Canadian Musician - November/December 2018 | Page 40

Creating For Kids!
Ouimet is one of those
annoying musicians who is
really good at a number of instru-
ments – drums, bass, guitar, piano,
lap steel, and hopefully not much more.
It seems there are few he won’t take a
stab at. He even called me once to
record him playing tuba. “Have you
ever played a tuba before?” I asked.
“Nope,” he replied. This spirit of adven-
turism, along with an over-developed sense
of humour, high degree of creativity, and the
ability to turn projects around quickly, has
made him a fast success in the world of kids’
music on TV.
MATT OUIMET
And word has spread. His current proj-
ects include the aforementioned Sesame
Workshop show, Esme and Roy, and the new
Disney offering, Go Away Unicorn, both of
which premiered in the latter half of 2018.
Understandably, this breakneck career
shift has come at a cost to his career as a
performing sideman. Ouimet was a regular
player in the Ottawa and national scene and
had to start turning people down once his
Nickelodeon schedule sunk in. He even had
to decline an invitation to join Hawksley
Workman’s touring band. “I’d rather play
more shows,” he laments. “It just takes a lot of
time to do the scores. With the Disney show,
for example, for every 11 minutes of footage,
I have seven to eight minutes of music hap-
pening. That’s a lot of music. And there are
certain projects where a minute of music can
take a day to create.”
So as it turns out, the notion of striking
a balance within his current career configura-
tion is more of a conceptual distraction than
a viable reality. Yet I’d be remiss not to say
that for many people, this would be a nice
40 • C A N A D I A N M U S I C I A N
problem to have. As for drawing a compari-
son to the old guard in his industry, Ouimet
points out that, “What the old guys had the
luxury of was that when they recorded a
take, it was done. They just walked away,
because if they had to come back [to make a
change] it would be so expensive.”
In an age where there’s a computer
in everyone’s pocket, we can all attest to
the reality that technology has not lived up
to the promise of more leisure time. “Just
because there’s a washing machine doesn’t
mean that you can’t find more housework
to do. You just make a different mess, ‘cause
that thing’s going,” Ouimet adds. “They also
had much more time to
compose, because as the
technology improves for
us, so does the speed of
everybody’s roles,” refer-
ring to today’s editors,
writers, and producers,
all emailing and texting
demands to each other
and expecting results
yesterday.
But he still looks to
the past for creative inspi-
ration or, more accurately,
for reference as a compar-
ative benchmark to his
own work. Considering the orchestral scores
of Carl Stalling and Raymond Scott in Looney
Tunes (which he studied for his work on
Teletoon’s The Bagel and Becky Show) or the
music of the Toronto-produced Spiderman
cartoon in the ‘60s, or the pleasantly high-
brow Disney music of the Fantasia era, Oui-
met doesn’t like the idea of dumbing things
down just because it’s music for kids.
“The producers are very strict about
things and they have a very defined man-
date, so I always try to sneak in a few gems
of either chords or odd notes that you
wouldn’t normally hear,” he laughs.
As someone who grew up with Bugs
Bunny, Schoolhouse Rock!, and The Muppet
Show, I see no point in aiming any lower.
OUT IN SPACE
“How many songs do you have about pants?”
I ask over a pint of beer with Ian Goodtimes,
bandleader for Toronto-based party band
The Mercenaries and founding member of
children’s space rock outfit Space Chums.
“Twenty-five,” he replies in his typical
deadpan. “There’s ‘Pants Situation,’ ‘Kung-Fu
Pants,’ ‘Rock and Roll Trousers,’ ‘Have You Seen
My Pants?’… Did I mention ‘Pants Situation?’”
I suppose this is the kind of fruit born
from a habit of writing a song a day while on
the road with your wife as the tech crew for
children’s entertainment company Koba. “If
you write a song every day, they’re gonna be
about pants, where’s my keys, and farts,” he
adds nonchalantly.
Goodtimes is a hard-working Toronto
bass player and singer with his thumb in
many pies, as often has to be the case to
make a living playing music. Primarily, he
runs The Mercenaries, an eccentric band
in the trenches of Toronto’s bar scene that
plays a combination of a few originals and
a wide array of covers, with soul music from
the ‘50s as a starting point. Obscure audi-
ence requests are always welcome. (Just try
to stump them on TV show themes.) They
play danceable (and funny) shows in Toron-
to on a regular basis, mostly at the Dakota
Tavern, and also do weddings for anyone
brave enough to book them after seeing
one of their high-energy, antics-rich shows.
“Did you like that?” he’ll ask a prospective
young couple in the Dakota’s Ossington
basement, “Cause that’s what I’m gonna do
at your wedding. I’m not gonna play ‘Brown
Eyed Girl.’”
Know thyself.
While the song-a-day habit was trans-
lated into a morning ritual with their two
young children, Ian Goodtimes and his wife
Lindsay Goodtimes (their chosen surname
offers a glimpse into their shared philosophy
of life) are no longer on the road facilitating
giant mascot-headed Caillou and Backyar-
digans shows for tots; however, their years
a decade ago running those shows made
them realize they could create their own
show for kids.
“But let’s do something cool,” Ian sug-
gested as a starting point. So along with
Koba cohort Kate Keenan, they invented
Space Chums. “I would call it the Beastie Boys
for kids,” Ian claims. “We’re from outer space.
I’m a disco cosmonaut, my wife’s a space
ninja, and Kate is like a Bjork weirdo. We fly in
from outer space and entertain kids with our
outer space rock and roll. It’s sample-based
and heavy,” he further explains, containing
parent-targeted samples ranging from Phil
Collins to Kraftwerk to Public Enemy.
And while they do have two albums out