More High Notes for Laurie Berkner

By Shannon Maughan, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 10/11/2007

When it comes to children’s music, Laurie Berkner truly has rock-star status among the preschool set. Her CDs and DVDs are bestsellers, her music videos airing on Noggin are wildly popular and her live concerts sell out all over the country. But now she’s making a return engagement in a different kind of arena: the children’s book world. Her new picture-book-and-CD title, The Story of My Feelings, illus. by Caroline Jayne Church, is just out from Scholastic/Orchard. It’s a follow-up to 2004’s successful Victor Vito and Freddie Vasco, illus. by Henry Cole.

Credit: Michelle Pedone

Berkner notes that she hadn’t yet considered branching out from her performance career when the opportunity came knocking. “The first time we were on the Today Show [in 2001], an editor at Scholastic saw us,” says the Manhattan-based Berkner. “She called and said she thought that it would be a cool pairing to put some of my songs with illustrations in a children’s book. I met with her and liked her, and that’s how it all began.”

The fast friendship between Berkner and then-Scholastic editor Beth Levine sparked Victor Vito and Freddie Vasco about two ursine pals on a cross-country road trip in search of new menu offerings for their Klondike Cafe. “It was Beth’s idea to turn Victor and Freddie into polar bears and give them a story that goes beyond my lyrics,” Berkner recalled. “I was really happy with how it turned out.”

Berkner performed for Scholastic's
booth visitors, at this year's BEA.

While Berkner’s publishing foray was off to a good start, her subsequent project, The Story of My Feelings, another song adaptation, was stuck in neutral when Levine was laid off as part of a company cutback. “It took quite a long time for any progress after Beth left,” says Berkner. But once things got back on track in-house, Caroline Jayne Church delivered illustrations that Berkner believes work in perfect harmony with her lyrics. “As a book, I think it’s moving and satisfying,” Berkner says. “Caroline picked up on the theme of connecting feelings to things in the natural world, which is a way that kids can make connections about their feelings,” she explained. “I know that I feel differently when the weather changes and that’s probably universal. There’s only so much you can express in words—and that old saying, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’—is really true in this case.”

Berkner attended BEA this past June and received a warm response from fans as well as teachers and parents. Plans are in the works for further book promotions, but “I haven’t chased them down yet,” admits Berkner. “It’s ongoing and I try to do as much as I can when I can. But it has to be integrated in my life,” she adds, citing spending time with her husband and three-year-old daughter, as well as working on a new children’s CD (due next year), as other priorities in her life.

And then there’s touring. This fall will find The Laurie Berkner Band in concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall for two shows on November 4, as well as at Symphony Hall in Atlanta on December 2.

Those venues are a long way from the days back in the early 1990s when Berkner was writing and performing with all-girl cover band Lois Lane and her own rock group, Red Onion, “struggling to write original music.” But a new creative switch was flipped when she began working with children at summer camps and then at New York City preschools and day care centers. She began selling cassette tapes of her first recording Whaddaya Think of That? (1998) to local parents. Now, several studio recordings and music videos later—not to mention a Starbucks promotion and a ride on a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade—she’s become a household name to a certain demographic.

As for future books, Berkner hopes to craft some original children’s texts that are not adaptations of her songs. “I finally got an agent,” she says, “and I’d like to continue. I felt really inspired by Victor Vito, and now I have a better sense of what a picture book should be.” And that’s likely music to many fans’ ears.