownups, it’s much more of a two-way street,” he says. “I’ve had times where kids will just start talking to me from the base of the stage – sometimes in the middle of a song. They’ll tell me something and it’ll be really funny or I’ll repeat it for the audience and it’ll add to the show.”

Nearly every Justin Roberts show features a kiddie “mosh pit” – though maybe a little less intense than the ones Roberts saw at the hardcore punk bands he grew up watching around his native Des Moines in the 1980s.

“Instead it’s a three-year-old shaking his head like he’s way into the music,” he says. “I think kids have this kind of unfettered spirit. They’re not really too self-conscious about what they’re doing so they’ll just jump out of their seats and start dancing even if no one else is. But if one person starts, just like with adults, other people join in and from the perspective of watching from the stage, we get to watch a really hilarious show ourselves as we’re playing.”

Roberts says his music inspires thought as well as movement – but doesn’t lecture or preach.

“I leave a lot of songs kind of open-ended,” he says. “A lot of times I hear it creates a dialogue between kids and their parents, because kids are very inquisitive and they do listen. I think at a young age they’re responding more to the music and the fun but as they grow up a little bit and listen to it a lot of them really do tune into the lyrics and they memorize every word and they ask their parents questions about the songs. So I just think shooting high is the best method rather than trying to guess what kids are going to like and play down to what you think a kid is. Because I think for me, kids are just adults in very small size.”