Pee Pee Song

At the heart of CarTune Factory are Aaron and Adam Esposito. The idea behind creating this album and the title CarTune Factory altogether was to create music that's first and foremost safe for young developing minds, but also entertainment for the entire family.

Aaron came up with this project in 2009 and did not have the funds to produce it until 2014. His friend and recording engineer William Courchaine set up his traveling studio in Aaron's home in spring of 2009 where the bulk of the album was recorded in just a few days. It was only in the last year however that Aaron and his wife Shannon were stable enough with their household income to begin squirreling money away to pay for production of the album (a years worth of $1 tips from live performances). So Aaron finished up the cover artwork that he started back in 2009 and took the leap to self-produce CarTune Factory's first album. This project has been a long journey for the Esposito family and hopefully it's just the beginning of a successful music making adventure for many years to come.

As far as anecdotal tidbits are concerned, each song in this volume is different from the last, and each has a little story of how it came to be. Here are a few short paragraphs from Aaron to explain each song and where it came from.

"Water Balloon War started off as a silly poem over 2 years before the concept for the album even came to be. I found the poem in a notebook when I was toying with the idea of a children's album, I added some music, a few extra lines and a chorus, now it's one of everyone's favorite songs from this volume.

I Want a Pet is one of those songs that was just fun to write and record. The music for it was part of an instrumental (I used to call "Circus Music") that I had written about 6 years earlier, and the lyrics where really kind of just improvised. When the song was recorded I had a scrap piece of paper in my hand to keep track of the animals and relatives (it just had two words for each part i.e. "dog mom", "cat dad", "brother skunk" etc.).

Don't Cry was really written for parents and newborns. It's for those moments when your baby is crying for no apparent reason, you're tired and you don't no what else to do except comfort your little bundle of discomfort until everything is calm and quiet again. Frustration happens as a parent, this song is how I dealt with it.

Martin C. Morford (Please Collect your Mail) was inspired by... well, mail. When we moved into our first home, we were receiving mail from all the people that lived there before us. The most commonly addressed pieces of post were addressed to Martin C. Morford, I thought the name was so fictional sounding that I had to make a poem about it. One day, during some down time at a restaurant I was working at, I sat outside and wrote a short poem with a punchline about all my friends having my name wrong and another song was born.

Time Out is one of my favorites. I thought of the phrase "pre-elementary penitentiary" and rhymed it with "count to 3" and literally wrote around it.

Nursery Rhyme Blues came together when I tried to put a blues back-beat to any nursery rhyme I could think of. I just went through a list of the most common nursery rhymes I knew and it evolved into Nursery Rhyme Blues. My favorite part is The Muffin Man, I think eventually I may do an entire Muffin Man song.

Circus Song came together years before we recorded it for this album. Adam and I were just improvising songs one day, I was playing a really out-of-tune old piano and Adam was just spouting off lyrics as they came to him. I transposed the music to be played on an open tuned guitar and Adam re-learned the lyrics (with just a little editing) from the original words and we added it to the song list.

Super Dragon was created from just me imagining that I was a dragon super-hero. The tuba, that was played by the sound engineers nephew (Dylan), reminds me of a big dragon taking big dramatic steps. Listening to the song now, I kind of wish it were faster and more upbeat, but that just means that I may revisit this one later. Super Dragon too.. just a thought.

The Pee Pee Song was the song that inspired the entire album. It started off as a chant that I'd sing to my daughter Natalie when I changed her diapers. The chant got longer as her attention span got shorter and eventually I put some chords to it and started actually singing it. One day my wife suggested that since I wrote that silly song I should make an entire children's album based around songs parents and kids could relate to. This album would not exist if not for this silly song about diaper changing.

The last song on the album, If You Were the Sun, is one that I almost saved for one of my regular albums (regular meaning not specifically a "children's album"). I used to sing this to my youngest daughter as a lullaby when she was an infant and it helped her fall asleep nearly every time, which is why I chose this to be the last song in this volume. I had written this for my wife and daughters to express my love for them, my life would be meaningless without them and I can't imagine what my life would be like if they weren't the center of my world.

I hope you and your family each find something in this collection of songs that you can connect with."