Vance Gilbert Competitors

Kid Pan Alley’s mission is to inspire and empower children to work together to become creators of their own music and to rekindle creativity as a core value in education through the group songwriting process. To date, we've written over 2,700 songs with over 65,000 children across the country from Virginia to Hawaii. The songs are a sophisticated and powerful world-view as seen through the eyes of the children. Our songs have been recorded by artists including Amy Grant, Sissy Spacek, Delbert McClinton, Cracker, Kix Brooks, Nashville Chamber Orchestra, Corey Harris, Suzy Bogguss and many others. We’ve won numerous awards including Parents’ Choice Gold Awards, a WAMMIE, and have received a Grammy nomination for one of our recordings. We live in a creative economy, yet most of arts education focusses on the re-creative. We think you’ll find Kid Pan Alley to be a powerful way to inspire kids in the creative process. Here’s a link to a few songs if you’d like to listen to a few. https://kpa.miradamedia.io/player/6956

Label founder Ani DiFranco once called Righteous Babe Records “a people-friendly, sub-corporate, woman-informed, queer-happy small business that puts music before rock stardom and ideology before profit,” and it’s hard to imagine a more accurate mission statement than that one. Since Ani bucked the major label system in the early-‘90s, opting to release her music on her own terms, the self-described Little Folksinger has been the subject of all kinds of hyperbole. She’s been called “fiercely independent” (Rolling Stone), “inspirational” (All Music Guide), “the ultimate do-it-yourself songwriter” (The New York Times), etc. As the cracks in the music industry get larger and more big-name artists follow Ani’s lead – Radiohead, Madonna and Nine Inch Nails among them – maybe people will just start calling her “smart.” As important as Righteous Babe Records is to the singer/songwriter/guitarist, she’s more than happy to trust like-minded people with the business and revel in the complete artistic freedom it provides. Ani DiFranco has written hundreds of songs, played thousands of shows, captured the imaginations of legions of followers, and jammed with folkies, orchestras, rappers, rock and roll hall-of-famers, jazz musicians, poets, pop superstars, storytellers and a martial arts legend. She’s “fixed up a few old buildings” and minimized her carbon footprint before it was trendy – from installing a geothermal heating and cooling system in the renovated church that her label calls home to using organic inks on all the t-shirts she sells. But nothing she’s done in her 20+year career has garnered more attention than a business decision.

Mary's GRAMMY nominated release, Rifles & Rosary Beads, was co-written with U.S. veterans and their families. The eleven deeply personal songs on this album reveal the untold stories, and powerful struggles that these veterans and their spouses deal with abroad and after returning home.