https://www.mistermikesmusic.com/mister-mikes-blog daily 0.75 2026-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/696fc1666d8417793071ad78/2f117893-8900-424b-b4ae-3b486a016191/MMM-QuoteMarks-Blue_handdrawn.png https://www.mistermikesmusic.com/mister-mikes-blog/mr-mikes-family-notes-meet-the-glidden-family monthly 0.5 2026-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/696fc1666d8417793071ad78/503d7646-04ee-4e70-ab21-297f6667e5eb/Glidden+Family.jpg mister mike's blog - Mr. Mike's Family Notes: Meet The Glidden Family Meet Jacquelyn Glidden and her daughters Juliette and Dorothy. Jacquelyn signed up for our babies class in the summer of 2022 for one of the most honest reasons I hear from new parents: it was hot, she had a three-month-old, and she needed to get out of the house. She didn't know any other new moms yet. She wanted something inside and air-conditioned, somewhere she might talk with another adult, maybe even make a friend. She saw a post for our class and signed up immediately. That was almost four years ago. Jacquelyn and her daughters have been in class every semester since. What hooked her wasn't what she expected. Jacquelyn has a PhD in Child Development, and she recognized something different right away. She saw how the class held space for parents to connect with each other, gave babies room to absorb music and movement at their own pace, and created moments of quiet closeness between families. It wasn't a performance. It was families in a room making something together. This is what connected me to Music Together as well. I grew up in Kentucky where music in my family meant cousins and aunts and uncles singing together while the kids ran around playing. No one stopped us to make us join in, but we were connected to it. We knew we would grow into it, and we knew it came out of pure joy. Jacquelyn's description of what she found in our class, adults getting together and connecting while the children absorb the music in their own way, fills me with pride. That's the feeling I want every family to have in our classes. Jacquelyn's second child Dorothy came along. She came to class as a baby too. And something Jacquelyn didn't anticipate started happening. Songs from earlier collections came back around, and they carried memories with them. She told me that hearing a song from Juliette's very first babies class played three years later brought everything flooding back: over-packing the diaper bag, walking through the July heat to get to class, the first time a song from class soothed Juliette during a diaper change. All of it, in the best possible way. And then there's the friendships. She's met some of her closest parent friends through class. They run into each other at parades, on school tours, at Trader Joe's. She said she's met dozens of families she would now call friends. That kind of connection can be hard to find as a new parent. She called it "truly a treasure." https://www.mistermikesmusic.com/mister-mikes-blog/you-cant-unhear-the-words monthly 0.5 2026-07-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/696fc1666d8417793071ad78/8400be00-96c9-4223-a8ca-e2ca2187a267/1080x1350_MT-SocialTiles-KAZOO-Illustration-10.png mister mike's blog - You Can’t Unhear the Words I've written a couple of posts about the importance of songs without words in our collections. Here's an important distinction. A song without words is not the same thing as a song with the words removed. If I asked you to sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" but only on "La la la," you could do it, but your brain would still be processing the words. Try it. You would be hearing them in your head even though you weren't singing them. You associate them so much with the melody that it's almost impossible to not hear them as you sing. They're built into that melody for you. Every time the tune moves, your mind fills in the language whether you sing it out loud or not. Musicians and music educators call this audiation. It's the ability to hear and process music in your mind, even when it's not being played out loud. It's the musical equivalent of thinking in words. And once your brain has attached language to a melody, it's very difficult to separate them. That's why the songs without words in our Music Together collections are so valuable. Songs like Bim Bam, Doodle, and Su La Li were never written with words. There are no words to audiate. When your child sings along, their brain is processing pure music. Pitch. Rhythm. Melody. Phrasing. The feel of a song. Nothing is competing for space. Now think about what happens when a well-meaning children's program takes a familiar tune and strips the words out as a musical exercise. The adults in the room are still hearing the words in their heads. And if the child already knows the words, they're processing them too. It's not a song without words. It's a song with invisible words. https://www.mistermikesmusic.com/mister-mikes-blog/mr-mikes-family-notes-meet-the-winslow-family monthly 0.5 2026-07-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/696fc1666d8417793071ad78/313565d9-f0d1-423b-a3cc-7d60244bf8b5/Winslow+-+Brenna%2C+Thomas%2C+and+Perry.JPEG mister mike's blog - Mr. Mike’s Family Notes: Meet the Winslow Family The Winslow family joined us when Perry was little. Brenna came from a house where people sang, and she wanted that for her own family too. Brenna signed up for Deborah's class for the same reason a lot of parents do: she needed things to do with a baby. Not baby-tolerating things but baby-friendly things. A mom in her PACE group rallied a few parents to sign up together and they joined as a group. What she didn't mention at the time, and maybe didn't even realize yet, was that she hadn't had a place to sing out loud since college. Brenna grew up singing. Church, musical theater, a band with her sisters in high school. Music wasn't something she watched other people do. It was something she participated in. And the baby? He made it his own immediately. He took his first steps in one of Brenna's classes. Said "Mama" for the first time in one of Deb's. Two milestones that had nothing to do with music and everything to do with what happens when a child feels safe and alive in a room full of people making sounds and moving together. https://www.mistermikesmusic.com/mister-mikes-blog/songs-without-words-part-2 monthly 0.5 2026-06-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/696fc1666d8417793071ad78/ab060971-8f1a-4e1e-9f51-803dfae53a77/SWOW+2+-+FIDDLE_Illustration-11.png mister mike's blog - Songs Without Words, Part 2 In an earlier post I wrote about why our song collections include songs without words — songs sung on vocables instead of language. The short version: when you remove words, you reduce cognitive overload and give a young brain more room to focus on pitch and rhythm. But there's a bigger idea that goes beyond simplification. The idea of emotional depth by understanding music as something without language. A lot of the music children encounter in school and in daily life is being used to deliver words or understand concepts. Songs that teach the alphabet. Songs that help kids remember the days of the week. Songs that make a task more fun. That's fine. But it's not really music. It's fun with words. And it reduces music to something that only exists to serve language. But really, those things that have nothing to do with music at all. If that's all children experience, they learn something limiting: that music needs words to have a purpose. They learn that music on its own isn't enough. Think about how much of the music the world has produced is instrumental. 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