Barry Louis Polisar: The _Heeb_ Interview

You may have grown up with Barry Louis Polisar‘s books or songs. He is the author of such classics as Insect Soup and Don’t Do That, as well as popular children’s songs, including "Don’t Put Your Finger up Your Nose" and "The I Eat Kids Klezmer Polka." Polisar has been making the rounds of public school libraries for years now, so he was surprised when director Jason Reitman contacted him not because he was a childhood fan but because he stumbled across Polisar’s forgotten tune "All I Want Is You" on iTunes.

"He was looking for a song by Yo Lo Tengo called ‘You’re the One I Want,’" explains Polisar, "then got confused and typed in All I Want Is You and got the U2 song and various covers of it, so then he was listening to the covers, and then clicked on my song and it was different and he really liked it."

So much so that he used it in the opening credits of his recent hit Juno. The songs inclusion in the Juno soundtrack has brought a whole new fanbase to Polisar, who describes "All I Want Is You" asa filler song on one of his earlier albums. "It was a kid-like love song–something adults could enjoy as they were listening to the album with their kids–I never even performed it or anything," he says.

We reached Barry on the phone from his home in Maryland to ask him about how he got started in the children’s music world, what he thinks of Juno and what inspired his recently released Haggadah (which we plan on using at Heeb‘s inaugural Slow Food Seder).

Did you have kids when you started making music for them?

I actually started when I was 21 and wasn’t even married yet (I’m 53 now). My first album came out in 1975 and it was called "I Eat Kids" – never expected it to be a career, but then I put out my second album, which was called "My Brother is a Banana". That’s the one with "All I Want Is You" on it. I sort of built up a rep as the bad boy of children’s music – a lot of my songs focused on brothers and sisters that don’t get along, mean teachers and nagging parents that sort of thing.

Then I got married six or seven years into my career and then I didn’t have kids until 1987, so I had been performing for about a decade before having kids. Once I did, the songs sort of shifted. Over the early years I was writing from the perspective of a kid. Once I became a parent it was a voice that didn’t ring true – I was faking it. So the focus shifted. Basically in the first part of my carreer I was writing songs for kids that parents also enjoyed and now it’s songs for parents that kids also enjoy.

How did you transition from songwriter to author?

I actually always thought of myself as more of a writer than a musician, and when the industry went from records to tapes I couldn’t fit my liner notes in anymore. I could barely fit them with the albums. So I was producing these cassettes, and people were writing me asking me for the lyrics, requesting that I put together a songbook. That was the first book–a compilation of my lyrics accompanied by little line drawings. Then I found a publisher in New York that agreed to carry and distribute the book and my tapes. That freed up my time to write other books, and now I’ve published about a dozen.

What prompted you to write a Haggadah?

You know, my whole career has sort of been prompted by people asking me for stuff. I started touring and performing live because a school got in touch with me and asked me to perform for their students; I started publishing books because people were requesting my songbooks. With the Haggadah, usually we go to my wife’s parents’ house every year for Passover, and they have their traditions and they use the same Haggadah every year.

One year we had to host it ourselves because the in-laws were gone and I said ‘I’m not using that book that everybody hates!’ So I put together a rudimentary outline of a Haggadah that also explains things. For 25 years I’ve been going to my wife’s family’s house for Passover seders and everyone asks the same questions and is confused by the same things. No one ever fully gets it. 25 years ago I was asking, and now I’m the person answering, mostly just because I got interested and started looking into it. I found out a year or two after that first year that people who had been at our seder were using my haggadah, and they said I should put it out to the public because it would be helpful.

So that’s how it became a published book, but I also wanted to make it available for free online . Technically it’s been out a year, but this is its first real Passover season. Last year it was in the book catalogue April 1st and Passover was April 2nd. So it’s effectively a new title this year. Like everything else I’ve done, it’s been sort of an underground phenomenon for a year and now it’s coming up everywhere.

How has the Juno connection affected your career?

My career hasn’t peaked the way Kimya Dawson’s has – I mean, I’m a children’s songs writer and I play in elementary schools and this is about a teenage pregnancy so…

But it’s sorta given me a second career and reconnected me with people that have been listening to my albums since they were kids, and then it’s also opened me up to new people. I get messages from people that recognize me from when they were a kid, and then also from people who say they wish they’d had my albums when they were a kid.

Did you like the film?

I did! I thought it was very well done. My favorite parts of the film, which I guess are a testament to Reitman, are all the parts that have no dialogue. The scene where the father of her child walks into the hospital room and her dad just gives him a look, and the moment right after that where the adoptive mother comes in and then the stepmother comes in and gives her a look – I think those are the two most emotional points in film. The third part was this quick pan in the Michael Cera character’s room that showed Jewish lettering on the wall, a bar mitzvah certificate and a dreidel. To me it’s a clear signifier that he’s leaving childhood. I think there was an interesting commentary there.

What do you think?