My kids and I like to listen to music in our car as we drive places. Nothing unusual. We’ve listened to Disney’s Greatest, Disney’s Princess, and Disney’s Children’s Favorites a number of times. We all know the songs and order by heart. Recently, however, we’ve taken a bit of a different direction.
After Halloween last year, my husband put The Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack into our car CD player, where it happily stayed for weeks. The kids were enchanted! It was something very different from what they were used to, a little sinister, a lot of drama and depth, and a few purely instrumental tracks.
After Christmas, we switched to The Lion King Broadway Musical, which we’ve been listening to ever since. I thought that we would have been tired of it a long time ago, but when I tried to change the CD to something else, none of us were happy. It has familiar songs, lots of new ones (some utilizing acoustic guitars), a distinctly African flavor, and more fantastic instrumentals. Oh, and the singers are absolutely wonderful!
I’ve been seriously toying with the idea of putting on Joseph and His Technicolor Dream Coat next. Les Mis is fun too, but the content is a little over their heads right now. Same with Phantom of the Opera, though we have put it on for them before, and they did like it.
At home, my kids have more favorites that they like to dance to. Again, Disney is prominent, but they really like some others as well. One of the more notable is the Nutcracker Sweat. They like to be the fairies, flowers, and mushrooms in Fantasia, or Clara from the Nutcracker.
Another favorite is called Kameo. Believe it or not, it’s a videogame soundtrack, and it’s really good. There are the brave, hero songs, the soft, background world music, a plucky bassoon number, and lots more. My kids have dubbed the bassoon song the “duck” song. It’s their particular favorite, and they always jump around and dance when it’s on.
If we feel like Japanese music, we put in a compellation of songs from Hayao Miyazaki’s movies. These include such titles as Kiki’s Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, Castle in the Sky, Porco Roso, and Naussica. Miyazaki is Japan’s equivalent of Walt Disney, and his works are absolutely wonderful!
My kids also like to play Christmas music all year round, and their favorite (until they left it out and it got broken) was Manheim Steamroller Christmas Extraordinaire. It uses a lot of synthesizers and almost no vocals to play a number of Christmas favorites.
My oldest, who loves drama, also likes Rachmaninoff; very intense, dramatic, emotional, and complex piano music.
Anyway, those are some of the CDs we like to listen to. I like the idea of introducing a lot of different kinds of music to my kids, and why not make it good music that I enjoy as well?
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