This assignment came to me out of the blue more than twenty years back. Yet it is still fresh in my memory, as if done yesterday. This impression is due entirely to the fact that it allowed me to spend forty minutes or so on the phone with John Lithgow, who I would say was then and still is uniquely skillful at his craft. I can’t think of anyone else who can effortlessly bridge the gaps between romance, both sophisticated and slapstick comedy, classic and contemporary drama, even onscreen terror (for proof, check Twilight Zone: The Movie).
He is also that rare gem of a celebrity, who can linger in the public eye for some forty years now without doing something scandalous or even committing a minor faux pas (unless he intended it for comic effect). And, in the ultimate test of virtue, entertain and inform roomfuls of children as effectively as when playing Don Quixote, Winston Churchill, King Lear or the voice of Augustus Redfield on The Simpsons.
Onstage and onscreen, Lithgow amplifies the key aspects of the character he’s playing, always with a sprinkle of grace that I would consider his hallmark. This served him particularly well in 2006, when Razor & Tie released The Sunny Side of the Street. The material and Lithgow’s playful performance targeted children, using tunes from Broadway (i.e. Jimmy Durante’s “Inka Dinka Doo”), British music halls (“The Laughing Policeman”) and Lithgow’s own imagination (“I’m a Manatee”) to entertain, inform and address the complexities of growing up.
Which led to my first question.
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This is a children’s album, so why do I like it so much as an adult?
Ah!, Well, the thing is, almost every song on the album is a novelty song from the good old days of Tin Pan Alley. They were written to entertain adults. I’ve been entertaining kids for a long, long time. I write books for them and give concerts and make albums. You know, when I was a little boy, my parents had a house that was full of music and songs. I loved their music — and it was all for them! So I thought, well, “This is exactly the kind of music that I would love to introduce to kids today.” It’s been like an archaeological trip to find all of these half-forgotten songs and make them live again for little children.
Although songs like “Inka Dinka Doo” were in fact written for adults, they still have an innocent quality that translates well to children.
That’s right. That’s the thing. I guess it’s from vaudeville days and Thirties and Forties musicals. There was a wonderful kind of lightheartedness to songwriting. People didn’t mind being silly. In fact, for a lot of singers and songwriters, that was their stock in trade. And people listened to music very differently back then. They listened for jokes and rhymes and wit play in ways that they really don’t anymore. They do in Broadway shows, I suppose. There’s a lot of terrific songwriters out there. They were superstars back in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, like Dorothy Fields.
I think of songwriting today as having a more ironic tone.
I think you’re absolutely right. I think this is the age of irony. When you think of our comedians, they are very sour and ironic. You really can’t name one who isn’t. When I was a kid, the comedians were Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Bob Hope, George Gobel. These were not ironists; they were just joke tellers. You’re right to spot that in the difference between songwriting now and then.
Now, I can be ironic as hell. I’m a huge Jon Stewart and Conan and David Letterman. They’re my favorites. But that’s not really me. My nature as an entertainer is kind of true-hearted, even though I’ve played despicable villains in my day. I think about redemption all the time [laughs].
Also, the Depression-era vintage of these songs makes it clear that music was about an escape into a few minutes of pleasure.
Absolutely. I mean, Dorothy Fields’s great song, “The Sunny Side of the Street,” was written in about 1930 or ’31. The Depression had just kicked in .. and people were depressed as hell [laughs].
When you listen to that song with that awareness, that adds an emotional depth that isn’t always apparent to modern listeners.
What I’ve done is take gentle little liberties with these songs, to nudge them into the category of children’s songs. So that “Sunny Side of the Street” becomes a song about your first day of school.
Did you write the introduction to that song? It puts that spin on the tune?
I wrote that [laughs].
Music in the Air
What role did music play in getting you through childhood?
Well, it’s curious, because I never studied music. I never learned the piano or learned to read music. But it was just in the air. I had a brother and two sisters close to me, particularly my big sister. And we learned all these songs and sang them.
Your family also happened to be friendly with Danny Kaye.
