| ADVERTISEMENTS RELATED LiNKS: WWW.THEBRAMBLEJAM.COM OTHER ARTICLES:  BERLiN  FiNAL GRAViTY  SCARLET SiNS  THE WAiLERS  THE HOOTERS |
ROCKWiRED
iNTERViEWS THE BRAMBLE JAM KiDS
ARE PEOPLE TOO!
I don’t have to dig that deep to remember some of the kid-targeted
music that I listened to enthusiastically with the rest of my
kindergarten class thirty years ago. Thanks to those ditties, I know my
vowels from my consonants and can add and subtract (I wish they had a
song about long division!) Me being the dedicated bachelor that I am, I
never give much thought to what tickles the eardrums of young tykes
these days, but the New England-based THE BRAMBLE JAM have a better
understanding as evidenced by their debut CD ‘MOVE YOUR BOOTS’.
According to guitarist JASON KERN, this is children’s music without a
hidden agenda or a purple dinosaur costume to hide underneath. “When we
set out to write this album, we all agreed that we wanted to make
something that wasn’t just a children’s album.” says KERN “We wanted
this to be an album that had well crafted music and was something that
could stand the test of time. We didn’t want it to be an educational
thing and we didn’t want it to be sing-song-y. We also didn’t want to
make something that was going to be grating on the nerves to hear over
and over again. We wanted to create a set of songs that gives a nod to
real musicians and also has a bit of humor for the parents so that they
can keep it light and fun and listen to it over and over again.
Thematically, I think that was our main focus.”JASON KERN OF THE BRAMBLE JAM TALKS TO ROCKWiRED ABOUT THEiR DEBUT CD MOVE YOUR BOOTS AND MAKiNG CHiLDREN'S MUSiC WiTHOUT CONDESCENSiON  iNTERViEWED BY BRiAN LUSH ROCKWIRED spoke with JASON KERN over the phone. Here is how it went. I have to say that a children’s album is a first for ROCKWIRED. Our publicist said the same thing. Hopefully that will work to our advantage. How do you feel about the work that is behind you? I feel really, really proud of it. Looking back on the last year of recording and putting it all together, it was one of those things that was just supposed to be. The quality of the recording that we ended up with came out really well. Talk about the genesis of the project. JESSIE GRIFFITHS (vocalist) and I have been good friends for a long time. She and her husband own a farm and they have a harvest party every year. She and I have played a little bit of music together. We worked together with ASA BREBNER and Jay Janney and a couple of other friends on some cover tunes for the harvest party in October of 2008. After we finished that show, we sat down with ASA GREBNER who is this good friend and neighbor of hers and we decided that we wanted to continue music but weren’t sure how that would look. Within a couple of days, we each called each other and we all had this epiphany that we should create kid’s music because that was where we were in our lives. Do all of you have kids? ASA doesn’t but the engineer JAY JANNEY does and JESSIE and I have eight kids between us. I have five. She and her husband have three together. How instrumental were your own children in ear making the material? I’ve always got a guitar around and I’m always making up silly songs for them. Sometimes the songs will stick. A song like ‘GOING TO A PARTY’ is one that I wrote with hem as we were going on a hike and it was designed to keep them from getting unglued. We were coming up on the end of the hike and I needed to come up with something to keep them motivated. If you listen to the rhythm of that song, it’s got this marching rhythm to it. All of the stuff that I wrote and contributed to the album evolved form things that are always in front of me as a parent and the kids are always there to hear it and either not like it or like it. The material is definitely kid-tested. Talk about the other member of THE BRAMBLE JAM and what you think each of them brings to the table both musically and personality-wise. JAY JANNEY who did all of the engineering and the recording for us really had the quiet guidance of getting some great sounds and some great recording. He really worked with JESSIE when she was doing her vocals and with me when I was doing some the recording. He made things really comfortable so that we could lay down a good track. He quietly goes about his business and all of a sudden, you’ve got some great recordings and some great material to work with. ASA BREBNER – who produced the album and co-wrote several songs – has been around the circuit for a long time. He’s played with a lot of people and has a vast knowledge of music. His ability to produce the album and each of the tracks and come up with good tracks was something that I was impressed with from beginning to end. It was a really fortuitous occasion that he was available for us. JESSIE wrote a couple of the songs and did a lot of the harmonies and helped a lot with the refinement of the lyrics and the refinement of the message in each of the songs. She brought a great energy to the group. She was always there with a great sense of humor and a liveliness that kind of made the whole process that much more exciting. As