Chip Withrow

Dodging flying beach balls and other projectiles on stage in Fort Myers, Chip Withrow played two half-hour sets with his percussionist. The crowd was rowdy, on their feet for the hour of music.

“We have to get used to stuff like that,” says the 41-year-old ponytailed and bespectacled guitar player after the show, recalling the audience’s reactions. “We made those kids wild.”

And kids they were. The raucous crowd was made up of about 50 kindergarten-aged fans attending the launch party for Withrow’s debut album, “Everyday Things.”

With a sound like Jack Johnson in the “Banana Pancakes” phase, and the reflective lyrics reminiscent of Jimmy Buffett’s “Little Miss Magic,” the man who used to plan his jobs around the Grateful Dead tours went from stints as a bartender, news reporter and textbook editor to settling into teaching in his early 30s.

In January 2002, when his daughter, Josie, was born 11 weeks premature and with serious health problems, Withrow and his wife, Anna, knew their daughter would eventually need heart surgery.

They also knew that after that, “we were going to do something big.” So once Josie was on the mend in the summer of 2004, they left Ohio for Fort Myers.

“I had never really written songs before. When we moved down here, I was already 38 years old,” he says, sitting on the back deck of the Fort Myers Imaginarium after the launch party.

A lifelong guitar and piano player who often performed in bars, he started fiddling around with songwriting while teaching journalism at Ida S. Baker High School in Cape Coral.

“I got bored playing other people’s songs for, like, four hours a night.”

His early songs, he thought, could cross over into the country genre if sung “with a twang,” so he pitched them to Nashville.

“I got rejected over and over again, which I kind of expected. But I got some good feedback.”

Then came the first children’s song.

His lively 5-year-old daughter, who on this early November afternoon has slid beneath the rails of the deck to collect coconuts, was the inspirational spark.

“Josie one day said to me, ‘Oh, look, the sunset looks like a red ball.’ So I said, OK, I’ll write a song,” Withrow says. “It took me, like, 10 minutes.”

He called it “Where the Red Ball Goes.”

With children’s music no longer the domain of Sesame Street, Raffi and the Wiggles, Withrow joins the trend that seeks to attract parents, as well. Alt rock band The Might Be Giants released a family-friendly album in 2002, and world music powerhouse label Putumayo began its Kids division the same year. Acoustic folk artist Jack Johnson also tried his hand at bridging the musical tastes of children and adults alike with his participation in the 2006 soundtrack for the film “Curious George.”

From “Red Ball,” he built up his portfolio until one day, this past spring, he sat down and counted the songs.

“I said, ‘wait a second, I have 20 songs here. I should do a CD.’”

Anna has always been for it. “I think it’s so cool,” she says, joining him on the patio. Anna teaches English composition at Florida Gulf Coast University. “Even if nobody ever buys a copy, for Josie to grow up and have this album her dad made is so cool”.

The caveat?

“Then I figured out it was going to have to be made at our house.”

But she offered up half of her jewelry and painting studio so Withrow could record in their Edison Park home. Then for a week in April and one in June, Anna and Josie holed up at the beach while Withrow recorded — and learned as he went along.

“I didn’t soundproof the room, and you can tell, because on a couple of songs, you can actually hear the sheet music falling off the stand.”

“It was raining one of the days that I was recording, so I just stuck the microphone out the window and started recording the rain, and I put that on two of the songs.”

A few snafus along the way — like when the mixing and mastering studio, accustomed to producing hip-hop, returned the album track “PJs All Day” to Withrow with a street-thumping bass-line — provide for comedic interludes to the creative bursts.

The CD was a family affair from the beginning: Anna, who has no training as a singer, lends her voice as a backup vocalist and performs a whistling solo; Josie provides, with gusto, the shouts of “Gnu gnu” on the song of the same title. She also designed the bird featured on one of the T-shirts they sell to promote the album.

Their friends have become de facto roadies. They help break down the backdrop of two folding screens plastered with homemade art and load all the gear into minivans after a show, and sometimes jam along with Withrow.

The album and live performances, however, are only part of the “Everyday Things” project.

“We have big plans for this,” says Withrow. “We wrote up a whole series of writing lesson plans to go along with the songs” that teachers and parents will soon be able to download for free on his Web site (www.chipwithrow.com).

“That was king of the plan from the beginning. Once I started writing songs, the very next leap that I took was, ‘How can I mix this with teaching?’” he explains. “I approached this from the whole standpoint of ‘Here’s something that kids can learn from’.”

One of the exercises will be a listing task, inspired by the song “Josie’s pets.”

“I sat down in her play room. It was a mess like it usually is, and she has hundreds of stuffed animals. So I just started writing about the animals that I could see.” The exercise — which he used to write the song — is meant to be a brainstorming and observation activity.

In addition to getting children who might not enjoy writing involved, there is also an element of fostering music appreciation among the young ones.

“Kids will listen to and appreciate a whole broad spectrum of things, and we don’t give them credit for it,” says Withrow, adding that his daughter’s two favorite songs right now are “Shambala” by Three Dog Night and “Nothing But Flowers” by Talking Heads.

“Ideally, I wanted something kids as young as Josie, or even younger, all the way up into adolescence, could listen to. The popular music that’s out there, most of it is too content-inappropriate for them. They listen to it, but they probably shouldn’t be,” he adds.

He suggests parents get their children hooked at an early age on what they consider quality music.

“Seek out the music you like, make sure that it’s appropriate for them as far as the content,” Withrow explains. “Your kids are going to grow up listening to that.”

But children aren’t the only ones Withrow hopes to get into the family folk groove with “Everyday Things.”

“Ideally, I want a CD that, when the kids go to bed, the parents will pop it in and maybe secretly listen to it.”

- Naples Daily News

Full text coming soon - Fort Myers News-Press