Rockabye Rally: Swingset Serenade brings big band berceuses back

Melanie Dill and Tom Johnson. // Photo by Matt Whitesell

Anyone who’s been a parent knows that music for children can be a mixed bag. For every Yo Gabba Gabba! and its wide range of musical performances, there’s “Baby Shark,” and for every They Might Be Giants, there’s a machine-generated YouTube monstrosity likely to induce night terrors. For those parents pulling their hair out at having to listen to Raffi’s “Baby Beluga” or “Let It Go” one-thousandth time more, there is hope, and it’s courtesy of Lawrence musicians Melanie Dill and Tom Johnson.

Their new album—Mel and Friends present Swingset Serenade—is a throwback to a time when kids’ music could be more than just a solo musician strumming chords on a guitar. The record’s ten songs encompass an array of genres, such as big band, Latin jazz, and more—entertaining musical complexity while also offering songs catchy enough to grab a little one’s wandering attention.

In short, Swingset Serenade is family entertainment in the truest sense of the word, in that you can put it on in the car or living room and everyone enjoys it, as opposed to tolerating the music for the sanity’s sake. It’s the musical equivalent of vintage entertainment like The Princess Bride or, as Johnson puts it, The Muppet Show.

“We’re all in ‘this room’ of a certain age where you can remember where The Muppet Show had Loretta Swit and a great version of a song, or Ben Vereen or whoever,” Johnson says. “That was literally a show produced for adults, with that level of production value and quality.”

As Johnson puts it, “That was a huge event and as a kid, you’re like, ‘I can’t believe somebody made this for me to watch.’ I think if you’re an adult watching that back, then you’re probably like, ‘I can’t believe somebody made that for me and my kid to watch.’”

“A huge event” is precisely the way to describe Swingset Serenade. Firstly, the album features Dill and Johnson, who conceived, wrote, and performed on every track, with Johnson mixing the whole thing. There are nearly 30 musicians on brass, guitar, piano, drums, and percussion. It was recorded at five different studios in Kansas City and Lawrence, with 14+ kids on various songs, including Dill’s daughter Aurora, who is now a mother herself.

That last bit might need a little explanation, and for good reason. Work on Swingset Serenade began shortly after Dill’s second album Rainbow Lemonade, which released in 2002, but, as things do, life got in the way.

“Pretty soon after my second album, I started this and Tom was there with me and we did quite a bit,” Dill says. “A fair amount, anyway.”
“We started strong and then a lot of life happened for both of us in between,” he says. “At some point somewhere in the process, we realized it wasn’t a record like the other two records Melanie made.”

The other two records Dill made–Rainbow Lemonade and 2000’s Alphabet Parade–feature more songs of shorter lengths, and while great, don’t have the theme or focus found on Swingset Serenade, rather more aimed at the younger set than the family as a whole.

“After some early songs, we knew that Melanie wanted to do jazz, or Latin, or bossa nova, or things like that,” Johnson says, explaining that Dill knew that she wanted to have something that split the difference really well, wherein parents can handle repeated plays due to certain maturity level, while also appealing to children.

After four or five songs within the first year or two of their partnership, Dill was then raising a child and embarking on a new career. “I became a school teacher,” Dill says. She currently teaches Spanish at Eudora Middle School, along with teaching fifth graders at Eudora Elementary. “That, in and of itself, it’s a whole other thing, and I think I just didn’t have the brain space to do it.”

In the intervening years, whenever Johnson and Dill had the time and ability, they’d chip away at music for Dill’s third album, eventually ending up with more than double the tracks that would eventually find their way to Swingset Serenade. Fast forward to four years ago and the pair realized they had a lot of material that was interesting and good—they just needed to winnow down and focus on what could fit an album that feels like a concept record.

“Something that has low-to-no fluff and still has a continuum and tells a story,” Johnson says. “Probably about four years ago, we’re like, ‘Oh, we’re really close.’”

In fact, they were really close, and then a pandemic happened. COVID limitations presented some serious complications in trying to complete a large-scale, orchestrated record with a big band and children’s vocals, but the resulting record currently in constant rotation on our turntable speaks to how much the effort was worth it.

