Grammy-winning recording artist Lucky Diaz offers his unconventional take on the best children’s album ever without the slightest hesitation.
“I think that ‘Meet the Beatles’ is the greatest children’s album ever made,” Diaz said, speaking from his home in downtown Columbus. “That’s because the music created in the 1950s and 1960s had to speak to such a wide audience.”
Children’s recording artist Diaz, who grew up in Los Angeles with the influences of the Fab Four, Motown and the Doobie Brothers, knows a thing or two about a wide audience. He and wife Alisha Gaddis, the Evansville-born daughter of legendary retired Columbus East football coach Bob Gaddis, have sung to 10,000 people at Olympic Stadium in Beijing China, a country where they also have a children’s TV show.
They are hosts of the live-action, Emmy-winning PBS TV show “Lishy Lou and Lucky Too,” which is still in reruns.
And the dynamic duo known as The Lucky Band just released their latest and 13th bilingual album, “Crayon Kids,” aimed at youngsters in the 4 to 10 age range.
“But we know there are songs on there that could get maybe 11- or 12-year-olds pretty stoked,” Diaz said.
Just the nine-song disc’s decorated support staff could leave in-the-know parent listeners pretty stoked. Producer Kenny Siegal has worked with groups such as Cheap Trick and performed with such pop acts such as Tears For Fears. Mixer Matt Cullen has worked with Lady Gaga and Lana Del Rey. Grammy winner Greg Calbi mastered the tunes.
Clearly, the Lucky Band boasts no pint-sized standing in a children’s music genre that today is wearing big-boy pants. For proof, listen to the opening groove to the album’s tune “Letter C.” It would be at home on any edgy, rhythm-and-blues playlist anywhere.
Diaz breaks into joyous laughter over a questioner’s observation of that fact.
“Children’s entertainment is so very different today,” he said. “The internet has made it that way.”
This release is different for the married couple, too, with Gaddis taking more of a backseat. It was, after all, created partly in their Los Angeles home during the COVID-19 quarantine last year, shortly after Diaz recovered from the illness. So Gaddis, knee-deep at the time last year and currently writing for TV and a rom-com movie, inherited a different role: the silencer.
“This album was my most hands-off of any of them,” Gaddis said. “Normally, I normally have more of a producer/organizing role. This time, if Lucky was working on recording a song, I had to make the house completely quiet.”
Hardly an easy task with 5-year-old daughter Indiana and an energetic dog named Django. Much of the time, Diaz worked virtually with his longtime collaborator Michael Farkas near New York City. None of that fazed the couple.
“I’m used to creating in chaos,” Gaddis said.
Their first live show in more than a year unfolded recently, fittingly enough, in a town called Daybreak in Utah at an outdoor venue before 1,000 people. Upcoming dates in locales such as Los Angeles and San Francisco. In order to physically prepare for their sometimes hyper-kinetic stage show, Gaddis recently snuck into classes at the local Dancers Studio Inc. “where the teenagers were so sweet,” she said.
They both gush about the local arts community and leaders such as Columbus Area Arts Council Executive Director Kathryn Armstrong, who has booked them for both live and virtual concerts in the past.
“At the heart of what we’re doing is making positive things in difficult and challenging times,” Diaz said.
One positive thing about their career in a children’s field is that parents sometimes will recognize them in a Los Angeles Starbucks, but not interrupt them short of acknowledging them.
“It’s always really nice” Diaz said, “that people can connect with what we do. That’s part of the overall fun.”
