Music
Press
This charming CD, full of positive messages and lively tunes, addresses a variety of subjects: the solar system, animals, and life essentials such as cleaning your room and being a good friend. The title track, “Teasing Bird,” teaches children that teasing can be hurtful and has painful consequences. “The Planets” teaches the placement of the planets and a bit about the solar system in a pleasing beat that can be easily sung and remembered. Aliens “Krinkledinks (pink) and Grodsnips (blue)” teach us that just because we're different, doesn't mean we can't get along.
Parents and kids can come together on the wide range of sounds including high-tech, synthesized electronics, rocking reggae beats and pop. Some songs are upbeat and jazzy (“Teasing Bird,” “Sandwich”), while others are mellow, such as “There Once Was A Bagel,” a ballad about a bagel who learns to fly, “He flies through the air with the greatest of ease/ free from gravity/free from cream cheese.” The bluesy “Who You Are” is a standout. A sense of playfulness and offbeat humor, in the songs and in the CD booklet, add to the fun.
- Parents' Choice Foundation
Listeners will want to sing along with these 13 upbeat songs recorded by Ira Marlowe. Children will like the fun lyrics and catcy tunes while adults will appreciate the musical variety and occasional motivational themes. The kid-friendly subjects fo the songs include kangaroos, flying bagels, teasing, and wishes for a genie. A few pieces are educational with facts about the planets, animals, or getting along with others, while others are just pure fun. Some tunes are quiet, with soothing lyrics that lend themselves to unwinding at bedtime. Musical styles vary from rock to reggae to folk and jazz with vocals by adults and children. All songs are supported by various instruments including keyboard, percussion, guitar, trumpet and clarinet. The result is a quality mixture of original songs that kids will want to hear over and over again. - School Library Journal
Discography
1996 "Songs from the House of Wax"
1998 "The Doubter's Bible"
1999 "The Nashville Delusion" (country demos)
2000 "My Secret Life"
2003 "Save the Day"
2004 "Double Feature" (two musicals)
2005 "The Teasing Bird" (kids' music)
2006 "All the Colors" (kids' music)
2007 "Lucky" (not yet released)
Photos
Feeling a bit camera shy
Bio
Ira Marlowe has strolled with his guitar between the tables of a Howard Johnson's. He's performed at a circumcision. He's been courted by a big-time LA agent who (as it turns out) operated from the back of a wholesale bedding outlet.
In between occasional tastes of glory -- performances at San Francisco's Fillmore, Slim's and Great American Music Hall -- Marlowe has endured all that a life on the fringes of the music business can offer. After fifteen years, five smarmy managers, and three failed record deals, you'd think he'd have the good sense to quit. So he did, sort of.
He took two years off and started a small company called BRAINY TUNES, producing fun, challenging music for kids. Brainy Tunes is growing every day and was recently offered a digital distibution deal by Fisher-Price.
But two years of performing for mucus-glazed faces made Ira realize he just wasn't ready to give up on adults. Now he's back with his best work ever, a forthcoming CD titled, "Lucky". This site contains unmastered mixes of three of its songs.
Instead, he's just released his best work ever.
SAVE THE DAY is a colorful parade of ghosts, vampires, posers, gurus, fugitives, robots, saviours and drunks. It's a CD about fear, but also about strength. Most of all it's about the struggle to find humor and balance in an increasingly maddening and out-of-balance world.
Shuttled from town to town while growing up with his anthropologist parents, Marlowe listened to everything from Gershwin to Hendrix to Western Swing to West Side Story. At age 13 he sold enough greeting cards, door-to-door, to earn himself a "Folktune Wood Guitar", and at 19 he began to write songs. In the years since, he's developed a literate, narrative style often described as "cinematic" -- drawing comparisons to Elvis Costello, Leonard Cohen, and Robyn Hitchcock.
In 2000, Marlowe joined forces with versatile guitarist ROGER LINN, inventor of the first programmable drum machine. The two perform as an acoustic/electric duo, and also as a full band when accompanied by bassist DON BASSEY.
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