In Tune with Kids

Making kids’ music seems like fun and games. But it takes a special set of skills to put together a performance that’s both entertaining and educational … and won’t make the parents who have to endure repeat plays want to rip their ears out.  

“Being a children’s musician is a completely different skill from being able to play a guitar and sing,” says Aaron Jones, who performs as Mr. Aaron. “You have to have this other awareness of what everyone’s doing and how everyone’s doing. You’re managing a classroom.”

In New Hampshire, there’s a growing group of musicians writing and performing songs for kids, each with their own unique approach to bringing music to the youth masses. Here are four to add to your child’s rotation.

Miss Julieann

Miss Julieann is a music therapist who writes music that helps destigmatize mental health conditions in kids.

Last winter, Julieann Hartley, aka Miss Julieann, found herself walking among the stars in Los Angeles. Her friend, Lucky Diaz, had asked her to be a part of his most recent album, “Brillo, Brillo,” which ultimately won the Grammy for Best Children’s Music Album in 2025. 

To attend the ceremony, she wore a “secondhand silver sparkly dress off Poshmark” paired with a Frida Kahlo-inspired rose headpiece she made herself.  “I never in my life thought I’d be on a red carpet next to Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus,” she says.

As far as being a representative of the kids’ music scene in New Hampshire goes, Hartley was a good one to send to Hollywood. She’s a neurological-based music therapist who focuses on songs that can help kids build their resilience and coping skills. 

“I work with the way the brain and music interact to help wire in different nonmusical skills. Anyone who still remembers all the state capitals thanks to “Wakko’s America” (“Concord, New Hampshire, is just a quick jaunt / to Montpelier, which is up in Vermont.”) knows the power music can have in forming neural connections. 

When she first started her career as a music therapist in 2012, many of her patients were kids with trauma: those in the foster care system or those who had experienced abuse, neglect,or trafficking. “Seeing those kids go through these massive traumas made me want to be more a part of the large-scale prevention of these intergenerational trauma cycles that were fueling what these kids had experienced,” she says.

Now, Hartley is writing and performing songs meant to help destigmatize mental health conditions and provide kids with tools to build up resilience — which sounds serious but rarely feels that way when she’s on stage. “I try to get these very serious concepts across in a fun, silly, engaging way,” she says. 

The “lessons” in her songs are subtle; she doesn’t want the kids to notice they’re learning a new coping skill. Take “Race Car,” for example. It’s an interactive tune that requires kids to pay attention if they want to participate in the fun part. 

“We freeze, and whoever froze the fastest gets to pick what kind of race car we’re going to be,” Hartley says, noting that she wrote it with one little boy with autism who had a hard time with group activities in mind. “He loved race cars so much that he would join the group for this song.” 

That song can be useful for children who have experienced trauma, too. “Children who have experienced a lot of abuse or domestic violence in the household are going to have attention problems,” Hartley says.

In her on-stage performances, she often fakes a panic attack, something she deals with in real life, and asks the kids in the audience to guide her through it. “There’s just so much stigma around mental health. It was such a struggle for me,” Hartley says. “If I can be the person that helps some fourth-grader recognize that they’re having panic attacks or anxiety and get the help they need, then that feels pretty cool.” 

Hartley has published a book form of one of her most popular songs, “There’s a Dinosaur at My Door,” and is now working on her third album, “Wild Child.” Since Miss Julieann is part nonprofit, she’s also applying for more grants so she can bring her resilience songs to more areas of New Hampshire and across the country. 

She was recently asked to do a mini tour in Roanoke, Virginia, another area of the U.S. that’s been severely affected by the opioid epidemic. She hopes to do more tours across the country to areas that need substance-abuse prevention programs most. 

“I love going to schools and talking with the social workers and asking, ‘What more do you need? What else can I do to fill those gaps for you?”

Mama Nous

Mama Nous’ songs are for kids with big feelings, but adult fans say the lyrics help them too.

When Michelle Barrow had twins in 2020, she, like so many that year, felt isolated and spent a lot of time on social media. “I found myself constantly singing to my kids about random things: their emotions, how they were feeling, changing their diaper,” Barrow recalls. She decided to start posting videos of those songs under the name Mama Nous; turns out, they resonated with many other people.

Barrow’s stage name, Mama Nous (pronounced “mama nu”), is Franglish; “nous” is “we” in French. “I wanted the name to be bigger than me,” she says. “We (as mothers) are in this whole thing together, co-creating what’s possible for our kids.”

