If, like us, your week is dragging on just a little bit, perhaps you'll find some comic respite in the form of Nashville-based musician K. S. Rhoads' jaw-droppingly well-produced reimaginings of "kids' favourite jams by their dad's favourite bands".
In a series of TikToks, Rhoads has covered 15 (and counting) nursery rhymes and kids' songs in the style of popular rock and indie bands. Before you roll your eyes, we're not talking some half-assed performance of Wheels On The Bus with an electric guitar. Rhoads has painstakingly recreated the playing style and production choices of each artist and filmed zany, frequently hilarious videos to accompany each cover.
In other words, Rhoads has displayed an admirable commitment to the bit, and we are here for it. The videos are made all the more fun by the inclusion of two big spinning wheels which randomly decide which song will be covered and which band's style Rhoads will impersonate next.
Among the covers, we've got Radiohead taking on Baby Shark, a relentlessly catchy melody that will be well-worn into the grooves of any parent's brain. Its mind-numbing cheerfulness may be the antithesis of Radiohead's gloomy melancholia, but Rhoads masterfully shifts the song into a new time signature with an appropriately spooky, minor-key vibe, complete with pained, Thom Yorke-style wails: the crescendo even sounds a little bit like Climbing Up The Walls.
@ksrhoads ♬ OK Shark - ksrhoads
Elsewhere in the series, Rhoads channels Pearl Jam on Twinkle Twinkle Flannel Star, does Dylan on Old Macdonalds Blues and imagines what it might sound like if The Beach Boys played a show at a preschool. He takes on modern bands, too, putting a folksy spin on You Are My Sunshine with You Are My Mumford and Sunshine (prompting the official Tears For Fears account to comment: "are we on the wheel?") and doing an uncanny Bon Iver for Wheels On The Bus.
Silly they may be, but it's no mean feat to recreate the sound of this many bands this accurately - Rhoads is clearly a talent. The Nashville native also writes and records his own music, and his latest release was 2020's Experts.
Follow K. S. Rhoads on TikTok.
@ksrhoads ♬ original sound - ksrhoads
