What I Do When I Get Kids' Songs Stuck in My Head

My daughter Ellie is getting to the age where she falls in love with kids' TV shows and the songs therein. She often wants me to sing them with her. I'm happy to oblige.

The downside is that these songs often get stuck in my head. When this happens, I find it helps to mix it up by singing them to myself in weird voices.

For example, here's the basic version of the Dora the Explorer song that Ellie and I sing together. (If these audio clips don't work, this whole post is worthless. It is surprisingly difficult to get an audio clip in a blog post. I blame the government. I'll work out why later.)

When this version starts to drive me nuts, it helps to shift into the Tom Waits version. It's a new voice I'm just starting to work on, so it probably needs refinement. Any constructive criticism is welcome.

Then there's the Morrissey version. This is a voice I've been doing for years, so I don't think it's getting better any time soon. Most people hate it, saying it sounds like Kermit the Frog doing Morrissey. It makes me happy to sing along to the Smiths in my Morrissey voice, though, so I'll keep doing it.

I've gotten much better feedback for my Louis Armstrong voice, which I'm now realizing is kind of a combination of Tom Waits and Morrissey. Maybe since Louis Armstrong was my first voice, Tom Waits equals Louis Armstrong minus Morrissey. Either way, the three of them are all clearly blood relations in real life. 

My only other impressions are of Hannibal Lecter, former baseball announcer Skip Caray, and Congressman Charlie Rangel, so none of those are terribly germaine here. But, if pressed by an adoring public (and if the audio files work), I can give them all a shot at the Dora theme.