Darrelle London finds her quirky, poppy groove with kindie record ‘Primary’

Kids’ tunes are eventually gonna catch up with you when you have a kid.

There’s no ducking around it. Even if you bombard the little one(s) early with ABBA or Tiffany or AC/DC or Otis Redding or freakin’ Lamb of God, or whatever your personal musical weapons of choice might be, inevitably at least a few kids’ tunes are gonna storm the barricades and take over the daytime playlist.

And the burnout factor on kids’ tunes runs so hot and so high so quickly to such unimaginable extremities of constant, water-drip torment — not least because kids tend to get into a single kids’ tune at a time looped over and over and over again until you feel like you’re imprisoned in a gibbering Lewis Carroll time loop that … well … when that tiny baby shark from Dollarama with batteries of indeterminate power placed somewhere indeterminable within its damnably impenetrable plush exoskeleton has been playing “Baby Shark” (“Do-doo-do-doo-do-do-doo–doo”) around the clock for weeks and suddenly finds itself “accidentally” plunged to the bottom of the bathtub or crushed beneath the wheels of the neighbours’ car, best no further questions be asked.

Toronto singer/songwriter Darrelle London is a mother of two boys aged five and seven and, thus, well acquainted with the above predicament — which is no doubt a major reason why her new children’s album, “Primary,” does such a diligent job of not being the sort of kids’ record that, as she puts it, “you’re gonna burn out on in a 20-minute car ride.” But “Primary” also works as well as it does because London’s decision to “niche down” toward a much younger audience than she’d previously envisioned has actually allowed her bright, singsong voice and whimsical approach to songwriting to flourish in a most natural way.

She might have found her perfect orbit.

“It’s actually been so liberating. Even though I’m ‘niche-ing down’ with a kids’ album or what I call a ‘kindie’ or ‘kids’ indie’ album, it actually felt so liberating because I have been described in the past as ‘quirky’ and, like, not pop enough for radio but too pop for a folk festival,” said London over coffee in a windblown park at Yonge and Lawrence one recent afternoon.

“It’s been hard to be taken seriously or even find my place when I do have a playful quality to my music, but with a kids’ album no one is gonna say, ‘This song is too pop’ and ‘This song is too rock,’ or ‘You need to have drums here.’

“No one is going to tell me any rules because it’s a kids’ album, and my goal is to expose children to different types of music and keep their ears paying attention, so I wanted every song to have its own colour palette and to sound different. So, in that sense, I feel like I’ve actually been able to be the most myself with this kids’ album. And I wasn’t expecting to feel that way.”

“Primary” is an abundantly tuneful and smartly played and arranged pop album in its own right, despite lyrical content that dwells on such child-friendly fancies as bugs, trains, ice cream, the wonders of a day moon and the self-esteem issues that might have been involved in Pluto’s demotion from “planet” to “exoplanet.”

And much of its confidence derives from the fact that it’s not actually London’s first foray into making music for children, since she quietly issued an EP’s worth of lullabies partly canonical and partly original “in between having two babies” a few years ago, released in 2018 as “Sing to the Moon.” And she quickly learned that there was a welcoming world of “kindie” entertainers out there — from genre standard bearers such as Dan Zanes and Laurie Berkner and Frances England, to established “grown-up” artists like They Might Be Giants, Lisa Loeb and sometime Presidents of the United States of American vocalist Chris “Casper Babypants” Ballew — aiming their music for a similar family-friendly rather than kid-specific window.

“I didn’t really promote it a ton, but I was in that exact headspace because my kids were babies and little, so all I was thinking was ‘lullabies,’” recalled London.

“I was extremely sleep-deprived so I wanted to make music that was soothing for parents as well as kids that you could put on at bedtime. That was me dipping my toe into the kids’ music world, and I was surprised at the response and the warmth of the community. So I thought, ‘Let’s go for it, let’s make an album that talks about all the things I wanna talk about to my kids.’”

Extended COVID-era lockdown at home with two young boys provided ready inspiration, since children of a certain age have no shortage of earnest questions to ask about things like where different colours come from or why the moon is sometimes visible during daylight hours.

Writing the songs that would make up “Primary” also gave London something to do while virtually struck blind by a rare eye ailment — ocular rosacea and meibomian gland dysfunction, to be specific — that left her with impossibly painful dry eyes because her tears would evaporate as soon as her tear ducts could produce them. She’s written about the condition in the past and, needless to say, is grateful that she’s now managed to get it under control because at one time “it was so awful that I didn’t think I’d ever be able to see an album to fruition.”

“During early COVID lockdown when everyone was binging Netflix, I couldn’t look at a screen, I couldn’t look at my phone and a lot of days I spent with my eyes closed,” she said. “One thing I could do was sit at my piano and I was getting my inspiration from all this time with my kids and all these questions, so I would sit at my piano with my eyes closed and my answers to all those questions started coming out in music form,” London said.

“They like it, which means a lot to me because they are very honest without consideration for my feelings. So, in that sense, they were the perfect focus group because I would play the songs for them throughout this whole process and they would tell me if they didn’t like something, which has been lovely. But they like it and they’re proud of me, which is a good feeling because, yeah, they’ve obviously been my biggest inspiration.”

Once the personal and pandemic dust cleared a bit, producer Dean Drouillard (Justin Rutledge, Royal Wood) and a gang of seasoned session players helped London translate the sounds she’d heard in her head for each separate song and story to tape.

London’s had more than a decade of recording and touring experience — she’s had a song on the “90210” soundtrack and co-written with Chantal Kreviazuk in the past, and was briefly signed to Perez Hilton’s label in 2010 when that was a thing — so, in a weird way, the limitless potential of making a record for children has allowed her to perhaps fully demonstrate the accomplished range and craft of her songwriting on a recording for the first time on “Primary.”

Artistically, she said, she’d “love to go back and forth,” and jokes that it might be to her advantage that some of the fans who’ve grown up with her for the past 15 years and now have kids of their own might rediscover her through her children’s songs.

“If I go back to ‘grown-up’ music maybe they’ll still want to hear what I’m singing about,” laughed London, noting that there are plenty of “adult” influences lurking in the mix on “Primary” for parents willing to dig for them.

The album’s standout banger, “Wild Party” — a spunky little ditty about having your birthday bash crashed by a bunch of actual wild beasts — owes far more to the Dead Milkmen than Raffi, for instance.

“I wrote that song on ukulele and what we were first thinking of was doing it as a very acoustic kind of East Coast ‘kitchen-party’ thing; I couldn’t get punk rock, like pop-punk rock, out of my head so I told Dean, my producer, and so he was, like, ‘Let me think on that,’ and he went home and then he emailed me and said, ‘There’s this band called the Dead Milkmen. Have you ever heard of them?’

“And I was, like, ‘I love Dead Milkmen.’ So that was a reference for that track, which is so funny,” London said. “We were listening to Dead Milkmen in the studio while we were making it. It’s just been so fun. There are no rules with kids’ music.”

Ben Rayner is a Toronto-based journalist and a frequent contributor to the Star’s Culture section. Follow him on Twitter: @ihatebenrayner

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