All you need is a song sesame street

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Composer Stephen Lawrence has died. Lawrence wrote the music to hundreds of songs for "Sesame Street." He was the music director for the landmark children's album "Free To Be... You And Me." He also composed songs for the project, including the title track. NPR's Elizabeth Blair has this appreciation.

ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: Just a few months ago, for his 82nd birthday, Stephen Lawrence made a YouTube video with some of his favorite songs for which he wrote the music. There is Free To Be... You And Me.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FREE TO BE... YOU AND ME")

THE NEW SEEKERS: (Singing) There's a land that I see where the children are free. And I say it ain't far to this land from where we are. Take my hand...

BLAIR: Take the jazzy "Fuzzy And Blue" from "Sesame Street. "

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FUZZY AND BLUE")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As Grover, singing) I'm fuzzy and blue. That's me - I'm fuzzy and blue.

BLAIR: And Mama Cass Elliot's version of "One Way Ticket."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ONE WAY TICKET")

MAMA CASS ELLIOT: (Singing) Call the village band out. Bid me goodbye.

BLAIR: Melody - that's what Stephen Lawrence was always looking for, says his wife, Cathy Lawrence.

CATHY LAWRENCE: That was number one - it had to have fabulous tunes. He didn't like Beethoven because he didn't think he was much in the way of tunes.

BLAIR: Composing for "Sesame Street" was perfect for Stephen Lawrence because he got to work in all kinds of styles - country western, R&B, classical.

C LAWRENCE: He parodied Puccini in an aria about fish.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Singing) Fish - I love them (unintelligible) or fried or boiled, flambe or poached, sauteed or broiled.

BLAIR: Stephen Lawrence grew up in Great Neck, N. Y. His father worked at a glue factory. Cathy Lawrence says Stephen wasn't big on sight reading, but he could play anything by ear as early as age 5. He won three Emmys for his work on "Sesame Street," awards he shared with his fellow composers. It's also where he met the late lyricist Bruce Hart and his wife, the late sketch writer Carole Hart. When Carole started working with Marlo Thomas on a new children's record, she suggested her husband and Lawrence could work on the music.

MARLO THOMAS: He was adorable and fun, but he was very serious about the music.

BLAIR: Marlo Thomas says when she and Mel Brooks were recording a song together, Lawrence was so serious, Mel Brooks walked out of the studio. He eventually came back. When Sara Bareilles recently did a version of the title track of "Free To Be... You And Me," Marlo Thomas said she wanted to change a few chords.

THOMAS: And he was very, you know, upset about it. He had to call - I said, well, call her and negotiate it, whatever you want. You know, I'll stand beside you whatever you want to do. And so he was very particular about what he would allow and what he wouldn't allow on the chord. And, you know, I mean, I could barely tell the difference, but Stephen was like that with his own music and with others', too.

BLAIR: Talking to WNYC's John Schaefer in 2012, Stephen Lawrence reflected on the album's success.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED MEMBER STATION PODCAST)

STEPHEN LAWRENCE: The record company said we could hope for 15,000 sales.

JOHN SCHAEFER, BYLINE: And?

S LAWRENCE: And it sold over a million. I'm not sure how much. It just keeps selling.

BLAIR: Among the tributes to Stephen Lawrence, Sesame Workshop tweeted, thank you for bringing smiles, laughter and the gift of music to our neighborhood. Cathy Lawrence says her husband loved being recognized for his work and would be so happy with what people are saying now. As for Sara Bareilles' version of his song, Marlo Thomas says he loved it.

Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF TIMO ANDRES' "V")

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The Sesame Street Book And Record (Music)

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/music/thesesamestreetbookandrecord

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The Sesame Street Book and Record was the first Sesame Street spinoff album, released on Columbia Records in 1970, shortly after the show's first season ended.

Instead of only a collection of songs, it's formatted as an audio Sesame Street episode, linking the songs with dialogue. As the title implies, it was initially packaged with an accompanying book that included illustrations and song lyrics.

Featuring several of the show's most iconic songs, the album was hugely popular, spending nine weeks in the Top 40 of Billboard's album chart, peaking at #23. "Rubber Duckie" was a hit single as well, getting all the way up to #16. It also won a Grammy Award for best children's album.

