Former Del Fuegos leader Dan Zanes appeals to kids — and their hipster parents — with a friendly, indie rock aesthetic. Photo from danzanes.com.
While there has always been “family music,” leads a recent movement to reclaim the music from corporations producing little songs for little characters — stripping away the furry costumes and playing unpretentious songs that kids and parents alike can feel good about. Saturday afternoon, Zanes and his six-piece band performed in a well-populated with proud parents and exuberant kids that ranged as young as 1.
Just after their first song, a rendition of the old work song “Pay Me My Money Down” (leaping out of the children’s musicbox from the git go), Zanes modestly greeted the crowd and said, “We could do what is generally done — a concert — or we could forget about it altogether and have a wild party.”
The predictable audience answer led to between-song threads that referred to an ensuing “wild dance party” (one not fully executed in the chair-heavy Boulder Theater environment). Yet Zanes introduced a few subjects — including the New Sanctuary movement, which aims to end suffering of immigrant workers — that one doesn’t hear about on episodes of “Caillou” and “Bob the Builder.”
Zanes and Friends’s song genres ranged widely, with two Spanish-language nonstandards, as well as island music and heavy doses of bluegrass and folk — the latter augmented by banjo, fiddle and standup bass. Large parts of the show seemed cut from the same cloth as the Boulder Theater’s resident variety show, , and several members of the Boulder Youth Symphony chimed in for two songs.
Zanes is now in his second musical incarnation; he fronted Boston bar band the Del Fuegos in the 1980s. Like other “adult” rockers who have delved into family music, including They Might Be Giants and Lisa Loeb, Zanes cultivates an indie aesthetic, with graphic design tilted toward hip parents in hipster places such as Brooklyn and Austin, and a charity-centric approach that promotes Heifer International and the aforementioned New Sanctuary cause, “putting the fun back in fundraising” as he describes it.
Spiritually and philosophically, Zanes and Friends walk the path of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, who have emphasized singing-along and a communal mindset, and who do not think music has to “talk down” to appeal to children. Though Seeger probably not have worn the green sports jacket and bright yellow shirt that Zanes chose, he would not likely have disapproved. During Zanes’s late-set cover of Seeger’s “All Around the Kitchen,” the man himself — 90 years old next week — would have found it in him to dance.
Jeremy Simon is a Lafayette freelance writer and regular contributor to Reverb.