He was a big, big deal for us. My folks knew him when they were all young in the Village in the 1930s. We knew every syllable of this one album, Danny at the Palace, which had all kinds of great virtuoso comic turns.
Growing up, when I got a little older I got into Gilbert and Sullivan. They were everybody’s heroes among songwriters. I performed in six or seven Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in college. Then I also got into British music hall songs. I used to have an entire program of them that I would sing in college.
Kind of exotic interests in those days.
Yeah, I’ll say! You know, there was one great music hall song on the album: “The Laughing Policeman.” That’s my little nod to the British music hall [laughs].
It’s fun to imagine taking a writer’s credit for that chorus: “Ha, ha, ha.”
Yes [laughs]!
One common element in these influences you’ve mentioned is that they’re about performers in some kind of a character, whether it’s Danny Kaye or British music halls. It sounds like the performance of that music was as important to you as the songs themselves.
Well, it’s no coincidence: I am a character actor. I love to sing songs in different personas. So you have Art Carney’s great “Song of the Sewer” and the Betty Boop song on the album. There are even accents in “The Laughing Policeman.” There’s the great Bea Lillie song, “I Always Say Hello to a Flower.” All of them are performance turns.
“The heart of everything I do as a singer is the fact that I’m an actor.”
That’s different from, say, the Tony Bennett approach, which is about presenting the song more so than assuming a character in singing that song.
The heart of everything I do as a singer is the fact that I’m an actor. In fact, I still can’t quite call myself a singer with a straight face. Although I won a Tony Award for best actor in a musical, when I do musical theater, everyone around me is so much better at it than I am. What I bring to it is just this reckless conviction that I’m an actor. That’s why I think the “character” songs are the best songs on the album. I certainly have heard far better singers than me sing “Getting to Know You.”
But few as effectively as you. It’s a great intro to the album.
It is a good intro. It’s a welcoming-in song. Rogers and Hammerstein knew what they were doing. But adding children to the sound of it is just magical
How did you find these kids?
They came from the United Nations School in New York. There were just six girls with a really, really good choral teacher. She took a lot of time preparing. They were just sharp as could be.
Did you watch cartoons as a kid? Did they also influence you in terms of doing songs in character?
Well, I think that’s in our DNA, all of us baby boomers and older. This was the golden age of Disney animation. Cinderella and Snow White were all big deals to us. We loved all the character parts: the foolish courtiers in Sleeping Beauty and the mice in Cinderella.
I’m also thinking about those great music cues in Warner Bros. cartoons.
Oh yeah, absolutely. But look at what Disney has done by reviving that whole concept. They’ve created Broadway musicals out of their own cartoon features.
I just want to put out one other name that I think might have played a role in your path to doing this music. That would be Dick Van Dyke from the Mary Poppins era.
You know, I came late to Dick Van Dyke. He’s really great, no question about it. But my idols were Danny Kaye, Flanders and Swann — a lot of Brits and French guys, to be honest. [Monty] Python came later. I perform with that energy. It’s very hard to be restrained [laughs].
Does performing for children replenish you in some way from doing weightier, serious roles?
It’s huge fun. I don’t have to do it. I do it because I love to do it. It also makes me feel good because I think it’s a good thing to do, to pay attention to children. I think it answers a real need for quality entertainment that actually challenges kids to learn something. I mean, these are grownup songs! We set the bar high and say, “Don’t worry. You won’t understand all of this. But you’ll enjoy it all.”
What role did music play as you raised your children?
Well, they would always request that I sing “The Nightmare Song” from Iolanthe [laughs]. They’re all very musical. My younger son is a musician. My older son grew up playing the clarinet and saxophone. My daughter plays the piano. I was very intent that they were very well trained in music because I never was. They do love it.
First Steps
When did you begin feeling the time had come to do another children’s album?
Well, I’ve been meaning to for the past few years. Last year I worked for an entire year on a Broadway musical , Dirty Rotten Scoundrels— my second Broadway musical in three years. Because I was working with so many music theater people, I just put the line out. I decided that the theme for this should be “great, old, forgotten songs.” I just asked everybody I ran into, “Do you know any old songs?” They came trickling from many, many different sources. I would say that eight or nine people made suggestions as we came up with fourteen songs.
