Get Mellow with Gustafer Yellowgold

I don't have kids of my own, but I do like to borrow them from time to time. So when I heard animated songster Gustafer Yellowgold was once again the opener for the Polyphonic Spree's annual holiday spectacular, I couldn't resist sitting down with my favorite 5-year-old to watch Gustafer's DVDs and see what all the fuss was about.

You see, Gustafer Yellowgold comes to us from the sun, which he left in pursuit of colder climes (he set the controls in his sun-pod for "colder" and ended up in Minnesota). He lives in a quaint, shuttered cottage with best friend Forrest Applecrumbie, a pterodactyl, and a pet eel named Slim—short for Slimothy. Oh yeah, there's also a dragon named Asparagus living in his fireplace, and no, we're not high right now.

Gustafer is the creation of songwriter/illustrator Morgan Taylor, a rock music veteran who's been playing in bands since the '80s and most recently worked with the Autumn Defense, the soft-rock side project of Wilco's John Stirratt and Pat Sansone.

"It kind of happened by accident," Taylor says. "I was taking a break from my normal rock band life and started illustrating out the lyrics to some of my funnier songs...And some of the songs had a first-person narrative I knew wasn't me, so I was like, 'Well, who is my first person in these songs?' And I said, 'OK, I have this old cartoon character that I used to draw on bar napkins,' just for the fun of it. So I made this little yellow character the first person of these funny songs. And then the world started taking shape because of the songs that I had written...and all of the sudden it's my new career. I didn't sit down and make a conscious decision to start playing kids' music. And I think because it wasn't premeditated like that, it's actually just kid-friendly music, really."

Combining his imaginative, quirky illustrations with a pleasant, '70s soft-rock sound, Taylor's Gustafer DVDs are a breath of fresh air in the relative creative wasteland of modern children's music—if you've ever endured The Wiggles then you know what I mean—harking back to the whimsical soft psychedelia of children's classics such as The Electric Company and Schoolhouse Rock (not surprisingly two of Taylor's childhood favorites).

From the nature-obsessed lyrics ("Just one smell and you will believe/Where I come from we don't have these/Hear 'em callin' down for me/Hear 'em callin' from the trees/One for your brother, one for your sister/In a sandwich or a pretty vista/Pinecone Lovely, to thee I sing") to the soft-focus melancholy of songs such as "The Bluebird Tree" and "Dream in Green," Taylor's works are evocative of a simpler time, when children watched Bert and Ernie sing "Rubber Ducky" on Sesame Street while their parents listened to Harvest on the hi-fi in the next room.

"I guess there's something special about being moved in a melancholy way that's just really appealing to me," he says. "I know how I felt listening to those kind of songs when I was experiencing music at a young age. You know, where you're totally innocent, you're at peace with the world because you don't know very much yet, and you're able to get absorbed into this little musical moment...I just like how the music could take you over emotionally.

"It kind of goes back to the records I listened to when I was young," says Taylor. "You know, like, 4 and 5 years old, when I had my older brother and sister's record collection. My sister had a lot of Bread records, so I listened to a lot of that. I think that's probably one of the reasons my music is so mellow...there's a little bit of that sappy soft rock guy in me. And then I was a huge KISS fan starting at like age 8. I think that's why playing music that's a combination of music and cartoon characters is so appealing to me...

"There's some old Sesame Street and Electric Company music that I found and listened to recently," he adds. "Songs that are really good that now, as an adult, you can listen to with a different set of ears and be like, 'Wow, I liked this as a kid, and I listen to it now and it's just a good song.' You know 'Rubber Ducky'? It's a classic little song. You listen to it now, and it's not cheesy."