If you're familiar with Sandra Boynton's cartoons, you might expect her to resemble one of her characters — a boisterous hippo, perhaps, or a mischievous piglet. Instead, Boynton is a slender, elegant blonde, with a soft-spoken, acerbic wit. She's not round or cuddly, but she is immensely likeable — and she lights up when talking about her latest CD-and-book set, Blue Moo. An uncanny homage to the jukebox songs of her childhood, Blue Moo features Boynton's lyrics sung by the likes of B.B. King, Neil Sedaka, Sha Na Na, Brian Wilson and The Monkees' Davy Jones. Babble sat down to talk with Boynton about her writing process, her famous friends, and which books were inspired by her four children. — Gwynne Watkins
I want to talk about Hippos Go Berserk because it was my favorite book when I was a baby, and now our editor-in-chief has a one-year-old and it's his favorite too. It's the first book you wrote, right?
Yes, I wrote it when I was in drama school — I went to the Yale Drama School and it was a January project. They let us do any project we wanted to do. And I don't know how I persuaded them that it had something to do with theater! Actually I wrote my very first children's book when I was four, and the entire text was "Once there was a funny animal who had a party. All the animals came. They didn't like it, so they left. The end." So there's a theme running through! [Laughs.]
That book is also kind of fascinating in that preverbal children like it so much. Is that something you've noticed?
It is. I guess first of all, I don't think any children are preverbal. Do you know what I mean? You're so wired for language that the brain is designed to catch onto rhythm and percussion and consonants in language. So I think it's the chant of that book, the sort of sing-song-y chant that's part of it, too. I think it's also pictures — finding stuff in pictures, is a lot of it.
When you had kids, did that change your perspective on writing?
Well yes and no. I think children's book writers tend to be absurdly in touch with their own childhood. So first and foremost, I think you're writing for yourself as a child and it's not a stretch. It's very easy to go there. The thing that was great about having kids around to try things out on is you're getting absolutely honest, instantaneous feedback on whether it's working, whether it's boring. They don't have to say anything.
And also, you're inspired. Blue Hat, Green Hat was written when my son Devin, who's now twenty-three, was three, and loved the word "oops." He was a little guy with a very low voice, so every time he heard the word "oops" he would just go into this belly laugh that would set everyone else laughing. And so that was the fastest book I ever wrote. I said, I need a book that keeps repeating the word "oops" in it! Barnyard Dance was very much inspired by my daughter Darcy when she was two — she's my youngest, she's seventeen now — but from a young age, she would just respond to that square dance rhythm, the spoken rhythm even. And I thought, oh that makes sense then. And actually the very first board book I did was for my oldest daughter, who's twenty-eight now, for her first Christmas. And that was Moo, Baa, La La La. And I did it because she loved animal sounds, but most of the animal sound books seemed a little tedious to me.
I think of your drawings as characters; I don't know if you see them that way. For example, you've drawn many different kinds of hippos over the year, but if I see a hippo drawn by you then I know right away it's one of your hippos. Is that a style you've always had?
I think you would recognize a hippo as mine, but actually if you look at all the different hippos I've done, they're quite different, one from the other. And that's why I like not naming my characters; there's a lot more flexibility in how to approach the drawing of them. Different body forms are expressive in different contexts, so I would hate to be locked into "oh, I do these five characters, and this one's the crabby one, and this one's the sweet one" — it's just way too limiting. So I like the unnamed-characters approach. And the decision of whether they're clothed, therefore more human, or not, is fairly complex sometimes.
Do you think of your books as being set in the same world, or do you think of each one as being distinct?
No, they each have their own reality. I think in a sense I'm very prosaic; people think I must be in this fantasy world half the time, and to me when I'm working, I'm working. I guess I'm very left-brained in that way.
So let's talk about Blue Moo, because all the songs are in my head right now.
What's your favorite?
