These Are My Friends

Collaboration has always been at the heart of Alastair Moock's music career. On These Are My Friends, his seventh album and second specifically for kids and families, Moock puts collaboration center stage. The album features several of Moock's old friends from the Boston folk scene, including Lori McKenna, Kris Delmhorst, Mark Erelli, Jennifer Kimball, and Rose Polenzani; some newer friends from the family music world, including Rani Arbo, Anand Nayak, and Vanessa Trien; plus his wife, author Jane Roper, and twin four-year-old girls, Elsa and Clio. These Are My Friends follows Moock's award-winning family music debut, A Cow Says Moock. That album won a 2010 NAPPA Gold Award, a Parents' Choice Recommended Award, and was a Boston Children's Music Favorite Album of the Year. Like Pete Seeger and others from an earlier generation of folk music, Moock makes little distinction between his own songs and cover material. For him, it's all part of a continuum - a collaboration between the old and the new. Interspersed with the eight originals (and two short parodies) on These Are My Friends are songs like Mail Myself to You (by Woody Guthrie), Green Green Rocky Road (traditional, associated with Dave Van Ronk), Yes Indeed (by Sy Oliver, made famous by Ray Charles), and Ladybug's Picnic (from Sesame Street). Unfortunately, Moock can't bring all the fantastic musicians who helped make These Are My Friends with him on the road. But with his Rowdy Roots band, he brings the spirit and sound of collaboration to family audiences wherever he goes. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Before he launched his family music career in 2009, Alastair Moock was already a critically acclaimed singer-songwriter on the Boston folk scene. Since 1995, he has toured throughout the US and Europe and won top honors at many of the country's most prestigious songwriting contests. In 2000 he started a roots music series called Pastures of Plenty which continues to bring together some of the region's best songwriters and musicians for shows that The Boston Globe calls the hippest hootenannies in town. He was nominated in 2007 for a Boston Music Award for Outstanding Singer-Songwriter of the Year.