Now that it's almost December, there can be only one thing on the minds of kids around Japan: Um, summer camp?
OK, so the timing's not great. But Lisa Loeb — she of the cat-eye tortoise-shell glasses and introspective, intricate songs about the mundanities of love and life — is in Japan to support her two releases of 2008: January's "The Purple Tape," a CD reissue of her prefame demo tape, and May's marshmallow-toasting kids' album "Camp Lisa."
"It's something I had always planned to do at some point," she says, explaining her departure from downbeat tales of wintry woe into the world of children's songs. "There are some records I grew up listening to, like a Carole King record called "Really Rosie" and a record that Marlo Thomas made called "Free To Be . . . You And Me." And around the same time I was listening to those records as a kid, we were also watching Monty Python and Steve Martin and "Sesame Street," and there was this very fine line between grown-up and kids' entertainment."