We received a lovely note from New England listeners:

Hi Bill,

Happy birthday and congratulations on 20 years of Spare the Rock!

My son and I started listening to your show in 2022. I was commuting 40 minutes to work each way and my son was in preschool on the campus where I worked. Spending 80 minutes in the car, five times a week with a 3-year-old was NOT one of my best thought-out plans, but it meant that in my desperate search for music to listen to on the drive, I found Spare the Rock, and it was the best thing to come out of that year of driving back and forth. 

He quickly latched on to “The World’s on Fire (and we still fall in love),” and it was amazing to hear him recognize when you’d say, “We’ve got some Parker Woodland coming up…” He’d go, “Parker Woodland! My favorite!” It’s still his all-time favorite, and at the top of his playlist. It’s been amazing to see him develop his own taste in music. He also loves Candy Band, Lunch Money, OKGo, and the album of David Bowie covers. His first live music experience was seeing Jazzy Ash at Wolf Trap, and he was big-time disappointed that she saved “Be Outside” for the last number– a learning moment about concerts, for sure!

I also love that your show is the musical equivalent of #weneeddiversebooks. Our local libraries are great at providing books that show kids of all cultures, skin tones, body shapes, and family configurations, and Spare the Rock helps me do that with the music he listens to, both in terms of topics/content as well as styles and genres of music. Although it did once get me into the situation of trying to explain the glass ceiling when he was only 4!

So my kid was happy and engaged in the car, which is a great win for me as a mom, but I have to say that Spare the Rock brought me back the joy of discovering new music and the serendipity of hearing old favorites. It’s just so wonderful to hear a song about dichotomous keys or chocolate milk alongside the likes of Soul Coughing or the Be Good Tanyas. Many times I’d start my work day by going to the website to investigate your playlists and track down a new artist or a song I recognized but never knew the name of. 

So thank you, thank you, thank you. Even though we’re relative newcomers to your 20-year run, there’s so much more I could say about what Spare the Rock has meant to our family. I hope it brings you as much joy as it gives us.

Jeff Giles has been a friend of mine for a very long time now—as he notes below, it’s been a long time since he stopped away from doing anything related to family music, but the friendship has remained. He’s also the mind behind and coproducer of Keep Hoping Machine Running, a fantastic Woody Guthrie tribute record on my little label. And he’s a fantastic writer and you should all subscribe to his blog right now. Thanks to him for these kind words:

In just over a month, we’ll have been on the air for twenty years. This is objectively weird to me. I’d like to ask y’all to help us celebrate. First, a little history:

We started with Valley Free Radio, then a brand new station–they started on August 9, 2005, and we started on August 12. (They’re having a twentieth birthday party too!) I’d been involved in the station for quite a while before it went on the air, and, while it had some bumps in the road leading up to getting on the air, and presumably there have been more, it’s still plugging along providing great community radio for the Pioneer Valley.

After about 2 1/2 years with VFR as our home station, the nice folks at 93.9 The River asked if we’d like to move over there. We said sure, as long as the show could still be on VFR too, and that was our home from February 2008 until May of 2015 (we started syndicating the show in the summer of 2012).

And then 2012 is when the mighty KUTX 98.9 became our flagship station.

We’re also a good long ways into Spare the Rock Records, which has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to amazing non-profits.

Anyway. I never expected to be doing radio for kids for this long or to operate a record label or to book a bunch of shows or any of the rest of it. Both of our kids are out of college, though listeners know they pop on the show regularly. But I still love jumping on the air weekly and doing events and all the rest.

And what I love most of all is hearing from listeners. So what I’d like is to hear from folks about what the show has meant for you. I’d especially love to hear from those former kids who might have some memories of the show or our events, or from parents or guardians or caretakers who found the show fun, or from folks without kids who enjoyed it, or from current kids, or from artists who appreciated getting some love from us. I guess that’s not narrowing it down much. If the show or our events or the releases on the record label have meant something to you, let me know.

You can record a short little thing for possible airplay; you can send me an email; you can record a video; you can send a carrier pigeon, I guess? I’m at show at sparetherock dot com.

