Let us be clear about the premise, because it demands clarity: every song on *There's A Song In Every Story* was co-written by schoolchildren — fourth graders, seventh graders, kids whose primary cultural output is supposed to be macaroni art and sports-day certificates. And yet the album opens with "On Our Way To Liberty," a track concerning slavery that carries more moral weight than ninety percent of the protest songs released by adults this calendar year. Howard Levy's harmonica, that most American of instruments, bends notes around the children's words like a vine reclaiming old timber. Lea Morris sings with the restraint of someone who understands that the lyrics need no assistance.
"A Place We Go To Remember" is the album's centrepiece and its emotional apex. Co-written by a class of ten-year-olds responding to Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the song summons grief with an almost architectural precision. Pinchas Zukerman — *Pinchas Zukerman*, playing violin and viola here as though he has nowhere more important to be — and cellist Amanda Forsyth create a soundworld that is simultaneously intimate and monumental. Natalia Zukerman's vocals float above the strings without a single ornamental flourish. These children wrote about 58,000 names carved in stone. They appear not to have taken the assignment lightly.
One could continue in this vein — and one is tempted to, because the album rewards it — but it would be a disservice to reduce the record to a roll call of its most obviously moving moments. "I Don't Want To Say Anything About Love," written by a seventh-grade class, is wickedly funny and emotionally precise in a way that would make most professional songwriter-comedians put down their notebooks in respectful defeat. Lindsey Harper (formerly Selena Gomez's backing vocalist, which is either an irrelevant biographical detail or a neat symbol of pop's digestive system returning nutrients to the earth, depending on your metaphorical preferences) delivers the lyric with perfect comic timing and zero condescension. The arrangement is clean, contemporary, and knows when to stop.
The production throughout, handled by Ryan Benyo and Reisler himself, deserves particular attention. This is not a charity record dressed up in good intentions and lo-fi aesthetics. The folk elements crackle; the country touches settle as naturally as dust on a windowsill; the classical passages breathe. "I'm Hawaiian," featuring John Keawe, sits in its own acoustic space without feeling like a curio. "One Big Hurricane," with Billy Jonas, hits climate anxiety at a slant — the children's perspective landing precisely because it is *theirs*, not borrowed from a news segment.
The running time of approximately thirty minutes is worth noting. Reisler and Benyo have had the wisdom not to fill it out. Ten tracks, thirty minutes: a record with the confidence to end before it outstays its welcome. The discipline is its own kind of argument.
Critics of a certain disposition will reach, reflexively, for scepticism. Surely a children's songwriting project produces charming approximations, sweet rough drafts that the professionals smooth into palatability? *There's A Song In Every Story* answers this suspicion not by arguing against it but by rendering it irrelevant. The children are not producing rough drafts. They are producing songs. The distinction matters enormously.
Reisler noted, in his press materials, that a child who writes a song with a professional will be "changed forever — seeing themselves as a creator and an artist, and not just as a consumer of popular culture." Twenty-five years of institutional commitment to that idea has produced, among other things, this album. Listeners may find themselves changed in smaller but not entirely dissimilar ways.
Essential. Embarrassingly so.
*Released April 24, 2026 on Kid Pan Alley Records. Available on all major streaming platforms.*