Having recently been asked what “we freak in a jeep” means by my eight-year-old daughter after she listened to, and loved, Katy Perry’s “California Gurls,” I see the appeal of this, especially since, at their ages, my kids don’t seem to discern much difference musically between what they hear on the Nick show and what they hear on pop radio. “The songs sound like what you’d hear on the radio, the shows look like sitcoms you’d see on TV, but it’s a safe space for ,” Kraft added. (“It might be time to stop calling us a preschool band,” Hobson noted.) While Kraft and van der Velde conceived the show in part because they wanted their young daughters to have fun, hooky pop music to call their own, the songs, written by composition cooperative Matter Music, engage older kids and even, I can confess, their parents. Hobson might have used the word “people” by design, for while Nick bills the Fresh Beats as a “preschool band,” all evidence indicates that their appeal goes beyond the juice-box crowd. “We were flying under the radar, and it wasn’t until tickets went on sale for the tour that we all stopped and went, ‘Wow.’ Being on the road has been insane. “You work on the soundstage and you really don’t have a clear picture of the impact you’re having on people,” said Thomas Hobson, who plays keyboardist Shout, in a telephone interview from the Fresh Beats’ tour bus as it made its way from Oakland to Modesto. The 15-week, 95-date American tour, which kicked off earlier this month in Anaheim, Calif., marks the first time the foursome has hit the road, and everyone involved seems stunned by the passionate response. “ We can’t get tickets!” laughed Scott Kraft, who, along with his wife, Nadine van der Velde, created and executive produces The Fresh Beat Band, Nickelodeon’s live-action show about four friends and bandmates–Twist, Shout, Kiki, and Marina–who sing and dance their way through candy-colored sets as they work together to solve appropriately solvable problems. “These tickets are as hard to get as Radiohead,” he marveled. He was further surprised to discover that he couldn’t help. My cousin’s reaction was surprise that the first time I’d enlisted his aid was for “some Nick thing” he’d never even heard of. So I sent an e-mail asking if there was any way for me to buy tickets to the hottest gig in town: the Fresh Beat Band. The New York-area shows had sold out in a nanosecond, and two very important people were depending on me. I’d never asked my cousin, a senior executive at Live Nation, to help get me into a concert before, but this situation was desperate.
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