Were any of these songs new to you?
I didn’t know “I Like Bananas (Because They Have No Bones).” I didn’t know “Be Human” or “You Gotta Have Pep,” the Betty Loop song. I didn’t know “The Laughing Policeman.” I didn’t know “Lullaby in Ragtime,” which is actually a beautiful Danny Kaye song, written by his wife at the time [Sylvia Fine]. I knew “Inka Dinka Doo” but I didn’t know any of the lyrics; I just remembered Jimmy Durante doing funny riffs to the song.
So most of this is fairly new material to you.
Oh, yeah! We were all set to record it on a Tuesday in L.A. I said to J.C. Hopkins, my producer, “In all conscience, we have to perform these at least once for kids.” So I called McCabe’s Guitar Shop, which is a fabulous place with a small room for concerts. They do kids’ concerts and I’d done kids’ concerts three or four times there. I said, “Can I come and do a concert?” Of course, they leapt at that and set it all up for the Sunday before we recorded. Sunday morning at eleven o’clock, I performed twelve songs for kids that I had never sung for anybody before, which was taking a gigantic leap off a very high cliff [laughs]. The kids started piling in. I’d sort of forgotten how young they were. A lot of parents bring their four- and five-year-old kids, which is fine. They also bring their two-year-old little sisters and brothers.
As they came in, I sort of panicked. I got terrific stage fright. I said, “Guys, find a guitar and put it up on the stage.” It was kind of like a fire extinguisher: If these kids got out of control, I’ve got lots of kiddie songs, so I know I can control them. But I didn’t have to resort to that guitar once! They just loved it, every one of them.
Did you have the same orchestration that we hear on the record?
No, it was just piano and Walter Hawkes played trombone and ukulele. He had done a lot of the arrangements, so he was just there to riff along. It was very, very improvisational. But I rehearsed with the instruments for the first time.
Did that performance at McCabe’s give you any insights into how you might interpret these songs differently?
It mainly gave me tremendous confidence. I just knew that kids loved these songs. Also, I had learned them all, so it was great to go into a recording session having everything down. The only songs had trouble recording were the two or three we hadn’t actually performed because they sort of required a second voice.
Were these mainly first takes?
There were quite a few songs where we really got them with two takes. I mean, there’s always lots of refinement in the orchestrations. But in three days we recorded fourteen songs.
Did you play a role in creating these arrangements, even if just to talk about what kind of a mood you wanted?
We had several sessions in New York with Walter Hawkes and Doug Wieselman; they split the arrangement duties between them. We went through every one of the songs. It was very good for me too because we figured out an angle for each of them, just by messing with the songs.
To give you an excellent example, J.C. had proposed that we sing the great Dorothy Fields song, “Pick Yourself Up, Dust Yourself Off and Start All Over Again.” I was a little skeptical of that because I couldn’t really figure out how that would actually lock in with kids. But as we messed with it, I realized, “Well, this is what we should do. When the music hits the chorus, we’ll set up a dialog between a grownup and a bunch of kids who want to learn to dance.” So they sing the little recit intros: “Good please teacher, teach me something.” And I say, “So, you want to learn to dance? Sure, I’ll teach you how to dance.” In the musical break, you hear me demonstrating how to tap dance until I lose my balance and go crashing into the wings.Then they take over the role of the teacher: [singing] “Don’t lose your confidence if you trip.” It was only by working with the musicians could we figured out a way to turn it into a kids’ song.
“It’s always great to give the kids a chance to take over.”
That also gives the kids a lesson in confidence: They end up straightening you out!
Oh, it’s always great to give the kids a chance to take over [laughs]. I wrote a little song called “Big Kids Scare the Heck out of Me” years ago, because I love the notion of a great big man singing for very tiny kids about how scared big kids made me. I always ask that: “Do big kids scare the heck out of you too?” They always say, “No! “ And I say, “Good, because you’re big kids too.”