Big, boisterous songs like the title track could follow Eileen Barton’s, “If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake” on an episode of The Retro Cocktail Hour, without anyone knowing they were recorded 75 years apart. The joyous, giggle-inducing wordplay of “Ruth’s Couscous” wouldn’t be out of place on a Dr. Demento compilation. The album’s closer “Bedtime” is quiet jazz, which could be the sort of song India Adams sang to her kids after coming home from a cabaret revue. It’s a delight from start to finish, and if there weren’t a copyright date of UPC code on the back of the album jacket, you’d never know it was modern—That sense of timelessness is what made this project appeal to both Dill and Johnson.

“I just love that style,” Dill says. “I mean, that’s just something I’ve always just been into. Jazz, bossa nova, and so on—That’s always appealed to me—that sound. Even though I do play guitar and I will strum and do things like that, and I used to a lot back in the day, around the time of my first two albums, it’s not my preferred style. My preferred style is a more lush sound.”

“It’s a throwback approach to making something for children,” Johnson says. “I mean, I would not dare to compare us to the actual 1950s and ‘60s era when they were making children’s records with big bands and people like Ella Fitzgerald, but I haven’t heard anything like that in the space today.”

(L-R) Melanie Dill, Tom Johnson, and Irie Studer. // Photo by Matt Whitesell

The pair agrees that the overall effect they want from Swingset Serenade is that they hope people will be overwhelmed that they would expend that much effort and that many resources to make something for their kids and for them.

“That’s the emotional impact, we hope,” Johnson says. “One of the best things about it is, kids don’t know what jazz is. They don’t know what a genre is. They just know, ‘This is really interesting.’ There’s a lot of stuff happening in here. There are a lot of different sounds or instruments or momentum or motion. They’re not gonna care the way an 18- to 22-year-old will care if it’s jazz. I think that that’s a charming part of what kids bring to a listening environment.”

“We shouldn’t be skimpy when it comes to kids,” Dill says. “Just give it all. They deserve quality music.”

The parents get quality, too. The vinyl version of the record was pressed by Vinyl de Paris in France, and it does the music proud as it comes off the turntable and through your speakers. It’s an impressive object to hold in one’s hands and read off the back of all the people who made this possible. While Swingset Serenade was released digitally in the fall of 2023, the whole reason we’re speaking with Dill and Johnson is because the album had just been released physically.

As Johnson puts it, “This is why we’re here. ‘Cause it’s real.”

“To see it and to hold it, I guess it’s just like, ‘Oh look, something that was in my brain,’” Dill jokes. “To actually see it manifest, like it’s an actual thing, it’s just not in my mind anymore—It’s actually something that can be shared and actually handed off to someone? It’s a pretty significant feeling.”

That said, while the album is out, there are no solid plans to recreate this live, although that’s not a hard and fast thing. As Johnson puts it, “under the right auspices,” they’d be amenable.

“We would love, love, love, love if school kids come and see this,” Dill dreams. “I think that it would just be such a great thing for kids to sit, watch, and see it live.”

Swingset Serenade Album Art

Because of the level of quality contained within the album’s ten songs, any live performances would have to be of a high quality themselves, the two musicians continue. As Johnson straightforwardly states, “We’re not going to cut any corners to do that because that’s just who we are at this point. I think we can’t go backward.”

The beautiful thing about Swingset Serenade, however, is because it’s so produced, Dill and Johnson have the charts, parts, dialogue, and lyric sheets, so it is definitely reproducible in a live setting. Given that songs from the album have made it to airplay in places as far-flung as Mendocino, California, and Barcelona, Spain, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that this may find life outside the area in which it was gestated and birthed.

“We’re interested to see what does or doesn’t happen out there,” Johnson says. “And if nothing happens, fine. But if something does happen, again, it’s the same idea of the parts are there and the charts are there and it lives beyond Melanie or me in that sense.”

“As exciting as it is for me to think of other people listening to this and enjoying it, it just occurred to me—other people outside of this playing it and enjoying it that way, how cool is that?” Dill says. “Now that’s a whole other level of experience.”

Mel and Friends present Swingset Serenade can be found online at swingsetserenade.com.