The Wiggles’ Sam Moran opens up about his musical ‘evolution’

Former Yellow Wiggle Sam Moran sat down with Yahoo Australia to talk about his new album, mental health and life after The Wiggles.

Video transcript

SAM MORAN: Well this is certainly an evolution for me. I've definitely worked in pre-school music more so over the years, which pre-school music is largely just dealing with joy and happiness most of the time.

But when coming out of COVID, I was reading these reports of children struggling to identify how they were feeling and their emotions. And that's something I could resonate with, I got diagnosed with depression myself in 2015. And so that was something I had to re-educate myself, was about what am I feeling on any given moment.

So to read those reports and hear that diagnoses of anxiety and anxiety medication for young children had gone up significantly with children not being able to identify what they're feeling, I was able to combine what I knew from children's music with this mental health aspect as well, and really tackle that I guess social emotional development that a slightly older children are dealing with.

We found when we were looking at the age group we were trying to tackle with this emotional development is more that when children start going to school they start experiencing these emotions for the first time. These more complex emotions.

And so when we find that children in that age kind of went from Cocomelon and The Wiggles, and then suddenly they're going straight to Taylor Swift musically.

So we really musically tried to create a bridge between those two and try and be a space that was a safe place for children to enjoy, but something they wanted to listen to that the whole family could listen to together as well.

As far as the emotional aspects of the songs, with adults when we go through a break up we listen to break up songs. We don't listen to happy dancing music to kind of help us get through that.

We turn to songs that reflect how we're feeling to help us process what the emotions we're experiencing. And children are no different in that need too, especially when they're experiencing these complex emotions for the first time.