Chris: I had a lot of hair then. That was me singing and playing piano. Jim Henson actually puppeteered my little character. And Frank Oz was a big part of that first piece as well.

Norm: What that song really exemplifies about the show is that it was fun, and it had all this repetition of the word exit, which is what we were trying to teach. It not only taught the word, but it taught the meaning of the word in a funny way. That was all by design that the room emptied out.

Chris: I was the guy who couldn’t figure out how to get out of the room at the end of the song. I didn’t listen to my own lyrics, I guess.

Norm: I think the songs were also fun for parents at the same time that they were fun for kids.

Chris: But the rule was you should never go over the heads of the kids. Anything that appealed to adults had to either appeal to the kids too or be something that they didn’t need to know.

Norm: They might not get the adult joke, but it wouldn’t stop them from enjoying the piece or laughing at something else.

Beck: So if you were writing a song, would the origins be some idea or lesson that you were trying to teach in that episode? Or was it ever like, “We just have this funny idea and let’s see how it fits in”?

Chris: At the beginning of every season, there would be meetings with writers, researchers, and educators, and we would talk about the goals that were going to be emphasized in the next year. The writers at Sesame Street weren’t really supposed to set the curriculum. And the educators weren’t supposed to write the material. Almost always, [our ideas] came from the curriculum somewhere.

If somebody says, “We need a song about the letter j, and we don’t have enough songs for Cookie Monster, and reggae is really popular now,” that’s a lot easier than to say, “Go write something, whatever you want, and bring it in tomorrow.”

Beck: Were you involved in performing the songs or being on set when they were being filmed?

Norm: Chris often was at the recording session.

Chris: Almost always. Because I played piano on quite a few of them, on the rock-and-roll ones. I’m really good at banging. In fact, I broke so many pianos in the studio over the years that they began to have my character Muppet on the show break pianos too.

Beck: Oh, I remember that!

Norm: I would also be at the Muppet tapings, but not all the time. I was more often than not in the office, reading scripts and things. We had one experience where we had received a number of complaints about a song that Chris wrote for an animation.

Chris: It was a song that was supposed to teach the idea of zero. We came up with the idea that we would teach subtraction too. We thought it would be fun to show different animals. A rabbit would have three carrots, and two, one, and finally zero after the rabbit ate them all. And the animation ended with a goat eating sneakers. That was our big joke. It ended with no sneakers left. But that was not the end of the story, Norm.