Thaddeus Rex

Photo: Stephen Jensen

It’s pretty rare these days to find a kids’ performer as imaginative and original as Thaddeus Rex, and rarer still, a musician who weaves educational content into his tunes in a hip way. For his second album, the singer-guitarist (T-Rex for short) widens and expands upon his 2004 debut, Martian Television Invasion Lesson Plans (the singer left the PBS show The Friday Zone in 2003 to focus on performing). His songs are as inventive melodically as they are lyrically—topics range from anxiety over moving to a new city (“I Don’t Want to Go”) to a surrealist riff on the library (“Kazooey Decimal”) to, well, “You Can Tell a Boy by the Smell” and “I Stepped in Dog Doo.” The use of mild gross-out humor in a handful of songs shows what a canny writer he is; it also acts as a clever ploy to keep kids interested during the more serious tracks. Plus, his songs expand well past the CD player—the T-Rex website has an impressive amount of material based around his tunes, as well as tips for kids interested in songwriting.

Thaddeus sings in a slightly quavering voice which, at times, is reminiscent of David Bowie—flashes of Monty Python, Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein also flit in throughout the album. And a lovely, if incongruous, cover of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” serves to make the CD all the more unusual. But make no mistake: While Thaddeus Rex’s quirky originality and loopy energy may take some getting used to, it’s guaranteed to keep kids from wishing he were extinct.—Jem Aswad