Sesame Street's long history of great music continues — here's why

Australia Broadcast Center

5 hours ago

The music of Sesame Street lives rent free in many of our brains.
Songs like The People in Your Neighbourhood, Rubber Ducky, and C Is For Cookie introduced us to the soothing, educational and celebratory powers of music. They delivered little shots of pure joy into our lives. They helped raise us, and continue to comfort and delight the young people we cherish today.
These days, children around the world rinse all manner of kids songs of varying qualities ad nauseam, but there's a sophistication to the work from history's most famous kids show that has set it apart since it first aired in 1969.
"When you have a child who's singing one of your songs and doesn't even know that it's a learning thing at the same time, that is really the ultimate thing," says Bill Sherman, Sesame Street's long-time music director.
"It's not meant to be subliminal by any means, but in the same way we teach the ABCs in classrooms, a song is just another mnemonic way of learning something.
"The great songs on Sesame Street are the ones that do two things: they get stuck in your head because somebody wrote a great song, and whatever that thing is that's in your head is something you're learning.
"If you can do both of those things at the same time, that is a successful Sesame Street song. And a successful learning experience. I think that both are equally as important."
Sesame Street has perhaps had the best musical guest list of any TV show in history. From Destiny's Child to Dave Grohl, Billy Joel to Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder to Carrie Underwood, Smoky Robinson to Katy Perry, most artists of note have figured out how to get to Sesame Street.
The latest season, which is screening now on ABC Kids, features influential R&B chart topper SZA, folk heart-throb Noah Kahan and the Zeitgeisty Reneé Rapp.
A particular highlight of this year's soundtrack comes from country star Chris Stapleton, whose song You Got A Friend In Music feels like a future Sesame Street classic.
It's a tribute to music's ability to heal, with Stapleton's soulful, gruff-yet-toasty vocal reminding kids (and the rest of us) that there's a song to match every mood.
"Chris Stapleton is one of those people that when he opens his voice, you can't imagine that he could do anything else," Sherman says. "He exudes music. Even when he talks it sounds melodic.
"Another guy who's like that is Ed Sheeran, who's just unbelievably musically oriented.
"It's really an honour to get to work with them, and to co-write a song is one of the great joys and achievements in life."
In his tenure at Sesame Street, Sherman has worked with many of modern music's biggest names, and says there's no one size fits all approach to a successful collaboration on the show.
"Some artists really have an idea of what they want it to be like, and how they want to experience Sesame Street, and how they want to lend themselves to it," he says.
"[Stapleton] was dead set on writing a song, so he wrote this song and sent it to us. Most of it is what you hear. We have our curriculum goals and our educational goals, and we've got to implement those back into the song.
"Sesame Street's been around for a very long time, and there's a very high level of musicianship and history. Getting songs together is sometimes a difficult task because the level is so high. But with a guy like Chris Stapleton, he comes in with so much that it's just sort of sculpting and moving parts around."
While Sherman is no slouch on the tools — his past credits as a producer, orchestrator and arranger include Broadway smashes like Hamilton, In The Heights and & Juliet — he reckons his key role is directing the creative traffic.
"I think my job in a lot of this is like setting the table, bringing everybody over to have dinner and then, whatever happens at dinner, just trying to guide it to be the best thing.
"It's just putting the right people in the room and making sure that everybody knows the end goal, and then figuring out the most graceful, efficient way to get there.
"And not being a jerk, just being a nice person helps."
It also helps to have an inherent understanding of the magic the artist you're working with possesses.
"I think the best compliment I can get is when we go to shoot it, and they're there and they go, 'Oh my God, this song sounds like it should be on my next record.' That's only happened like two or three times, but that to me is the ultimate compliment."
A song like The Power Of Yet, Sherman's 2014 collab with neo-soul shapeshifter Janelle Monáe, is a strong example of a song that fits with an artist's own creative approach.
"I had just seen her in concert and there was so much James Brown happening," he recalls. "There was so much gut funk, awesome horns and dancing and everything.
"I just wanted to make something where she could do all of that. She could really sing, and then she could really have a full dance break moment and all this stuff.
"She did the vocal and it was awesome, and she was just super into it. As I watched her move and dance, she became like her own Muppet, her own character of Janelle Monáe on Sesame Street. It was such a fun day, and such a great thing to watch and be a part of. She was super into it. She took some liberties on the melody and did all this stuff that really made it hers."
It's artists like Monáe, those willing to fearlessly embrace the Sesame Street experience, who tend to get the most out of their time on the show. Sherman has spent over a decade on the set and admits the novelty does wear off. But it doesn't take much for that magic to return.
"You see a celebrity who clearly had watched Sesame Street in their childhood walk in and they're just totally amazed and totally transfixed," he says.
"What I think happens, whether it's consciously or not, is you sort of revert back into being a child. When you get around Big Bird and Elmo and Cookie Monster, you can't help but lean into the magic of it all and be totally seduced by it all.
"Those artists that come in and let the exterior of being a famous person go away and just revisit their childhood and let that happen, they have these awesome experiences. Watching them just sort of melt in front of these characters and these puppets is a really eye-opening experience.
While the music is always fun, Sesame Street takes its reputation as an educational resource seriously, and is forever ensuring its messages are constructive.
Sherman's personal favourite songs from his childhood are C Is For Cookie and Bein' Green, two enduring examples of early Sesame Street composer Joe Raposo's incredible work.
"The guys who were the founding fathers of Sesame Street music were such heavy musicians and such heavy composers," Sherman says.
"I think people assume that children's music is simple. It's not just like Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and the ABCs, they took the simplicity of melody and applied it to jazz and pop and rock'n'roll and bossa nova, and mushed it in together to create this new sound. Which is what made Sesame Street in the early days, and what I'd like to think today, so cool. It's genreless."
Kids are famously tough audiences with tiny attention spans and no filter. On top of that, Sherman believes they now access a broader range of music than ever and, as such, their standards have become even more discerning.
"People assume when you're writing songs for kids that it's being dumbed down for children or written in a certain way. I always feel like it's my responsibility to fight against that.
"Because my children are 12 and 14 and they have very sophisticated ears. The way that they retain lyrics, or the way that they retain melodies and ideas, is on such a different level than when I was a kid.
"When new composers come to write for Sesame Street, I say, 'Don't think like you're writing a song for a child. Just write a good song.' It's not that it should pass the test of being for an adult, it's that a children's ears are so sophisticated that everybody's listening to the same things all the time.
"The key for me is not to write like a kiddie song, but also to be sophisticated. But, at the same time, be repetitive, do call and response, do those things that make the songs really stick in a kid's head.
"Write an earworm verse and an earworm chorus with the prayer that, if you write a great song or great chorus or great hook, then that will hook both the song and the educational idea into the child. I think then you've succeeded all around."
Season 55 of Sesame Street is currently screening on ABC Kids and ABC iview
Families can hear songs from Sesame Street on the ABC Kids Listen app, streaming 24/7.