Track list:

Side One

1. "Sesame Street" - The Kids
2. "ABC-DEF-GHI" - Big Bird
3. "I've Got Two" - Gordon, Susan, Bob, Mr. Hooper, Big Bird and Oscar
4. "Goin' for a Ride" - The Anything People
5. "What Are Kids Called?" - Bob and Susan
6. "Everybody Wash" - Ernie and Bert
7. "One of These Things" - Bob and Susan
8. "Up and Down" - Two Monsters (though the Frank Oz-voiced monster would later be Retconned as Cookie Monster)
9. "Bein' Green" (just titled "Green" here) - Kermit the Frog

Side Two

1. "Somebody Come and Play" - The Kids (with Bob joining in toward the end)
2. "I Love Trash" - Oscar the Grouch
3. "A Face" - Bob
4. "J-Jump" - The Kids (preceded by Big Bird reciting a poem)
5. "The People in Your Neighborhood" - Bob and The Anything People
6. "Rub Your Tummy" - Gordon
7. "Number 5" - The Kids
8. "Five People in My Family" - The Anything People
9. "Nearly Missed" - Susan
10. "Rubber Duckie" - Ernie

"On my way to where the Tropes are sweet":

• Antidisestablishmentarianism: In "ABC-DEF-GHI", Big Bird thinks the alphabet is a really long word.
• Baths Are Fun: "Everybody Wash" and "Rubber Duckie" are Ernie's celebrations of bathing.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Several characters address the listener directly.
• The Cynic: Oscar, of course. At the end of "I've Got Two", when everyone enthuses about what a great song it was, he simply says "I didn't like it."
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The album serves as a time capsule for all the elements in season 1 of the show that soon changed.
  • Matt Robinson as Gordon.
  • Big Bird being portrayed as The Ditz with a yokel accent.
  • Oscar with a more pronounced Bronx accent.
  • Cookie Monster not having crystallized as a full-blown character yet, so he has a voice closer to Grover (though the singing voice is close to the classic voice).
  • The Anything People as a separate troupe of Muppets who changed personalities from sketch to sketch. Starting in season 2, the methodology shifted to using the Anything Muppets as templates for continuing characters.
  • Caroll Spinney playing some of the Anything characters. With the hiring of Jerry Nelson and Fran Brill in season 2, Spinney focused on just playing Big Bird and Oscar.
  • Bob McGrath and Loretta Long pitching in with Anything voices too.
  • A slightly deeper-voiced Kermit and Ernie (and a more subdued Bert).
• Everything Is an Instrument: "Rubbie Duckie" is punctuated by squeaks from the title toy.
• Have a Gay Old Time: The pun on the old meaning of "queer" in "ABC-DEF-GHI".

  It starts out like an "A" word as anyone can see
  But somewhere in the middle it gets awful "QR" to me

• "I Am" Song:
  • "Bein' Green" is Kermit talking about how he accepts himself for who he is.
  • "I Love Trash" is all about defining Oscar as a character.
• In the Style of: Most of the songs are done in the standard show tune-inspired Sesame Street style, but "Up and Down" has a big Soul influence.
• Incredibly Lame Fun: Early signs of Bert's devotion to this in "Everybody Wash", as he calls out wonky body parts like "kneecaps" and "big toe", in contrast to Ernie saying obvious ones.
• Kids Rock: Four songs are sung by a group of kids, including the theme song.
• Lyrical Dissonance: "Somebody Come and Play" is a bouncy, happy-sounding song sung from the point-of-view of a child who can't find any playmates.
• Medium Awareness:
  • In "Everybody Wash" Ernie acknowledges "The boys and girls at home listening to the record".
  • The closing announcement on the vinyl version.

  Gordon: Well, it's time for us to go. But you know what? Any time you want to visit Sesame Street again, all you have to do is take this record off the record player, turn it over, put it back on the record player, and put the needle back on at the beginning.

