We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Allen Bleyle is a musical chameleon. Indulging in roaringly noisy punk one minute and crooning beautiful folk melodies the next, Blyle’s versatility and love for the song in all of its forms has lead to an unexpected career as a “nutrition musician” named Apple Brains, performing far and wide at summer camps and farmer’s markets, in elementary school classrooms, and anywhere else where “kids ages 1-98″ might lend their attention to his irresistably fun tunes.

Singing lo-fi odes to the heartbreaking beauty of tomatoes, the little-known first encounter between peanut butter and jelly, and the magnificent nature of H2O, Apple Brains is closer in spirit to the whimsical folk of Jonathan Richman at his narrative best– or early Of Montreal (before they went synth-pop)– than the canned elevator music and frozen smiles packaged by the mainstream children’s music industry. What started as a part-time gig has evolved into a full-length album entitled Get Fruity!!. What’s it like to live the life of a children’s musician? Find out below in our interview with Apple Brains!

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What music did you listen to in your early childhood? Were you into Raffi?
Hmmm…. I don’t remember much about music I listened to in early childhood. I know that the first tape I owned that I chose myself was Weird Al Yankovic… not sure which album, either In 3-D, Dare to Be Stupid or Polka Party. But that was when I was 8 or so. Before that, I don’t remember listening to music, to be honest! I played Suzuki piano, and my Mom was in the choir at church, and I do remember having the Beatles’ Help lying around the house, but my parents were never much for playing music in the house, though they both like music and my Mom is quite musical herself. I didn’t listen to Raffi though at all, didn’t even know who he was til I was an adult. Oh, but I did LOVE The Muppets and all that music!

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Before Labyrinth, before The Muppets were making appearances on The Orson Welles Show, before Sesame Street sparked a revolution in children’s entertainment, Jim Henson was just a University of Maryland graduate with a B.S. in Home Economics, experimenting with televised puppeteering in five-minute segments on a local NBC affiliate. But like most of us, he still had to find a way to pay the bills. Hence, some of the weirdest and funniest commercials of the 1960s. While most of the ads on TV in that day were still relying on cardboard representations of the nuclear family grinning with acidic alacrirty while they delivered straightforward salutes to prefabricated post-war aspiration, Henson and his felt creations brought something unexpected into the ad world:

…till then, [advertising] agencies believed that the hard sell was the only way to get their message over on television. We took a very different approach. We tried to sell things by making people laugh.

How is this not an episode of Mad Men, yet? Watch below to see Henson getting away with murder (sometimes literally) thanks to a motley crew of adorably lovable irreverent proto-Muppets. And if you’ve got eight minutes to spare, check out this oddball romp of a metafictional behind-the-scenes film looking into the Muppets, Inc. marketing department.