As an 8 year old, Shawn Colvin taught herself to play songs on the piano from a book called “Lullabies and Night Songs,” with songs Alec Wilder and illustrations by Maurice Sendak. Later, as an adult about to give birth to her daughter, she used some of the songs from that book to record her first kids’ album, “Holiday Songs and Lullabies.” Now, almost 20 years later, she’s released “The Starlighter,” another album of children’s music that draws its source material from “Lull

I was introduced to Dan Bern’s music almost 20 years ago when a friend played the song “Jerusalem” for me, and I’ve been a huge fan ever since. I got ridiculously excited to learn that Judd Apatow had tapped him to write the songs for “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” and the songs he contributed to that movie are hilarious and wonderful. He has a 7 year old daughter now, and has recently started writing more kids’ songs. He has 2 kids’ albums, "Two feet Tall" and "Three Feet

Michael Granberry is an animator on the Amazon show for pre-schoolers Tumble Leaf. The show has won multiple emmy awards in its first two seasons, and it’s something you don’t see much in kids’ TV anymore; it’s quiet. It’s thoughtful, it doesn’t go for a lot of jokes. It’s a simple show that is anything but simple for the team at BixPix to create. Michael will tell us how he fell in love with the painstaking process of stop-motion animation, how he shifted from the horror gen

Richard Kissel has been on a pretty direct path his entire life to where he is now as the Director of Public Programs at Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History. Richard tells Mike how he's always been passionate about not only his love for dinosaurs, but about getting other people to love them to by understanding their history and complexity. Mike reads this sentence to Richard from his bio page: "Dr. Kissel's current scientific research focuses on the enigmatic group of Pa

The "Captain" part of Todd Forman's stage name might be an affect, but the "Doctor" part if 100% true. Mike tries to convince the horn player for the popular family-friendly Jelly of the Month Club band to write a book on time management or personal productivity after hearing that he is not only a professional musician (with Sublime and Sublime with Rome in addition to JOTMC), but also a practicing physician with his own family medicine clinic, a teacher who is deeply passion

Shane Portman was writing stories meant to be read aloud and creating characters meant to annoy his younger sisters for years before he realized he had been preparing himself for a career writing children's television. Shane now works on Amazon's Emmy-winning preschool show "Tumble Leaf," as well as for "Moonlight Story Time" on the Curious World app. Check out his website and learn more about how such a quiet guy can have so many characters and stories rolling around in his