All Over Albany

My Exit: Sara & Olive Niccoli

Every Monday night our friends at WEXT do this thing called My Exit -- local listeners get to come into the station and program an hour of music. So we thought it'd be fun to find out a little bit about these people and why they picked the songs on their play list.

Here's tonight's person:

Who?
Sara Niccoli and her daughter Olive Niccoli from Fort Plain, NY.

How would you describe your musical tastes?
Olive loves country and folk. I've been into world and Latin these days, but appreciate talented musicians whatever genre they happen to fall into. Our music picks were kid-oriented, but definitely a joint effort.

A few songs from Sara & Olive's My Exit show:

For Today I am a Boy by Antony & The Johnsons
We picked this song because Olive loves to dress up in floaty outfits and dance to it. I love its sweet message about a child who holds on to her destiny even when it seems unachievable, "One day I'll grow up and be a beautiful woman, but for today I am a boy."

Fly Through My Window by Pete Seeger, from the Birds, Beasts, Bugs & Fishes Little & Big: Animal Folk Songs album
We listen to a lot of music and this has been our favorite singing together, romping good time album since Olive was a baby. This song has a fun chorus repeated over and over, "Little Bird Little Bird Fly Through My Window" and you get to squawk like a crow and whistle like a bob-white. We love it.

Cowboy Take Me Away by the Dixie Chicks
Olive and I, much to her stepfather's chagrin, are big Dixie Chicks fans. This is my grown-up equivalent of that cheesy love song that you were so sure was written expressly for you and your zitty boyfriend when you were 13. I heard it when I lived in NYC and these lines, "I wanna touch the earth, I wanna break it in my hands, I wanna grow something wild and unruly...I wanna be the only one for miles and miles, except for maybe you and your simple smile," became our own little destiny-- we moved out of Brooklyn to the farm in Fort Plain that my husband grew up on.

I and Love and You by The Avett Brothers
Neither cheerful and bouncy nor focused on a single simple subject, this melancholy song about endings and beginnings is Olive's favorite. Which just goes to show that kids are a little more complicated than the mainstream children's music market gives them credit for. PS: I wanted to change out this song for Franz Ferdinand's Eleanor Put Your Boots On but Olive wouldn't let me.

You can hear Sara & Olive's My Exit show tonight at 8 on 97.7 or at exit977.org.

Here's how to schedule your own My Exit show on WEXT.