“I’ve got an unlimited supply of high fives,” Marsha Goodman-Wood of the award-winning DC kindie rock outfit Marsha and the Positrons sings to end their latest fifteen song album, Energetic. Whether it’s scientific songs, like “Counting On My Brain” and “Kinetic and Potential Energy,” or songs to help kids with their worries, like “Shoelaces” and “No More Doctor Blues,” or songs to get kids outside or reading, like “Fly Ladybug Fly” and “We’re Going to the Library,” Marsha and crew offer up-beat songs in the form of jazz, doo-wop, blues, and rock n’ roll, that present the facts in compelling rhythm and rhyme, songs that get you moving and above all, get you thinking positively and intelligently.
Children the age Marsha is reaching out to have so many fears, but they have so much of a capacity for understanding, as well. You can imagine the joy a parent or a teacher feels, hearing their student or child repeat back to them the two hemispheres or three lobes of the brain or the reason bees dance and buzz around each other or the reasons why we should care about the white film on “ghost trees”—revealing the genesis of their understanding of how they and the world works. (Got some future scientists in the making, from a record like this.) Not to speak of the joy of children, themselves, singing the facts and melodies over and over again.
The album is full of those “ah-ha!” moments, often utilizing complex scientific vocabulary that kids can understand in context or have explained to them. Like E.B. White said, you should never write down to kids, (they understand much more than we give them credit for,) and Marsha and the Positrons use this as one of their guiding principles. While kids can learn about things that they didn’t know about, like the life cycles of cicadas and the purpose of a meteorologist, they can also feel identified with, in songs like “Fly Ladybug Fly,” which captures the urge to set a bug found inside free in the wilderness, or the prevalent fear, “They don’t know I’ve never tied my laces before.”
Marsha and crew put their fingers on the pulse of what it’s like to be a child, and utilize their grown-up skills of teaching in a compelling manner, entertaining with talent and vivre, and, to top it off, musicianship of the highest order. To illustrate the unity that they sing about in “Starlings,” they invite rappers and singers like Grammy-winning Saul Paul, Keith Grimwood of Trout Fishing In America, Tina Kenny Jones of Danny Weinkauf and his Red Pants Band, and Dumi Right & Black Root to join them on the songs, and make their already diverse sound even more diverse.
“Energetic” is an interesting title for an album full of so much scholastic minutiae. But like they sing in the last song, “It’s my positive energy / that keeps me happy / And when our hands touch, it’s true / You’ll feel that positive energy, too,” the whole album, and their live shows as well, are meant to pass on an excitement for life that is contagious. It is obvious that Marsha and crew care for kids (and adults, alike) and the wonderfully crafted songs are, above all, a service to the local and world community: to educate, to inspire, to empathize, and to entertain.
Prism Reviews 