Local band Trash Cat to perform at May Play festival Friday. You’ll soon be able to hear their tunes in a YouTube children’s show, too.

Trash Cat, featuring Hayden Farr, left, Mary Claxton and Brian Claxton will perform in Friday’s May Play Festival. Courtesy photo.

By Dan England

If any local band could write songs for a cartoon, it would be Trash Cat. 

That’s not an insult. Band members sometimes watch an episode or a favorite movie to write songs. A special favorite is “Adventure Time,” and the band’s first song was about Connie, a character from “Steven Universe.” They play Bari sax, drums and electric ukulele, which, yes, does exist. And just look at the band’s name. The goal, at least most of the time, is to be a little goofy. 

“We are, in a lot of ways, like our favorite cartoons, where they can be silly and random,” said Mary Claxton, one of the three in the band and its lead singer, of “Steven Universe” and “Adventure Time.” “But we can also be earnest in moments, in a childlike way. I don’t want us to be just a comedy band, but silliness is who we are. I want to be real on stage.” 

Claxton, along with her husband, Brian, and Hayden Farr, have a (somewhat) serious following, both for the work they do with the funk band The Burroughs and for Trash Cat. They have a featured spot in Friday’s May Play festival, which brings more than 30 bands to Downtown Greeley and also kicks off this year’s popular Friday Fest schedule.

They were also approached to write music for an upcoming YouTube children’s show, “Little Roar and his Big Family,” that debuts in July. (It’s also why we compared their music as fit for a cartoon. We aren’t as random as “Adventure Time.”)

Five years ago, Mary Claxton hosted open mic nights at Patrick’s in Downtown Greeley and would call Farr, one of her best friends, to bring his Bari sax and play with her when it was especially dead (or maybe just for a game of Cribbage). Those duos turned into Trash Cat when Claxton applied for a grant from the Weld Community Foundation to make an album. Getting the grant was great because she could record an album, but getting the grant also meant she had to make an album. She enlisted Brian, a terrific jazz drummer, to play and kept him in the band after the album was recorded. 

“Patrick’s was great because we could try out all these crappy songs we’d written,” Claxton said and laughed. “No one writes good songs right away anyway.”

“Wait,” Hayden said in response. “Connie’s Song is a banger.” 

Indeed, it is, along with others such as “The Only Person That I Like,” a song that references “Ghostbusters.” Mary wrote that one for Brian for Valentine’s Day. They were enough to draw the attention of Elaine Wall of Fort Collins for her preschool show about dinosaurs counting their ABCs and learning how to be a good friend and living with climate change. The members of Trash Cat loved the concept of dinosaurs with LGBTQ+ parents (two Moms to be specific) and another dinosaur who was adopted. They agreed to give them a song, and then the pandemic hit. 

They suddenly had a lot of time, so they scored all six five-minute episodes and wrote a song for each episode. The band even appears in a couple episodes as dinosaurs. The show was created by volunteers, so Trash Cat was paid in some equipment and granted music rights: Their third album will feature songs on the show and will be released with the show on July 10. The band also plans to put out a separate single this summer as well. 

“It was just so cute and so much fun,” Claxton said. 

The band takes its music seriously but won’t apologize for its silliness. Lots of other bands have done that, such as They Might Be Giants, Bowling for Soup (who not only wrote “1985” but recorded music for “Phineas and Ferb,” including the famous title sequence) and, yes, The Beatles (remember “Yellow Submarine”). 

“The great thing is our instrumentation is so weird and specific, we can be way more genre agnostic,” Claxton said. “It all just sounds like us.”