Claire and I went to see Clairo at the Austin City Limits Moody Theatre. We were celebrating her birthday, which was a few moths ago, when I gave her the tickets.
Neither of us are 100% sure we love all the new Clairo songs, but it was still a super fun father-daughter evening. 😊
Molly got me in a mood to goof around on the guitar and make up a song roughly based on Zep’s classic. This kind of goofing around is one of my favorite parts of being a dad. ☺️
Claire has recently discovered what she calls “aesthetic music”. I love that term! This is music that sounds cool and you can just chill to, as far as I can tell. Apparently, most of the time the genre of music involves a light electronic sound plus ukulele.
I’m not sure if aesthetic music is officially an official “thing” or just a term that Claire came up with. Claire says that her friend Olivia is into aesthetic music as well.
Here are some examples:
Molly’s loves pop music, and she decided to put together a playlist of all her favorite songs. Many of the songs are from the movie Trolls. She seems love Justin Timberlake and Anna Kendrick. Although Claire and I rag on her a little bit about those choices, it is a fine, lively pop playlist, and I’m proud of Molly for patiently organizing it in her mind.
Another fun thing to do when the weather is cold is to go to the music store. Molly loved the kids-sized drums and the tiny pink guitar, while Claire was into the keyboards. Molly wants the drums for Christmas, but she’ll have to settle for using my less-fun electronic drums set.
A few days ago, Claire and Molly were discussing rock n’ roll versus pop music. Molly said some song from a Disney movie was rock n’ roll, and Claire no, that was pop. Then Claire said, “This is rock n’ roll…” and proceeded to ad lib a weird song about someone named “Timmy Bob Bob”. The song had with power chords (yes, very rock n’ roll) and a chorus of “I love you, I love you!”.
The song just killed me, and Claire repeated it many more time over the next few days. I eventually caught one on video so you can enjoy it too.
There has not yet been any explanation for the name “Timmy Bob Bob”, and no, it is not “Jimmy Bob Bob”, says Claire.
Molly is at that age now where she is trying to figure out what in the world is real and what is made up. Tonight she asked if lava is real. Why yes. Yes, it is. Reflecting on this fact some more, it seemed strange that lava is real. I mean really… super hot molten rock that oozes out of mountains and cannot be stopped by anything? If you fall into it, you die? That is a ridiculous comic book idea, right? That can’t be real.
On the drive home from school, Molly asked if Bob Dylan was real. Molly is not typically a music fan, unless it’s from Frozen or another Disney movie, but she asked to hear “that Mr. Tambourine Man thing”. She asked who was singing it, and I said Bob Dylan. “Is Bob Dylan real?” Yes, of course he’s real. Jeez, he’s Bob Dylan! But then again, he is singing a song just like Elsa from Frozen, and Elsa is not real. “Is Mr. Tambourine Man real?” No, Mr. Tambourine is not real. He’s just sort of a character, or an idea, or something. Jeez.
And consider Elsa from Frozen. Of course she’s not real, she from a movie, silly! What about Winter the dolphin from the movie A Dolphin Tale? Oh yeah, she’s real. We saw her in person. Whaaaaa?
This must be terribly confusing for a kid. It seems so arbitrary. Dinosaurs are real, or at least they were real, but now they’re gone. So you’ll never actually see one. Oh yeah, and nobody even knew they existed until 150 years ago. This is pretty clear, right?
Claire had some questions about dinosaurs back around this age too. Nowadays, Claire and I are talking a lot about other mysterious real things, especially atoms and molecules. The big question is “How many atoms are in a ___?”, where the blank might be a muffin, a speck of cinnamon on the muffin, a dog, or the world. The answer is always the same: “Too many to count.” At her request, I looked up how many atoms are in the world. The answer was roughly 133,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Claire was not impressed. That did not look like such a big number after all. I tried to explain to her why that was a bigger number than you could possibly ever wrap your head around. Her eyes glazed over. Then it was back to discussing My Little Pony.
Claire has been going on a field trip every Friday for summer camp. She has hit the zoo, parks, museums, a restaurant kitchen, and even a recording studio. But all the parents were the most excited about this week’s field trip to the Austin City Limits theater, which in just the next few weeks will host the likes of Crosby Still & Nash, Tony Bennett, Norah Jones, and the Go-Go’s.
Claire took special interest in the Willy Nelson statue and enjoyed a picture of Arcade Fire, her favorite modern rock band (thanks to the music from the Hunger Games).
At the ACL theater, apparently the kids got a back-stage tour and a short performance by an unnamed guitarist who played a few silly songs, including a mixed up version of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, like “Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you pizza.” And then all the kids wold roar that he got the words wrong. It sounded pretty funny.
Anyways, here are some pictures.
Today when Claire was in one of her occasional sour moods in the car on the way home from school, we were discussing different kinds of music to put on to maybe cheer things up. Kid’s music? Beach Boys? An audiobook? Rock & roll?
Claire did not like the rock & roll idea at all. “I hate rock & roll!” she proclaimed. “It’s the worst kind of music there is! I hate rock stars too!” She then paused to add, “And I hate movie stars!”
Yeah! Eat it, Bono!
Once she got that out of her system, she was calm and relaxed, and we drove home a little more happy but with no music.
Oh so ironic… that was such a “rock & roll” way for Claire to work out her emotions. Take down the man! Yell it out! I think she might have slammed a guitar into an amplifier if she didn’t hate rock & roll so much.
McG Kids 