Reminick is, by any measure, overqualified for this. A DMA in composition from Northwestern, two decades in the post-punk outfit Paper Mice, advanced degrees in music theory and saxophone performance, a pedagogical lineage that runs through Paul Cohen and Don Sinta — the man could have spent his career writing difficult, respected work for concert halls and contemporary music journals. Instead, he has written a song called "I Hope Nobody Drops a Big Rubber Horse on My Head," and it is, it should be said, an absolute belter.
The opening gambit, "We've Got the Squiggles," arrives like a bus driven by someone who has studied every Burt Bacharach chord voicing and decided to deploy them all in the service of a wiggle. It establishes the album's central proposition immediately: the joke is always structural. DadJoke doesn't smuggle sophistication past children — it builds the sophistication into the foundation, so the fun and the craft are indistinguishable from each other. Mister Rogers understood this. So did the composers Reminick openly venerates: Alan Menken, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Robert and Kristen Anderson-Lopez. What they share is the conviction that a song for children deserves the same compositional rigour as a song for anyone else. *Fun Intended* holds that conviction and runs with it, laughing.
"Wakey Wake Up" is the album's most audacious set piece. Reminick has spoken about wanting both a metal band of monsters and a rodent jazz band within the same track, and — remarkably — he got them. The result is less a song than a contained theatrical event, the kind of thing that might have emerged if Frank Zappa had been commissioned to write a television pilot for the Muppets and then been given too much time and too little supervision. It shouldn't cohere. It does, brilliantly, because Reminick's grounding in jazz harmony (his reverence for Ornette Coleman's free period is audible, if sublimated) gives the chaos a skeleton.
The album's emotional register is wider than its absurdist reputation might suggest. "Because We're Friends" and "I'm Deciding to Be Brave," both featuring the luminous Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, are genuinely affecting — the latter a quiet masterpiece of emotional permission-giving that owes something to Brian Wilson's genius for locating the universal in the plainly spoken. These are not filler. They are the album's beating centre, the moments that justify Reminick's placement of bell hooks and Jason Reynolds among his foundational influences on how one makes music *with* and *for* children rather than merely *at* them.
And then there is "I Tried to Use AI… But It Came Out WEIRD," which is exactly as knowing as its title promises. A song about creative authenticity that deploys, by the artist's own account, a 1970s folk guitar section followed by a full orchestral passage — because the creative process got out of hand, and he leaned into it rather than pulling back. As a statement of artistic intent, it's more coherent than most manifestos, delivered with considerably more melodic invention, and funnier than anything a think-piece could manage. The irony of a human composer, steeped in forty years of musical learning, using AI as a comic villain to celebrate the irreducible messiness of genuine creativity is not lost. It is, in fact, the point.
Producer Taylor Hales deserves credit for keeping the album's 26-minute runtime taut without homogenising its considerable stylistic range. The sequencing is thoughtful: rock, punk, funk, jazz, Broadway pastiche, and R&B hover in constellation rather than competing for dominance, and drummer John Carroll provides a rhythmic intelligence that holds the wilder experiments in place.
Fun Intended is, improbably, one of the most purely enjoyable albums released in 2026 by any artist in any genre. That the target demographic is primarily aged one to twelve is simultaneously a marketing reality and a critical red herring. Great music is great music. Dave Reminick knows this. Now you do too.
Fun Intended is out now on Stritch Rose. Available on all major streaming platforms, and on CD via Bandcamp and dadjokemusic.com.