far as my own contribution, I often came to the group with bits and pieces of a song that I had been working on and put them out on the table. Everyone would work with it a little bit and would refine it as we went. Talk about how music got started for you as an individual. I always loved music and poetry. I went to NAROPA UNIVERSITY up in Boulder, Colorado. I can remember being in the third or fourth grade and writing really bad poetry. I’ve always really liked the impact of words and how they communicate not only the word but the underlying message beneath the word. The transition from the written word into music was just a natural one. I’ve always really enjoyed music and listening to what other people are writing about and how they are fitting a phrase together. I had been in a couple of musical efforts in college that never really got very far but they were always a lot of fun. After college, I put music aside and started the whole family thing. I started a big family and as the kids have gotten a bit older, I found that the best way to get back into music was to write songs for them. What songs off of the album stand out for you the most and why? The song ‘BIG BROTHER BLUES’ has a lot of depth to it. That one is my favorite right now. Each of us have talked about our favorite songs and each of us has a very different favorite song at any given time for any reason. Most recently, ‘BIG BROTHER BLUES’ has come back to me to the top of the list because it’s a song that started out very simply as a song about getting a new pair of shoes and about the feeling that a little kid would get from getting anew pair of shoes and being able to run so much faster and ride so much faster. The song kind of matured. The song was about the dynamic between my oldest son and my second son. One day my youngest son felt overshadowed by my oldest son and when he got a new pair of shoes, it was like nothing else seemed to matter. His light came on and I wanted to capture that in a song. It brought back memories of my CAPTAIN AMERICA shoes and sleeping in them when I first got them. I tried to bring that energy and excitement into that song with a little bit of nostalgia. That one has the most personal meaning for me. Talk a little more about the songwriting process within THE BRAMBLE JAM. We each have our own style of writing. The writing process for this album actually went really, really smoothly. It was actually one of the most remarkable aspects of putting this album together. My own personal style is that I’ll come up with a phase or a verse or a chorus and then try to add another piece to that and then bring that to everybody. We had a couple of days a week where we would work together for a couple of hours in an afternoon. I would show up with my fragments and piece and bring them in for them to work on. In that same time, JESSIE is very linear and doesn’t play many instruments but she sings a lot and had done a lot of work with an acapella group. She would sit down and write a song in a story form from beginning to end and ASA –who has this vast background of playing all kinds of music - brings his influences to the table such as THE BEATLES and CHUCK BERRY. He would bring that structure to the songs. I set up a website for all of us to be able to log into and work on lyrics so each of us could go in and change and shape the lyrics. Using our computers we would record bits and pieces and upload them and work on the material when we weren’t together. It was great to get another perspective on the stuff that I was working on and to have ASA there to shape and to have JESSIE there to give her opinion and be able to listen to what she was bringing to he table and add things to it. Seeing as how you guy are writing to children, what kind of place are you coming from as songwriters? When we set out to write this album, we all agreed that we wanted to make something that wasn’t just a children’s album. We wanted this to be an album that had well crafted music and was something that could stand the test of time. We didn’t want it to be an educational thing and we didn’t want it to be sing-song-y. We also didn’t want to make something that was going to be grating on the nerves to hear over and over again. We wanted to create a set of songs that gives a nod to real musicians and also has a bit fo humor for the parents so that they can keep it light and fun and listen to it over and over again. Thematically, I think that was our main focus. What would you like a person – young or old – to come away with after they’ve heard this album? The music on this album is not meant be anything other than enjoyable as music. There is no alterior motive. There is no educational theme. There is no pretense that anyone is going to get smarter by listening to this music. This is music as a way for connecting with other people. The music is produced well and it’s crafted well and if it resonates with people then that is good enough. That is what it should be about. I hate to load up any other baggage on music. It’s about enjoying the music together as a family. It’s a time for kids to be kids and people to be people. |