• Running Gag: Oscar announcing that he's going to sing a song, only to have the others stop him, until he finally disrupts things to sing "I Love Trash".
• Shout-Out: Big Bird's poem before "J-Jump" is done in the style of Henry Gibson's poetry recitations on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In.
• Sound-to-Screen Adaptation: "Up and Down" had only been performed as a snippet on the show, and the version here was its first full-length performance. While the monster who lost his cookie didn't officially have a name here, once Cookie Monster was established a character, a performance of Cookie Monster and another monster (an early version of Herry Monster, but retaining the Jim Henson voice) lip-syncing the album take was taped for the show.
• Tenor Boy: Bob's familiar tenor voice and guy-next-door personality are established here.
• Theme Tune Extended: The less-commonly-heard bridge of the show's theme song ("It's a magic carpet ride...") is included in the rendition here.
• Trademark Favorite Food: The Guttural Growler monster in "Up and Down" loves cookies. The song itself went a long way toward establishing the ravenous blue monster who appeared in season 1 as specifically being a Cookie Monster.
• Trash of the Titans: "I Love Trash" is Oscar's celebration of this.

Parodies of the song 'Sesame Street'

Article

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From 'Sing' to 'Put Down the Duckie' and more. Sesame Street has produced so many hits over the past half century that it would be hard for even the Earl to keep up with them. In addition to new songs written for the series, the classic children's program has also created an impressive number of song parodies, often performed by the original artists themselves. Here are 13 of the greatest and most stupid of all time. nine0003

1. "My Triangle"

James Blunt captivated melancholy teenagers and mainstream radio worldwide with his raucous ballad "You're Beautiful" in 2005, complete with a music video of him undressing on a snow-covered cliff and diving into the icy waters below ( presumably at his death). Although it was originally too painful for preschoolers, Sesame Street Long Lost Triangle Version replaces Angel featuring Angles and depicts an anthropomorphic triangle that appears after Blunt has lost hope of ever seeing his friend again. Blunt helped write the melody, adding some cheeky geometric jargon to the song: "It must be those angles that put a smile on your face, not to mention the hypotenuse."

how big is the international space station

2. "Hey Food"

With some help, The Beetles Cookie Monster turns the Beatles' "Hey Jude" into a cute ode to food that will probably make you feel more like the manic-eyed monster than ever before. The track's main themes include the inability to choose what food you want, the inability to stop snacking, and the recognition that food - whether it's "dry toast or something wetter" - always makes us feel better. nine0003

3. "Hi Sammy!"

Carol Channing takes on this sizzling parody with such flair you'd think she won a Tony Award for playing Dolly in a Broadway play. Hello Dolly! (she did). With lots of lingering S sounds and a cuddly Muppet snake named "Sammy", the song serves as a way to teach youth how to pronounce them S And an advertising campaign to combat the widespread cultural notion that snakes are just evil. nine0003

4. "Born to Add"

"Born to Add" by Bruce Stringbin and the S. Street Band somehow manages to capture all the rock and roll energy of the desperate working-class youth of Bruce's "Born to Run" Springsteen and make it simple arithmetic. . The leather-clad lead singer and his associates roam the neighborhood counting cars, trash cans and cops, and the track culminates in Clarissa's fiery saxophone solo and a dance party that even cops take part in. Stringbean also executes "Barn". in the USA", featuring an onomatopoeic choir of backing vocalists. nine0003

5. "Slime to the Moon"

Tony Bennett's parody of the classic crooner "Fly Me to the Moon" talks about Slimey's astronaut training and subsequent launch into space, explaining that a worm "has to be nervous/needs guts and stickiness / When everything goes upside down. While the phrase "Let him crawl through mud and dung / on Jupiter or Mars" may not be scientifically accurate, the idea of ​​sending a worm into space isn't that far off - scientists studied them on the International Space Station to understand how microgravity affects anatomy. muscles. nine0003

6. "It's not heavy, it's my feather"

It doesn't matter which version of "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" you listen to - Hollies, Neil Diamond or someone else - it will most likely be slow dark and full of emotion. The opposite is true for Sesame Street Performed - A buoyant country song performed by an animated chicken who looks and sounds suspiciously like Dolly Parton. In it, she lists a bunch of quirky and heavy items she doesn't take on a trip (anchors, anvils, hippos, chests of drawers, etc.) and discusses the merits of packing her feathers, which, you guessed it, isn't heavy. nine0003

7. "You're really holding me."

