Toothpaste Horse / I Don't Have A Bib

Occasionally, ever since John Ringhofer released the first Half-handed Cloud album in 1999, people have asked him if he's considered making music specifically for kids. The day has finally arrived. Toothpaste Horse is a 26-song album written and developed alongside John's four children, featuring fun-sized, gleeful melodies and handmade arrangements that navigate internal Ringhofer family logic. Most of these songs came about spontaneously as a byproduct of parenting young children, sung around their home nearly every day for years before being recorded. Topics range from motivational tunes for extinguishing light switches, to newborn baby love songs, to asking why there's a huge tower of discarded egg cartons in the corner — is it for a school project or something?In producing Toothpaste Horse, Ringhofer revisited the art-making methods of his own late-70s and early-80s childhood, taping the album with a 4-track Portastudio recorder. It's like The Beach Boys' Smiley Smile if it had been recorded on a telephone answering machine. The vinyl pairs Toothpaste Horse with 2018's self-released I Don't Have A Bib, now mastered for the first time, totaling 53 songs on one record, alongside a foldout growth chart poster over three feet tall with Ringhofer's illustrations of the album's instrumentation.