The Holiday Season has Begun

If Halloween is any indication, this is going to be a terrific holiday season. The Hipwaders took to the pavement and pumpkin patch to bring audiences our Halloween tunes and - little did the kids & families know - the songs from our next album. Yep, the songs are written and we performed the next album in it's entirety several times over the month. We go into the studio in January and for the first time actually have the songs arranged and even the running order figured out. Now, of course, things could always change (say, if a killer new song is brought to us by the muses...) but for now we're extremely happy. We'll divulge more later...

In the meantime, we're happy to note that our holiday album, "A Kindie Christmas" just won a NAPPA Honors Award. The best part of the award was the review that accompanied it:

I’ve always said that Christmas albums should rock out. There are plenty of traditional albums out there filled with sleigh bells and “Drummer Boy,” but there are none that we know of that feature a song called “Santasploitation,” where Mr. Claus himself is the rock star! The funked-up “It’s Wintertime” truly captures the hip-kid feeling of Christmas. From there, we taste a bit o’ country in “Santa’s Train” and the fun doesn’t stop there. The album gets progressively more and more rockin’, with some nice poignancy coming through in “Tinsel and Lights” that better describes the Christmas scene than traditional songs do. Complete with full rock band, distorted guitars and even a little country twang here and there, this album is the Little Miss Sunshine of kids’ CDs. (Don’t worry. There’re a few sleigh bells on this album, too!)

I had to laugh at the "Little Miss Sunshine of kids' CDs" bit as it seems to infer we have no problem letting our freak flag fly. Which we don't. Or, as one reviewer said of "Little Miss Sunshine":

"Little Miss Sunshine teaches us to embrace that middle ground, acknowledging that life may just be a beauty pageant, where we're often going to be outdone by someone prettier, smarter, or just plain luckier, but if we get up on that stage and be ourselves, everything will turn out fine."

We couldn't agree more.