Smokey Robinson spends a good three minutes trying to keep his composure as he looks the letter in the eye. U tries to hug him with an iron grip and no concept of boundaries. In addition to swapping U in the original song for U , songwriter Christopher Cerf added some suitable U words to illustrate the situation, including " U means uptight / That's how I feel / That's how I feel / that you were grabbed for a letter, unpleasant. nine0003

8. "Eighteen Sandwiches"

Although you have to go through puberty to truly identify with Alice Cooper's disturbing anthem "I'm Eighteen", Sesame Street Parody is something even toddlers can understand. In the animated video, the girl tries to decide which sandwich to choose for lunch, hesitating over "tuna, turkey, peanut butter, grilled cheese or salami/ham or jelly, chicken salad, minced liver, pastrami", etc.. As our poor, conflicted heroine flips through her list of 18 choices, you might be wondering, "Which home kitchen is stocked with all these ingredients?" or "I would like my child to love even two different types of sandwiches. " In the end, she gives up on the whole puzzle, opting for the pizza, which, depending on who you ask, is really just an open-faced sandwich. nine0003

9. "I want it (but I'm waiting)"

If any Muppet was born to embody the spirit of Icona Pop's insane "I Love It" collaboration with Charli XCX, it was Cookie Monster. His chaotic nature sets the perfect tone for "I Want (But I Wait)", a catchy number about the importance of delayed gratification. In Sesame Street , the music video lives up to the original almost scene by scene, featuring graffiti alleys, lyrics flashing on screen, and neon-lit dance parties. "Me Want It (But Me Wait)" ends with Cookie Monster devouring a well-deserved cookie, and it's probably safe to assume that the party members in the Icona Pop video end their night of fun with a snack. nine0003

10. "Don't Take Your Guns to Town"

"Don't Take Your Guns to Town" is the story of Johnny Cashian himself about a young shepherd named Billy Joe who ignores his mother's pleas to leave his guns at home and ends up dying in a short a bar fight after tasting liquor for the first time. In the Sesame Street Parody, on the other hand, Big Bird is depicted as "Big Bird", a "cow bird" heading into town while counting the number of units, and receives an alarm when Count von Graf and the Countess indicate that he is not knows how to count more than one. Instead of shooting him on the spot or something, they offer to be his friend and teach him how to count, making this parody number one on Johnny Cash's short list of happy songs. nine0003

11. "Kids just love brushing their teeth"

All it takes to be skeptical of the theory that girls just want to have fun is to hear Cyndi Lauper's new wave classic on the subject once. In the '90s, Sesame Street tried to harness the power of an infectious pop song and use it to sell kids something that hardly has a reputation for being funny: brushing teeth. "Kids Just Love to Brush" is a Lauper-style muppet who jumps up and down with his friends and hums lyrics like "It's a party every time we brush our teeth. " nine0003

12. "Being a square is trendy"

While the transition to "My Triangle" from "You're Beautiful" may have required some extra imagination, turning Huey Lewis and News into "Trendy Square" with a literal square Seems like too great an opportunity to pass up. In the animated video, a smiling red square briefly sings about four equal sides before rushing to dance and play with triangles, circles and other classic shapes to emphasize that it's cool to be anything. Lewis later told a fan that the group was happy to let Sesame Street use the song. "I think it's cute," he said.

13. "What Makes You So Useful"

The bright, serious faces of Harry, Liam, Louis, Niall and Zayn fit so well into the landscape around 2014 Sesame Street a music video that almost makes you wish they were regular cast members. With wacky lyrics like "U look Elmo upside down / U there's a unicorn dressed up as a clown" and "U under that cow an udder / U look it's Bert's unibrow", this utilitarian spoof of 'What Makes You Beautiful' is so same criminal catchy, like the original. nine0003

My mother is a drug addict. How Sesame Street Explains Adult Problems to Kids

October 11, 2019

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Photo copyright, Zach Hyman/ Sesame Workshop

Carly (left) tells Elmo why she ended up in a foster family

In one of the most popular children's shows in the world - "Sesame Street" - addition - new Carly's character, a six-and-a-half-year-old green fluffy doll, explains to her friends that she lives in a foster family because her real mother suffers from drug addiction. nine0118