Search - Recess Monkey :: Field Trip

With tremendous exhilaration, independent children s recording group Recess Monkey has set a June 9 release for their fifth studio CD, Field Trip. A companion piece to Recess Monkey s 2008 release, Tabby Road, the CD includes material from Recess Monkey s Field Trip Recording Session at which kids in the audience (the group s most devoted Monkey-heads ) were recorded singing live, during a Valentine s Day 2008 Seattle show.

The three members of Recess Monkey are teachers who met while working at the same Seattle school. The trio s genuine enthusiasm for a grad school project morphed into their 2005 debut release Welcome to Recess Monkey Town. This was followed by another popular (and zoologically correct) hit, Aminal House. The teachers (Jack Forman, Daron Henry, and Drew Holloway) made history with their next release, Wonderstuff, the first double CD children s album produced from material generated at a kids summer camp workshop. Likewise, 2008 s Tabby Road and the newest Recess Monkey album, Field Trip, each came from real life children s experiences.

Notes Jack Forman, All of the songs on Field Trip were inspired by field trips we ve taken with our classes. The album is part Magical Mystery Tour, part Mr. Rogers, and part Muppet Show, but it s all based on the kids that we teach and our memories of being young. We recorded the songs during weekends and holiday vacations from school this past winter in the music room at the school where we all met and where Drew and I still teach tapping into the energy that fills our classrooms and those halls every day. Recording this album felt as though, after being at sea for a year teaching and playing shows, we had briefly come back into port to share some of the things that we'd heard!

Field Trip starts where Tabby Road left off, putting a wacky, fantastical edge on the "everyday lives of kids. The world of Recess Monkey continues to expand in this album, with a whole new cast of characters: sack lunches that come to life while their owners explore new territory, a brigade of lice that invades a classroom (something the members of Recess Monkey have all encountered as teachers), and even an octopus with a penchant for "knock-knock jokes. Field Trip s music leads off with Fort, an up-tempo celebration of the fact that a magical trip is never very far away. With that, the adventures, big and small, begin in earnest (no permission slip needed). There are misty marshmallow fields to explore, a chance to hide away on pirate ship, the adventure of getting lost at a bubble factory, and the long, winding road to the nurse s refrigerator for an ice pack made much easier when you're with a good friend. Field Trip is like a sack lunch when you're far from home. Open it up and be greeted with something familiar and comforting: another batch of expertly produced sing-alongs from those Beatles-lovin', shenanigan songsters, Recess Monkey. As Drew Holloway puts it, There's a giant brownie of sugary pop inside but the whole thing is very new-tritious! Adds Daron Henry, With Field Trip, we ve moved beyond the map of Monkey Town that we constructed on the cover of Tabby Road, both musically and lyrically. But we re still Recess Monkey, and we keep our traditions alive! In Field Trip, after four albums of love and adoration for John Vanderslice, Mayor Monkey finally is able to reach him on the phone... well, almost.