In light of the recent flooding in the Hill Country, I’ll make a donation to Kerr County flood relief efforts for each submission.

I’m going to be doing the August shows pretty soon (like next week, most likely) so if you want to potentially be included in the “official” 20th birthday show (August 9), get something in soon? But I’ll celebrate throughout the late summer and fall some, most likely, too.

I love you all.

A year ago at this time, I was in Duluth, Minnesota, reeling from the unexpected death of our friend Jon Western. I was raised United Methodist, and to the extent I’m anything, I guess I’m that, but I think I was doing whatever my equivalent of sitting shiva is. I rented a little place on Park Point and spent a good bit of time looking at the lake and sitting with my grief.

I’m back here again after a year of deaths, some I guess expected and a lot not. There was Jon, but there was also Morgan, (another) Jon, Jeffrey, Mark, Alan, Art, Nancy. Our friend Erik died in 2020 but his celebration of life was in 2022 due to the pandemic.

I’m 51, and I know that some of this is just what happens. But half of those are my contemporaries and it seems too soon.

Anyway. Like I said, I’m back here and I’m trying to process. For me, a lot of processing stuff is music, and a lot of it is walking. So this morning I went for a walk from my place on one of Duluth’s many wonderful walking paths, and I wanted something familiar. So I put on Frank Turner’s album from a few years ago, Be More Kind.

Ella and I saw Frank open for The Hold Steady in December 2017 (here they are together, there are swears), so we got to hear one or two of the songs from that album early—I mostly remember him doing “Make America Great Again” (which isn’t what you might think it is).

“Don’t Worry” had honestly never made much of an impression on me other than as a pleasant album opener, one I’ve heard dozens (hundreds?) of times. But this time, walking with Lake Superior perhaps 1,000 feet to my left, avoiding slipping on the ice, it resonated.

Don’t worry if you don’t know what to do 
I’ve spent a little time in worried shoes 
I wore them out through walking 
It wasn’t any use 
Don’t worry if you don’t know what to do

Don’t give up if you just can’t get away 
Don’t listen to the bitter things they say 
Put those thoughts behind you 
Tomorrow’s a new day 
Don’t give up if you just can’t get away

And:

Don’t let your heart get hardened into stone 
Or lose yourself in looking at your phone 
So many so-called friends 
And still you feel alone 
You should spend more time 
With the do’s than with the don’ts

Gosh. Yes.

I’m trying on all of this. Trying. But it’s nice to be reminded that it’s okay to sometimes not be able to get away.

My mom pointed out that part of me knowing a lot of people who died is me knowing a lot of people, and that’s definitely true, and it is, absolutely, true and a good thing. But Frank’s right: it’s easy to still feel alone.

We talked with Frank way back in, gosh, late 2013, when he was touring with our pals Koo Koo Kanga Roo:

We’ve all changed a ton, obviously, except that I still wear a lot of Hold Steady shirts. Frank still seems to be kind and generous and thoughtful.

But, to steal from another one of Frank’s songs—this one featured today on a fantastic teaser for Ted Lasso, Season 3, that I saw right when I got back from that walk:

I still believe in the need 
For guitars and drums and desperate poetry 
And I still believe that everyone 
Can find a song for every time they’ve lost 
And every time they’ve won 
So just remember, folks, we’re not just saving lives, we’re saving souls 
And we’re having fun

Somehow I knew that Be More Kind was the record, and “Don’t Worry” the song, for this particular time I’ve lost.

Frank will be at the Fillmore in Minneapolis on April 29.

See you there, even though it’s a LiveNation venue. Go listen to his new record. It’s so good.

The Grammy nominations came out recently. I’ll talk about them a bit on the radio this weekend but thought I’d expand briefly here.

Every artist nominated is white; four of the five are white men. At a time when, more than at any point during the fifteen-plus years we’ve been doing this show, I believe there are more BIPOC folks making family music, and when so much of that music that is amazing, it is inexplicable that this would be the slate of nominees.

