What were you watching and picking up on back then? 

Looney Tunes, Zoom, the theme song to Electric Company, Sesame Street, and all the musicians that played on Sesame Street: Stevie Wonder, Ray Parker Jr. All those shows that I watched, the backdrop was this really great music. Now I have the opportunity to do it.

Are you learning that there are challenges that are unique to the music in children’s television?

When you’re looking at the emotion that this show has for a young Black girl in Manhattan, who has a family who deals with different problems—whether it’s happy, whether it’s sad, the music has to calibrate what we are watching. I had to come through. Even today, I’m working on an episode right now, a [version of a] song called “100 Yard Dash,” and I have to sing it, and I tried to sing it, and I got hoarse because it’s so high. I attempted to do it, and then I got hoarse and I thought, “Oh wow, it’s the real deal.” I’m not over here playing! I’m really making things that can be records!

But the story behind Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur is the most important part of it. This family and this very intelligent girl. And it’s a Marvel show. A show like this has so many great perks to it and the music is [one of them].

It sounds like you’re optimistic about kids still being able to find good music the way you did when you were a kid. 

Music is like water. It’s gonna break through all the gatekeepers, it’s gonna last through all the tech. It’s gonna last longer than TikTok, Twitter, Instagram. It’s gonna be here. And it’s gonna make it through to every age kid, to every country, to every person. I guess my message to kids is, if you want your music to age well, go back and listen to music in the ’70s, ’80, and the ’90s—see what kind of music sustains, and what kind of music comes back. You just gotta follow the greats. People try to figure out how to be hot. I always tell people, you know, hot gets cold. People forget about just being good.