I really like the the nose song, and I think the Interrupting Band is hysterical. The songs are so good; they don't feel strained like a lot of children's music.
The only concession I make to them being "children's songs" in that way is clarity of lyrics; it's too frustrating to not be able to understand the lyrics. Having four children, I found the music put out for children was music that adults wouldn't listen to, and I think that's a big mistake. I think it has to be equally appealing, and ideally you should be listening to the music with your children and enjoying it. And if not, I think there's something wrong. People will say to me, but wait a minute, there are songs that kids love that parents don't love. And I say, well, yeah, kids love donuts too, it doesn't mean they're nourishing.
You have some unlikely musicians on your albums — Meryl Streep, for example. How did that happen?
Well, that particular one was that I happened to know her. Mike and I always work on demos, and that song "Nobody Understands Me" that she ended up doing, we had a demo of it, and I had literally just been saying, "The problem with the singer for this is that you need someone with the acting talent of Meryl Streep to put it across, who can really sing." And literally, I hadn't seen her in a year and she happened by my studio the next day. And of course, as soon as she said she wanted to sing something, everybody in the world wanted to be on that album!
So for this new one, you've got this '50s jukebox style songs, and you're clearly in love with that style.
It's my favorite, absolutely my favorite era of music. And I think for kids to be sharing this music — there's kind of something nifty about that, that you now have three generations and it's new to two of them, and it's incredibly familiar and beloved by the grandparent generation. And a number of people we have on the album, of course, are now grandparents. People hate to hear that Davy Jones from the Monkees is a grandfather, but he is, he's got three grandchildren and he's terrific on the album, he's just amazing. Neil Sedaka has four grandchildren, and he sounds like the same singer. They all sound the same! It's amazing. We searched on YouTube to make sure before we asked people, because people's voices can change, and we kept being blown away. These people are still singing phenomenally.
I love Sha Na Na singing about bananas. They should always have been singing about bananas! What were they doing all time when they weren't singing about bananas?
Those guys are so funny. It's actually a complex song to do live, but they've talked about adding it to their repertoire. It was actually Jocko Marcellino who was our contact with Sha Na Na, and he's been with them since the beginning; he was the youngest performer at Woodstock, so I think he was still in high school then. Recently I got an email from him saying, "Let me know when the book's out cuz I want to put it in Greaser's Quarterly." And I thought, when did I ever dream I'd be in Greaser's Quarterly?
I saw some of the footage of the artists recording the songs. Neil Sedaka looked like he was having the best time.
I was giddy because I felt like I was eleven years old again, and there's Neil Sedaka. But he channeled right back into that era. He was, in a sense, excited to find a new Neil Sedaka song. He said that! He said, "Oh, a new Neil Sedaka song! From back then!"
What was B.B. King like?
The amazing thing about B.B. King — that man is eight-two years old, and he's diabetic so he has a little trouble getting around, phenomenal singer of course, incredible guitar player — but something I didn't know about B.B. King is what an actor he is. And he starts singing that song "One Shoe Blues," and we're watching this man, and he's not doing a kid voice or anything — thank goodness, he's singing it straight — and you're watching, and you believe he's a seven-year-old and his mom's calling him. It was jaw-dropping.
I read on Wikipedia, the most reliable website in the world —
Absolutely, it's all true! Whatever it is you read it's true!
— that you're getting a retrospective at the Norman Rockwell Museum ?
Oh, that's true. That is true! [Laughs.] That's February 2009, and then it's supposed to move to art museums nationwide.
I also read that you've been frequently confused with a man over the years.
Yes! Well, I guess I was first known for my greeting cards, and I just signed with my last name, and I guess there's an assumption that cartoonists are male. I don't know. But I used to get that quite a lot. Now that I'm known for my children's books, it's less likely to happen; there aren't very many male Sandras. But when I don't use my first name — I guess it's 'cause cartoonists are predominantly male. I don't know. Think of an answer and say that I said that. Make it witty. And deep.