(Actually, it is entirely explicable, but not for any good reasons.)

Pierce Freelon; SaulPaul; Lucky Diaz; Jazzy Ash–the list literally goes on and on. Pierce’s record was the best family record of the year.

It is true that many of the nominated records had non-white artists on them. Cool. Whether it is as it should be or not, it is inarguable that the name that is nominated is far more noticed than the supporting players.

So.

I commend to you this statement by the Family Music Forward organization, an organization taking a vital lead role in dismantling racism and white supremacy in family music. You’ll recognize many of the founding members as folks who have appeared on the show, often guest hosting (June of this year I dedicated almost entirely to shows guest hosted by people of color). You’ll hear more from them in the future on the show as well. I’m going to keep listening to them and amplifying their voices.

I also commend to you WeeNationRadio. You’ll recall that Devin guest hosted the show just a few months ago; you can listen to that now. His work is essential.

The Grammys have never been a huge deal to me; I’ve noted that before. But they are unquestionably a central part of how musicians are recognized and they make a real difference in the artists’ lives, as I understand it.

The records nominated are very good records, every one of them made by friends of mine. But any process that results in that slate is a fundamentally broken process. If I were a nominee, I’d like to think that I would choose not to be part of that process until it gets fixed, including this year. Declining a nomination is absolutely a sacrifice; it seems like a small one to make to noisily reject the process that led to this.

Note: as of December 9, three nominees—Alastair Moock, Dog on Fleas, and The Okee Dokee Brothers—have written to the Academy asking not to be listed on the ballot. I do not think this was because of my post, to be clear; I am glad they did so.

So, we’re fifteen years into this radio thing, which maybe makes it so I have some ideas about radio for families that others might find interesting. But I’m going to start about music radio writ large.

There are two things that I think make it so that music radio continues to be compelling, at least to me—and I think to others. 

First, it’s music that is selected more or less by human hands rather than even a smart shuffle—and selected with more than segues in mind. That is, it’s sets that are put together to tell a story or represent influences on an artist or just to be goofy. (The non-comm classical station in Austin, KMFA, has being “gently educational” in its mission statement, and I always liked that.) That is part of why we include non-kids’ music in the mix, because I think that’s one way to (gently!) teach about the broader world of music.

Second, it’s that music being presented by people with a voice and a point of view.  I know that if I turn on the radio during Mary Lucia’s shifts on The Current that I will get some dry sarcasm but a lot of humanity; I know that Jeff McCord on KUTX has a deeper knowledge of Texas music than anyone else; I know Monte on The River is not just connected to but an integral part of the Pioneer Valley; and so on.

I think those factors both apply, or should apply, to music programming for kids. The music should be (I don’t like this term, but don’t know a better one) curated, and it should be presented in an interesting way.

Maybe more importantly, I think those two factors should be overlaid with the critical fact (or at least my view) that kids deserve high quality music that is made for them just the same way that they deserve high quality literature that is written for them. It doesn’t have to be exclusively music made for them (see: our show playlist), but the experiences kids go through are unique to them and their ages, and family music done right reflects and resonates with that in quite precisely the same way that kids’ books can (should) do so.

All of that together gives us an opportunity to show kids (and to remind adults) what it is that radio and music can be in their lives—not just the music bed to a YouTube video or the background to a TikTok, but part of how they navigate life. 

An aside, sort of: That all goes for live music, too. I am not exaggerating when I say that one of the best traditions I have with Ella since she started college is meeting her in Brooklyn the weekend after Thanksgiving to see The Hold Steady, and that Liam is super excited to start doing the same thing (you know, if live music ever starts). I’m 100% confident that their love of live music, and their recognition of the centrality of live music to any city’s ecosystem, comes from growing up going to shows I was booking or promoting.

When we started all of this, I wasn’t thinking about this in quite these terms, though I think it was always there subconsciously. I was thinking about how it would be fun to do a radio show and to hang out with my kids while doing so. But I was writing this up for another reason and thought I’d throw it out there.

Anyway! Thanks for fifteen years. Here’s to another fifteen. We love you all.