Review: Peter Himmelman's Trampoline

Grammy Nominee Peter Himmelman's has released a new children’s album titled “My Trampoline.” His prior album was nominated for a Grammy and won national awards from Parent’s Choice and NAPPA. Unfortunately, I cannot understand how that could have been. In my opinion, the music on this CD has no true focus nor does it seem to have any goals of helping children with development stages. While the tracks are generally upbeat and fast paced to keep the children moving throughout the duration of the music, I doubt that many will put much effort into memorizing the lyrics. Some of the titles are also rather questionable for me to play for my kids. These titles include “Ten Billion blades of Grass” and “Peter was a Pinhead.” Most young children have no idea how many a million is never mind ten billion. And I thought the idea of children music was to avoid name calling? Peter was a pinhead, the song made no real sense and the title is just inappropriate. If I needed music to play in the yard to entertain the kids with background noise this may be ok. As far as playing with an educational purpose, I just don’t see it.  - Chris  B.

Editor's note: Loved it! Fans of They Might Be Giants' boundary-pushing word play and clever absurdity would be a good audience for this music; those with more mainstream musical taste should stick to more conventional fare. Chris and I will just have to disagree about this one.