She writes music for children with big feelings — songs that are meant to help those kids navigate bad days and hard situations. “Life is hard when you’re growing up!” Barrow says. “You need help being coached through your own experiences and understanding how to regulate and accept your own emotional experience.” 

Barrow recalls a message she got from a woman whose own mother had recently died and whose 8-year-old daughter was taking the loss of her grandmother quite hard. They’d come across a video of Barrow singing “I Wish You Were Still Here,” which soon became a song her daughter would request often — and then began playing it for herself whenever she was feeling particularly sad. 

“Her mom was afraid that acknowledging the grief would cause her child to get stuck in it,” Barrow says. “Instead, it helped her honor and move through these really big feelings.”

Her music hits for parents too. “I get so many messages from adults who are like, ‘I love this music for my kids, but I’m actually learning just as much for myself,’” she says. Barrow says that having kids — who make plenty of mistakes while trying to figure out how to be a person —taught her to give herself more grace, too. 

Since Barrow has a totally separate day job, she does the majority of her Mama Nous work on nights and weekends: Her husband is her producer, and the couple has a home studio. She also primarily shares her music online, rather than in live performances (though she’d like to do more of the latter in the future). Her first song to go viral was “Grumpy Bunny,” a bouncy tune about how being in a bad mood doesn’t mean you don’t love your friends and family. 

In those virtual spaces, Barrow is often mistaken for a trad wife, but she prefers the term “hearth witch.” “It can be easy to interpret the fact that I really love my family, and I’m very into being a mom … as sort of having this traditional message,” she says. “For me, it actually comes from this place of sovereignty.” 

She’s also one of a growing number of children’s entertainers, Ms. Rachel arguably the most prominent, who publicly emphasize their support for kids everywhere, regardless of that child’s identity. (For example, when this interview happened in June, the Mama Nous feed was filled with support for queer and trans kids.) “As an adult, I feel a responsibility to actively shape the current world into one that is worthy of these wonderfully kind, caring, compassionate kids we’re trying to raise,” Barrow says. “When I share videos that may be seen as ‘political,’ they come from the same place as my songs: a deep desire to build a world where every child feels safe in being themselves and cherished for their unique brilliance.”

Mr. Aaron

Mr. Aaron’s Kid Fest is a free, kid-focused music festival hosted annually in Concord. Courtesy Photo

Aaron Jones found his way into a kids’ entertainment career by way of a Craigslist ad. He was living in Brooklyn and looking for work; a nearby Mommy and Me music class needed a teacher. Jones, who has a background in writing for musical theater and opera, got the gig. Thus, Mr. Aaron was born.

Without formal training, he learned what worked and what didn’t on the job (“Sometimes I would pick things that were too musician-y,” he recalls of his early flops, like incorporating lesser-known Prince songs into the set list. “But you just kind of quickly bail and get onto the next thing.”) 

Once he began performing original music for the kids, things really clicked into place. “I realized it was a way I could sing my own songs,” he says, noting that writing songs and music for theater was his biggest interest at the time. “It’s steady music work” that allowed him to continue playing in bands and doing musicals at night, he says. 

Now living in New Hampshire, Mr. Aaron’s performances are 95% original songs. “I feel privileged and grateful that I have found this line of work where I can do original music and people are into it,” he says. After all, most songs are new songs for young kids, so they’re more open to music they don’t already know. “If you go play in a bar, it’s a lot harder to do your original songs.” 

Jones likes songs that tell stories. “In all my songs, I like to have some kind of journey,” he says. Take, for example, “King Crow,” all about a corvid who covets all sorts of nasty trash. “You all make garbage and dump it
in the sea,” the titular bird sings. “It’s not great for fish, but it’s wonderful for me!” It’s a groovy tune that gets the audience moving, but also provides a smooth segue to talk about why littering and pollution are a problem. 

Jones is happy to write new music to fit a particular theme too: Recently, he wrote all new songs to perform at the New Hampshire Drinking Water Festival, an annual event hosted by the NH Drinking Water Coalition. When they reached out, he told them, “I have a whole album about the ocean.” Great, they said, but that’s not drinking water. “That’s kind of the fun thing about kids’ music. You get these weird prompts.” He also writes new songs — sometimes a whole album’s worth — every summer to correspond with the state’s reading program theme. 

