Kindie rock

So what does the music actually sound like? It ranges from folksy balladry to faux-ska and proto-punk. Roberts' "Meltdown" is all jumpy dance guitars; Zanes' new album tends toward roots rock and charming folk tunes; Berkner's perky songs feature jangling guitars and piano that wouldn't be totally out of place on a Sufjan Stevens record. But like most kindie rock, their music has a special quality that somehow transcends the divide between music for children and music for adults. "Somewhere in-between those two extremes," says Zanes, "there's this whole world of music where everybody can be emotionally engaged and sometimes the songs might lean more toward the super-young people and sometimes they might lean more toward the grandparents.

"Songs about learning how to eat with a fork or put on a pair of trousers, those really don't mean anything to me, because I've been doing it for so long," he adds, "and if I'm singing songs about old girlfriends or drinking at parties, those aren't going to mean a lot to a 4-year-old."

Roberts says, "People think that kids want only really simple repetition and very simple melodies and simple songs." And while it's true that people like repetition (it's what pop, to some extent, is all about), he cautions, "You should never expect what your audience is going to understand or what they're not going to understand."

"I've gotten quite a lot of e-mail, saying something to the effect of: 'I found myself driving the car and playing your music, and the kid wasn't even in the car and I was singing along,'" says Mathews. "And that's kind of what I hope to accomplish."

And even though They Might Be Giants aren't specifically trying to appeal to parents, they've had their share of relieved fan mail. "I can't tell you how many times I've had parents come up to us and say, 'Your record saved our lives,'" Flansburgh says. "What we do is designed to stand up to repeated listening. That watered-down, kind of cutesy way of putting together children's music that seems appropriate to a lot of people initially is actually the thing that drives parents insane."

The idea of marrying rock to kids music has been around for a while -- see Jerry Garcia's 1993 record "Not for Kids Only" and the whole "Schoolhouse Rock" series back in the '70s -- but this new wave of musicians is grafting a specifically indie philosophy onto their songs for children. "I don't actually thinks it's a new genre; I think it's a genre that's in resurgence," says Michael Krumper, senior vice president of marketing for Razor & Tie, the label that helped put out Berkner's DVD, as well as the Kidz Bop series and children's folk singer Tom Chapin's records. The difference is that the former rockers now making the music have injected it with a certain amount of coolness. "I think it's music you can get into just as much as the new Broken Social Scene record," says Krumper, "and you don't have to be ashamed of it."

Kenny Curtis, director of children's programming at XM Satellite Radio, agrees. "It's becoming more mainstream -- more chic, actually -- to do music for kids," he says. "We always make the joke that it's amazing what happens when rock stars have kids."

"It's changed a lot, but only really in the last year," Berkner says of the old kids-music stigma. "It still happens that people who haven't heard my music make jokes when they first find out, thinking: 'Well, kids music equals Barney.' And I understand that, because that's why I started writing it, because that's what I found." Or, as Roberts puts it, "They're ready to hate it."

"When I started doing this, I would mention it to people and a lot of them I think secretly felt sorry for me," says Zanes. "Certainly a lot of people who didn't have kids had no understanding of what I was throwing myself into." But now, he says, "I'll run into hipsters who say they're working on kids records or family records."

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