Everybody Hates Elves by Kari Maaren: You'll Just Love It

Hey, I had a great time in Toronto on Wednesday night at Bakka-Phoenix Books' Night of Amazing Stories, where I and four other authors (Jen Frankel, Shirley Meier, Liz Westbrook-Trenholm, and Lena Ng) read from our stories published in the amazing Amazing Stories.  Editor Ira Nayman put this all together, Gisela McKay video-recorded the event (I'll post the link here when it's up on YouTube), and I actually not only read a story but sang a song, "If I Traveled to the Past," which will be on my new album, Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time, to be released by Old Bear Records in early 2020.  (If you'd like to hear that song, there's rough mix of it, right above this post, right above the snowy window.)

But speaking of songs, one of the best surprises for me of the evening was Kari Maaren, who sang two songs, one about a nerd, one about a werewolf, with her ukulele and her delightful, strong, funny (as in laughing) voice.  The songs both had clever, bouncy lyrics, just my cup of tea.  They've not yet been released.  But Kari has released a CD, which I couldn't resist listening to and reviewing here.

In general, Kari’s a little like Raffi with a ukelele - but mostly not like anyone else.  Her CD Everybody Hates Elves - which you can listen to here - has 14 songs, all of which have Kari's unique sparkle and style.

Here are my comments on most of them (I always like leaving a little something out when I review an album or an LP, to keep you in suspense) -

• “It must be so dreary to die” typifies the title song  "Everybody Hates Elves," a defiant song, with irrepressible, alliterate lyrics, which, come to think of it, light up just about every song on the CD
• "Fake Geek Guy" has some excellent counterpoint, and splashy sarcasm, another hallmark of these songs
• But "Come Rescue Me," from the Star Wars universe, is a plaintiff, almost lilting, altogether beautiful ballad
• "Trekless," on the other hand, rhymes Borg and morgue, hard and Jean-Luc Picard, binge and Fringe, and mentions Hulu
• Like most science fiction writers, Maaren dabbles in a little mystery, then returns to science fiction - but in the same song - and gets in another bevy of good rhymes, like "soil" and "foil" - in "Being Watson"
• She has a good love song in "I Did It For Love," and follows it with a good meta-love song, "They Are in Love," which stresses that nothing else matters, and brings the point home with the line "gives the tale its punch" which I think may be (homonymically) provocative
• "The Prophecy Hotline" is a very different kind of song, with a great ending, and one of my favorites lines in this collection of songs, "well meaning morons"
• Next up, "When the Starcats Come," has to be auto-biographical, about a kid oppressed in school, hoping for extra-terrestrials to rescue her
• Even more desperate is "Take My Sheep," which finds the troubadour unable to sleep, "buried in mounds of sheep"
• Boy A or Boy B is the dilemma presented in "I Can't Decide" - one is "excellent without a shirt" ... and the other? well, you have to listen to the song to find out
• And, trite as it may be for me to say this, Kari saves the best for last, with another other meta song, this one about a magazine seeking submissions (of stories), with rhymes of historical and metaphorical, in a refrain that features “we don’t want your unrealistic shit” which rhymes with ... "Can Lit" the title of the song

So, you get the acoustic picture.  If you'd like some laughs, memorable melodies, and creme de la creme rhyming lyrics, do yourself a favor and acquaint yourself with Kari Maaren's Everbody Hates Elves, which, again, you can listen to right here.

And if you'd like to know why I like rhymes so much, you'll find at least part of the explanation here.