You could fill an inflatable jumpy house with the graying indie-rockers now performing for children. The list includes Dan Zanes, Lisa Loeb and Twin Cities natives Justin Roberts and Adam Levy. But until New York musician Morgan Taylor picked up his Sharpie to create Gustafer Yellowgold, no alternative musician had successfully merged lush, melodic pop with self-produced animated storytelling.
That would be reason enough for Wiggles-weary parents to pick up a Gustafer Yellowgold DVD/CD, or to take their kids to a live show by Taylor, who will play with a band next Saturday in front of an animated backdrop at the Cedar Cultural Center. But Taylor's skill in reimagining the children's video is such that comparisons have been made to the work of Dr. Seuss and the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine."
With an animated musical fable centered on the life of a mute orphan from the sun, Taylor has created a melancholy and playful children's cartoon with a careful attention to nature and a dreamy sense of wonder.
Beginning with his first children's DVD in 2005, "Gustafer Yellowgold's Wide Wild World," and continuing with the DVD/CD packages "Gustafer Yellowgold's Have You Never Been Yellow?" and the just-released "Gustafer Yellowgold's Mellow Fever," the one-time record-store clerk and amateur illustrator has produced three volumes of unconventional children's entertainment that stand in contrast to the frenetic, somewhat sardonic fare that has often come to define the genre.
In a series of pop vignettes set to original '70s-style rock songs, Gustafer builds rocket shoes, struggles with loneliness, stares with Zen-like appreciation at the lives of ants, and contemplates the mortality of birds and even his own afterlife. Characters are often crying in Gustafer's world, sometimes for no apparent reason, and with the action taking place on window frames, under bushes and in kitchen sinks, the stories transfer the viewer into the reality of being 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7 -- long stretches of boredom, punctuated by sudden bouts of fun, bracketed by emotional whiplash.
His live show has earned praise from highbrow venues such as the New Yorker and New York magazine, which last year called Taylor the best children's performer in the city.
Then there is the matter of Gustafer's address. He lives in the woods of Minnesota. It turns out that Taylor, 38, once harbored a love for Trip Shakespeare, the innovative late-'80s rock quartet, whose bassist, John Munson, will accompany Taylor here.
"It's sort of an inside joke to myself," he says. Taylor describes having "an epiphany" after one of his bands opened for Trip Shakespeare in his hometown of Dayton, Ohio, but it would take years of slow going for the fruit of his labors to end up in Barnes & Noble. Today he records music and hand draws each image in his apartment, then ships the images to an animator for slow-pans and the insertion of small movements like eye blinks.
The result is a musical "moving storybook," and one that is decidedly less interested in the learning of letters, the braining of young viewers with sing-songy refrains or the application of convenient moral endings than it is in the notion that children's hearts are often raw, complicated construction zones.
"Yeah, there's some crying in most every song," Taylor says with a laugh. "I guess I didn't realize that until later. I guess I've always liked melancholy art and music, and I probably was a crybaby when I was a kid, and when I created this character I thought, 'Oh, he cries a lot.' "
