Grown-Ups
Bunny Clogs Gives Kids More, More More!
Despite the success of “I Like to Move It” from the Madagascar movie soundtracks as the dance anthem for a generation, funky beats don’t figure prominently in most children’s music. Enter Minneapolis singer and multi-instrumentalist Adam Levy and his family project, Bunny Clogs, who cover the Jackson Five’s “ABC” and anthropomorphize foodstuffs on goofy jams such as “Confessions of a Teenage Lima Bean,” which Levy belts out in a Prince-like falsetto.
Levy recruited musicians from two Minneapolis bands he leads: indie-rockers the Honeydogs and their party-oriented soul siblings, Hookers and Blow. But the giddy mesh sounds like neither group; it’s a fully digested combo of blast-off funk and Rubber Soul pop. Bunny Clogs’ 2008 debut More! More! More! (Princess Records) is an album-length tribute to the most important thing in life: the next meal. But food is just a starting point. The more-for-daddy-than-baby “Lullaby Pie 3.14” merely mentions edibles, while the catchy “Midtown Greenway” is a beautiful song about bicycling, burning off the accumulated calories of “3 Dogs and a Pancake” (a fuzz-guitar screamer) and “Velveeta Girl and Squatsy” (a piano-inflected boogaloo). Speaking over the phone from Minneapolis, Levy talked recently about the connections between food and music.
Did you love any food songs when you were a kid?
No, I can’t recall any food songs. That’s funny you should ask, only because there wasn’t any intent in writing all the foods songs on Bunny Clogs. I think that just kind of happened.
Do you think there’s a connection between food and love on this album?
I think there probably is, and I hadn’t really thought a lot about it, other than the fact that food is something that’s extremely important to the girls’ mother and myself. With most meals we have together, there’s a lot of care that’s taken in cooking and exposing the kids to lots of different kinds of things, and I think that’s a loving relationship that we’ve established with our children and with food. [laughs] Which sounds kind of odd in some ways, and yet that’s how we nurture our children.
How did this project come about?
Well, I couldn’t very well call it Adam Levy—it was a solo thing—because there’s another Adam Levy who plays with Norah Jones. So I came up with a name that I thought would be sort of amusing. It was a fake name that the Honeydogs used when we would do a show in town and we didn’t want to announce it.
It makes sense now!
Bunny Clogs, Honeydogs. Bunny Clogs is a mishmash of Hookers and Blow and the Honeydogs in terms of personnel. I guess it’s a rated-G version of Hookers and Blow, if you will.
[Laughs] I’m just laughing at that sentence.
I was teaching an audio class at the Institute of Production and Recording, and I thought, “Why don’t I do a new Honeydogs record and finish this children’s music project?” So over the course of a couple quarters we did overdubs, supplanting drum loops with real drums.
But why did you want to make this album in the first place?
I got a mini-studio, and the easiest thing to do in terms of learning is just to write songs quickly, and not the process I’d usually done with the Honeydogs. So it just became really easy to write this kind of goofy song. And considering I’d just got off the train that was [the Honeydogs album] 10,000 Years, which I consider a pretty serious record, just letting go and being goofy and having my children around when I was recording lent itself to making these songs.
And then I went to visit a friend of mine in Chicago, Ralph Covert [of Ralph’s World, whom we interviewed in May 2009], who has made a living doing kids’ music. I went to just hang out with him, and it really turned into kind of a shadowing thing, where I watched him over the course of this weekend do all of this kids’ music–related stuff. And I thought, “Gosh, these songs I’m working on at home—maybe it makes sense to release it.” And I also got to thinking, with the explosion of kids’ music, there’s a place for me in this, because most of that stuff seems to come from a folk and bluegrass place, while my songs are pretty funky dance songs influenced by music from the ’60s and ’70s.
You invite kids onstage for “Shpilkas.” What’s it like rocking an audience that young?
It’s marvelous. Just having my kids onstage with me has been such a treat, too. My 18-year-old son has gotten up and just completely danced like a goofball. My daughters [Esther, 10, and Ava Bella, 8] are really singing quite well. And then to have a bunch of little kids get up and be part of the moment is also really just...
I never thought I would be doing this. There’s a misunderstanding about children’s musicians, that somehow, you start writing children’s music, and you’ve been put out to pasture—you no longer make meaningful music. And I’ve found it to be incredibly rewarding to play in front of children, because I think they’re the toughest audience that you could ever play for. If they don’t like something, they will not pay attention. And that’s sort of helped me in other aspects of my music making.
How has Bunny Clogs helped you?
There’s a little bit of Las Vegas 101 that has to go on to get people to come back and see you. And definitely Bunny Clogs is about that “happening” of the moment, trying to make a show. It’s very loose. Kids wander onstage randomly. And my nephew Isaac, [former Honeydogs drummer] Noah [Levy]’s son, is playing electric guitar with us. [Laughs] He’s six years old, and he’s a remarkably good, savant-like electric guitar player. That definitely is very entertaining for people to see. He’ll kick a song off. It’s pretty amazing. Or we’ll just ask Isaac, “What do you want to play?” and he’ll start.
And my son pops in. My son [Daniel Levy] is a hell of an MC, and I’m looking forward to doing something with him under the name Chunky D, which is what I used to call him when he was a little kid.
What is “3 Dogs and a Pancake” about?
It’s about three dogs who are about to eat a pancake.
[Laughs]
It came from when I was in college, I got so tired of the Three Men and a Baby movie, and I thought it was the stupidest premise, so I’d always call it Three Dogs and a Pancake. There’s a lot of titles in the songs that were expressions I’ve used throughout my life. One was “Olive’s Olives.” Like before Daniel was born, I used to say “I love Olive’s olives.
One of the fun things about [Bunny Clogs] is I loved listening to records like De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising and [the Beastie Boys’] Paul’s Boutique, where there’s this sort of almost insider culture, the characters and expressions they make up, and you get pulled into that. When you sing the songs repeatedly, you feel like you’re part of the club. And with Bunny Clogs, that was something that happened really naturally, just because the kids were involved in the process.
