Canadian Musician - November/December 2018 | Page 39

JEREMY FISHER
genre’s biggest names, such as They Might
Be Giants, Dan Zane, and Lisa Loeb, all came
from and continue to balance their kids’
music with their grownup music careers,
and Fisher is no different. He has released
six studio albums (two of which earned him
Juno nominations) bouncing between folk,
pop, and rock, and is known for such singles
as “High School,” “Uh-Oh,” and “Cigarette.”
Jeremy Fisher Junior, on the other
hand, has released one record called High-
way to Spell (Get it? That’s for the parents…)
that was released in early 2018 and definite-
ly contains no single called “Cigarette.” But
Jeremy Fisher Junior does sound very much
like the familiar folky side of Jeremy Fisher
people have come to love. It even looks
like him, with a cartoon avatar on the cover
sporting his signature big hair.
Like a true kindie artist, he’s made an
album with mom and dad in mind, “with
little winks and nods to parents that kids
won’t even get,” he says over the phone
from his Ottawa home. “I want to be like
the Pixar movie of family performers; the
parents come to the show and there’s just
as much in there for them.” So how does an
indie artist become a kindie artist?
For Fisher, it was part strategy and part
reality. “When I knew my girlfriend and I
were having a kid, I took three months off
from performing cause I didn’t want to be
on the road and miss the birth of my first
child. In that time, I had planned to make
a children’s album because that’s what I
would be thinking about, and I sat down
and just stared at a blank page for three
months. Then we had our daughter and she
started sitting up and cooing and smiling
and I started entertaining her with my gui-
tar and the songs just came out. After tak-
ing more time off to look after her, I found
that I had an album’s worth of material, so
I recorded it.”
That was the reality part. Now comes
the strategy part: “I’ve made this plan to
sort of map along with her childhood and
make five kids’ records – an album a year,
to be released over the next 10 years. And
that’ll be the chapter in my life where I’m
observing childhood. Honestly, I don’t
know what else to write about right now.”
Of course the reality of being a pro-
fessional musician means you’re often re-
quired to be away from home, sometimes
for extended periods. To balance career
and home needs, Fisher has come up with
a plan to “work twice as hard, half as much.”
That means doing Junior shows during the
day and grownup shows in the evening
whenever possible. More shows over fewer
days and less time away from his family.
Smart math.
So reality has Fisher down on the car-
pet these days, and his strategy is all about
embracing it. It turns out it’s a process
he really enjoys. “One thing that’s been
interesting from a creative point of view is
that the Junior stuff really satisfies my folky
side. It satisfies my need for going out with
an acoustic guitar, talking to a crowd, and
working a crowd as a solo act. And it’s giv-
ing me leeway to experiment more with
heavier band stuff or more electronic stuff
in the regular Jeremy Fisher thing.”
He appears to see the value of this
new facet of his musical persona as some-
thing that will grow with him. Fisher, now
41, has been reexamining some of the
songs in his grownup set that he’d written
in his late teens. “I’m a completely different
person physically and emotionally than
I was at that time. I never thought about
being 60 years old when I started out,” he
states as he contemplates Jeremy Junior
becoming a senior. “Now it doesn’t seem
that far away. And doing some of those
songs at that age would be a tough sell for
me. I’d just be going through the motions,
whereas with the kids’ stuff, I could be
singing these songs when I’m a grandfa-
ther and they’ll still work.”
Fisher sums it up this way: “If I can still
go out and play circle time at the public
library as a 60-year-old a couple of after-
noons a week, that makes sense to me. I
love doing this, and I want to do it forever.
I don’t ever want to retire. I just want to
keep playing music.”
ON THE SCREEN
So does recent Toronto transplant Matt Oui-
met know Joe Raposo and Jeff Moss? “That
sounds familiar… Uh, no,” he sighs into the
phone from his apartment in Liberty Village.
Yet when I mention the songs they
wrote, he laughs. “Oh yeah, of course! I ac-
tually listened to that yesterday – Sesame
Street Fever and the album that starts with
the theme.”
It makes sense that Ouimet (pro-
nounced wee-met) has those on his playlist
as he is now employed by the same compa-
ny, Sesame Workshop, that hired those early
pioneers of children’s television music.
Ouimet claims his new career in TV
music for kids was all an accident. In 2015,
he had been working at Dave’s Drum Shop
in Ottawa and a regular customer who he
was friendly with popped in and asked, “Hey,
could you write some songs for tomorrow
for this show I have?”
It came as a surprise, since nobody at
the shop knew he was in the TV industry.
Ouimet said yes, of course – “Because that’s
what you say,” he laughs. As it turns out,
he was saying yes to writing music for the
pilot of a new Nickelodeon show called Pig
Goat Banana Cricket. He ran home, faked his
way through some legal documents, and
wrote and recorded three songs for the next
morning. Three weeks later, the show was
picked up and he was the official songwrit-
er. Two years later, his work on the program
would earn him an Emmy nomination.
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