Perhaps the most unique pieces Jones creates are done under his other musical alias, Bosey Joe. For many performances, he looks up musical equipment to living plants, including any that audience members bring from home. “(The equipment) reads the changes in electricity that go on in plants as they go through photosynthesis and move minerals and water around,” Jones says. “It converts those changes in electricity into voltages that are then used to play a synthesizer.”

Above all, Jones is focused on building community. On Sep. 12, he’ll host the third annual Mr. Aaron’s Kid Fest, a free festival of original music for kids and families, on the State House Lawn in Concord. “I wanted it to be free so that it could be accessible to everyone in the community,” he says. “It’s such an important thing to get people together to sing and to dance and to move.”

Miss Alli

All of Miss Alli’s performances are interactive, featuring plenty of silks and ribbons to dance with. Courtesy Photo

Alli Beaudry has a motto:  “Be a sponge, because the world has so much to offer. Just soak it all up.”  Beaudry has been a professional musician for more than 20 years, and Miss Alli, her kids’ entertainment stage name, for three. Her goal with the latter’s performances is to provide an eclectic experience that combines movement with music to create long-lasting memories. 

As with many of the artists in this story, Beaudry’s journey to musician for young folks started with having her own kids, specifically her second child who was born in 2020. “Things really shifted” both for herself and the people around her, Beaudry recalls. “The need and want for community connection through music seemed to be really prevalent.” 

So, one day, she walked into the Nest Family Cafe in Londonderry and introduced herself as a trained music educator (she taught at Berkeley College of Music for over a decade). They agreed to let her host pop-up shows, and Miss Alli’s world grew from there. 

Don’t expect to just sit and listen to nice songs if you attend a Miss Alli performance. “It’s very movement-based, sensory-based,” Beaudry says. “We do a lot of parachute, a lot of water themes, and storytelling through groove and song.” The first thing she says to open a show is, “Your body is your instrument, let’s wake it up!” From there, everyone gets on their feet. “We take the instruments off the floor, grab the silks, and find the most fun song to move our bodies to,” Beaudry says.  

You can also expect to sing along: While Beaudry does have a few originals, she primarily performs Disney hits (right now, “ ‘Moana’ is queen”) and songs you’d hear on the radio. Bob Marley is one of her go-to artists. “I open pretty much every Miss Alli performance with ‘Three Little Birds,’” she says. “It’s just a universal message … no matter what happens in life, everything will be OK.” “One Love” is typically another hit; the kids always seem surprised that “mommy or daddy or gigi are singing along.” 

While her performances are about having fun, they’re also rooted in her experience as a music educator. “We do a lot of exploration with my ukulele,” Beaudry says, noting that she lets the children come up and play around while she teaches them which notes go with each string. Her melodica sparks the most curiosity: The kids can press the keys, but no music comes out until she blows into the mouthpiece. 

Beaudry performs at all sorts of venues — coffee shops and theaters and other kid-focused spaces — but one of her favorites is Joppa Hill Farm in Bedford, where chickens mingle with the kids.  “When I’m performing on bigger venues, of course, it’s incredible to have these opportunities to play these main stages,” she says. “But I really love the intimate sessions, whether they’re for a private party or these institutions that want a music therapist to come and create that enrichment for the students and the families and their community.” 

Music is Beaudry’s full-time gig but, in the spirit of being a sponge, she’s not just sticking to one type of entertainment. At the time of this interview, Beaudry had just spent 10 weeks performing on the main stage at The Palace Theatre in Manchester. “I was in a show for Carole King, then I was in ‘Footloose,’ and I just finished playing Patsy Cline in ‘The Legends Live On,’ a tribute to country artists.” While she was in “Footloose,” she was also the musical director for a dinosaur musical. “During the week, it was a lot of T.rexes and triceratops and prehistoric musical magic,” Beaudry says. “Then, I’d get on the main stage in the evening to get back into the ’80s.”

She loves the ability to flip back and forth between Miss Alli and Alli Beaudry, who has two adult albums out now and is working on a third to release later this year. “Creatives can’t be tamed,” Beaudry says. “I don’t think I could ever work a 9 to 5. My soul would not feel complete, because I need to be doing something all the time, and I am very grateful that I can.”

Beaudry hopes she can provide community and inspiration for kids (and other adults) who feel that creative calling. “There’s only one of you in this whole universe,” she says. “So please shine bright.”