SO JUST WHAT IS "CRAZY CAMPSONGS"?
JJ: "Crazy Campsongs" is a revolution--a whole new way of singing and performing songs. A lot of kids today are turned off to singing, because compared to playing videogames and watching DVDs, singing is b-o-r-i-n-g. Meanwhile, a lot of the music that's spoonfed to kids in the schools these days is old, decidedly unhip and has nothing to do with society today. It's hard for kids today to relate to whaling songs or "I've Been Working on the Railroad." These days, who even works on the railroad?

GEORGE: "Crazy Campsongs" tackles the tough issues facing today's youth, such as weirdos in the park, UFO invaders, pizza with anchovies, strange little brothers and disgusting school cafeteria food!

BUT DOESN'T ANYBODY WRITE INTERESTING NEW SONGS FOR KIDS TODAY?
GEORGE: Absolutely. In fact, over the past ten years or so in particular, there's be an absolute renaissance of great new songwriters creating wonderful material for children.

SO WHAT'S DIFFERENT ABOUT "CRAZY CAMPSONGS"?
JJ: We write great and fun songs. So do a million other people. However, given the wholesale slaughter of funding for music programs in the schools, the ability to read written music is unfortunately becoming a lost art. The devastating result is that society is probably 99% illiterate when it comes to reading sheet music. And if no one can read the songs you've created, then books filled with music serve little purpose.

GEORGE: We're not against music--we're both musicians who've spent years writing, creating, producing, archiving and performing music in lots of genres--jazz, rock, blues, classical, historical. The point behind "Crazy Campsongs" was to create a method by which anybody can pick up a book of original new songs and perform them--even if they have no musical training whatsoever.

HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?
JJ: After years of research and analysis, we discovered a common rhythmic scansion used in about 35% of the music that been written over the past 400 years. Based on this common-mode scansion, we developed the (patent-pending) Universal Song Performance Method, which we refer to as Tuneswapping™. With Tuneswapping™, users simply superimpose any one of thousands of well-known melodies--(ranging from simple nursery rhymes to elaborate classical works) onto the new lyrics we've written.

I'M NOT SURE I UNDERSTAND...
GEORGE: No problem... Anything new takes a while to get used to. Essentially we've developed a lyrical system that works with songs you already know. If you know the tunes to songs such as "Mary had a Little Lamb," "Happy Birthday," "Deck the Halls," the "Jeopardy" TV show theme, "The Hokey Pokey," "Love Me Tender," "Purple Haze" and a zillion more songs, you can sing the "Crazy Campsongs" lyrics.

DOES ANY SONG OR TUNE WORK?
JJ: No, because not all music is the same. For example, some songs, like "Old Macdonald had a Farm" has too many odd repeating sections--"with a quack quack here, and a quack quack there"--to work. With other songs, the stanzas may be too long or short, and in other cases, like The Beatle's "Yellow Submarine," the verses work fine, but the chorus doesn't exactly fit.

GEORGE: The "Crazy Campsongs" book includes a list of over 100 common, familiar melodies to start you off with. We also have an expanded list of songs on our www.crazycampsongs.com website to choose from. With 42 songs in the book and thousands of existing melodies to pick from, "Crazy Campsongs" never gets stale--it's a different book of music every time you pick it up!

IS THERE ANY EDUCATIONAL VALUE TO "CRAZY CAMPSONGS?"
JJ: There are plenty of good books and methods available designed to help people learn to read music. The point of "Crazy Campsongs" is to help people enjoy music. And along the way, if readers get curious and want to find out the tunes to "O Sole Mio," "Le Donna e Mobile," "Greensleeves," "Wildwood Flower" or "Blow Ye Winds" so they can sing them to our new lyrics, so much the better.

GEORGE: "Crazy Campsongs" is also a great motivational tool for encouraging kids that are difficult to reach using traditional musical training methods. Before the book came out, we did some market research to get some reactions about the book from kids. Most of them were enthusiastic, but there was one 13-year-old boy who didn't want any part of it. Here's how the dialog went:

Me: "Do you want to sing?"
Boy" "No."
Me: "Don't you know any songs?"
Boy: "No."
Me: "Don't you even know 'Happy Birthday'?"
Boy: "Yeah... I guess."
Me: "What if I gave you a song about how
disgusting your school bathrooms were and you
could sing it to the tune of 'Happy Birthday'?"
Boy: "Lemme see!"
Grabbing the book, he starts softly muttering the
first verse, then singing the second verse loudly.
Finally he puts the book down and saying...
Boy: "This is cool!"

I doubt that would have happened if I tried to teach him to read and sing the sheet music from "My Darling Clementine"!

AREN'T THESE SONGS JUST FOR SUMMER?
JJ: No. Crazy Campsongs has all kinds of songs--schools songs, summer songs, holiday songs and more--there's something you can sing about all year long.

ONE FINAL QUESTION... HOW DID YOU GET A FAMOUS ILLUSTRATOR LIKE
JACK DAVIS TO ILLUSTRATE THE BOOK?
JJ: We asked him. He said yes.

GEORGE: Actually, Jack's been doing professional illustration for 60 years, with (literally) thousands of credits, but this is the first time someone asked him to illustrate a children's book. During the final stages of writing the book, we contacted Jack and sent him some of the songs to check out. He loved them and wanted to do the project, and we asked him to pick one song from each chapter to illustrate, which became the lead-off song in each section. Coincidentally, he began doing the final drawings for the book in October, 2002--exactly 50 years to the day that he illustrated the very first story in the first issue of Mad magazine.


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