That gets us into another subject. Before we knew it, we had combined a whole bunch of themes, which said, “These songs are good for you,” for want of a better way of expressing that. There is a song about eating good foods so that you’ll have pep. There's a song about being nice to animals: If you’re nice to animals, they’ll be nice to you. Also, the whole song about “pick yourself up, dust yourself off,” is about, you know, you’re not the only student in the world. You can be a teacher too. Even though these are really fun and silly songs, there’s a lot of goodness in them.
From the opening moments of this album, with “Getting to Know You,” I love the sounds of the instruments. Your two previous children’s albums sound terrific but they don ’t have quite the intimacy you create on “The Sunny Side of the Street.” I imagine this was a conscious goal of yours as well.
Well, it was. I mean, I didn’t dictate it. It came much more from the music guys. But I did say I wanted to feel restless and anarchic. I like how children’ entertainment encourages them to try it too. That’s why we throw in a kazoo and a slide whistle now and then, not to mention kids’ voices. I make all the sound effects myself: the sound of the gorilla and the toucan and all that. It’s all very kind of homemade. We wanted to have that feeling. We never wanted it to be too slick. These are extraordinary musicians but they’re also guys with great humor. They make it sound fun.
Was it “The Laughing Policeman” that had the clarinet solo that sounded like a beginner was playing it?
Exactly! And for “The Song of the Sewer,” they make bathroom sounds [laughs]. There’s another great song, “I Like Bananas,” where there’s the phrase [sings] “I don’t like to whistle. Can’t play saxophones.” And there’s a wonderful bad note played on a saxophone! “When I play the trumpet, everybody groans.” And he plays the trumpet badly. That’s what I mean. We wanted this to sound reckless, like we only just barely out of childhood ourselves.
And here we have to nod in the direction of Spike Jones.
Yes! We kept mentioning his name, like, four times an hour [laughs].
“You’ve got to entertain them right or you’re not entertaining them at all.”
Another thing about this album is that it has none of the condescending tone that I hear from children’s music or books.
Well, it’s not like, “Oh, I’ve had a child, I guess I can write a story for children.” But I do think that performing for kids that performing for kids comes quite naturally to me. I’ve done a lot of it. I think it all started from having a sister ten years younger than me. I also have three kids that range in age from two to thirty-four. I spent a lot of my time entertaining them and their classmates in school. It’s really a second career that nobody knows about. I just do it all the time. That’s how you really learn not to talk down to kids. It’s just like with any audience: You’ve got to entertain them right or you’re not entertaining them at all. Grownups won’t tell you they don’t like what you’re doing, but kids will tell you. They trample you.
You know, I’ve written seven children’s songs myself. Of those seven, four or five are actually pieces that I perform for kids at concerts, either as stories told in verse or actual songs or narrations. So they are market-tested in front of children.
Casting for Kids
Let’s talk about some of the guests on your album. We can start with Wayne Knight and Sherie Rene Scott.
Well, they are both very, very good friends of mine. They both said yes immediately when I asked them to come in and do this.
Did you know which songs you wanted them to perform?
Yeah. Wayne is actually on two songs. He does the “Sewer” song. I was with him. We worked together, although I had pre-recorded my part. Sherie and I rehearsed together but we were on opposite coasts when she did her parts. I wasn’t there. But I was there with Madeleine Peyroux and Maude Maggart.
Have you worked with them before?
No, I met them for the first time when they came in to record. Sherie, by the way, has a wonderful little boy, two years old now. So it meant a lot to her to do this with me. She just loved the song, the “Lullaby.”
Which track is Maude on?
She sings “Baby!” And Madeleine was on “Sunny Side.” We just loved the idea of adding that touch of a very different sound at four points in the album, with real sophistication and appeal for adults.
Obviously you need to please the adults as well as the kids, since they’re the ones who are buying the album.
Absolutely. If you think of taking a long, long driving trip with a child, you hate the idea of them sitting in the backseat, watching a DVD. At least I do. So you want music that you can endure more than ten times through, because you’re going to hear it a lot more than that [laughs].
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He's a very accomplished actor and a seemingly nice man....at the same time.