and we have a very very very special show we are so tickled i am tickled i read rosy red tickle because we have the incredible sarah donner who has somehow stooped low enough to consent to be on our show tonight low standards that exactly what i got to love those standards welcome sarah sarah is a musician the premier a musician in all of new jersey springsteen yeah well pretty much playing much you know i told doug that if you stop iran the group of teenagers on the street and you say the word sarah donner usually they will know who you're talking about i don't know where those students it's kind of true sometimes they know me by my hair that's that's usually the hair that gives it away and now you have lots of different kinds of hair i've seen you with pink hair and right now if you have it's sort of like a  i had pink hair for probably five or six years and just in the past year i decided to go crazy go purple two thousand and sixteen it's time to let go of the pink and embrace the purple so how long have you been doing this hair  thing well it started it started with a small streak of pink you know and every time i'd go back and redo the pink a little more gotten a little more get done and so it just sort of gradually turned into this monster of pink in the front of my head and i had a kickstarter that i ran a couple two years ago now for an album for the purposes yeah that's a pegasus and when we reached the ten thousand dollar mark i said i would die my whole head tank and ever since and we did yeah and ever since then i've just been doing the whole head because i can't i can't handle it anymore by myself so somebody else has to do it for me really so you're you know that's same thing happen to dennis rodman you know yeah it's the and twelve years old and we decided since we're going to an art opening that we would color our hair blue so we did color our hair but we had little spray on stuff though so it it didn't really i so your next actually doug ok i want to go plaid ok well with that we can probably arrange that i know people who can who do hair like yours so there are we're fabulously what we call it with the word we are our influence not just influence we are inspired are inspired by not just your music but your dedication to being a musician how did you start to be a musician when did you want to start being a musician gosh well i was the first child and decided i needed all the attention all the time so a very young age i started using my voice and i have a pretty musical family so it was there are always chances to sing and play instruments so kind of started there but i didn't really know that it was a career path that i seriously want to take until high school i was taken in a p bio class and i knew either wanted to be biologist or musician and somewhere i was studying for a test like the krebs cycle or something like that i just i lost it and i decided that's it i'm going to be a musician and dark path that i went down and then i know that we were going to play some of your videos today and you have a whole lot of videos which one would you like to start with to the gosh well the latest video that i have has kittens and spacesuits are very good that's what's what so yeah so five forty nine in seoul is the martian day  and it's a reference to the martian book by andy where are the movie if you saw that with matt damon and it references the day that he spoiler alert yes maybe he gets off the now sarah when i read that book i was surprised by the lack of kittens on mars and so i was i was very pleased that they are finally in this definitive version you're the video for the book that this one has the way i was imagining it yes i agree i mean with all that soil to dig in there should definitely be kittens on mars to do it it's like you have one big litter box yeah absolutely yeah i had wanted to do something with space kittens and i read the book over the summer and i was so inspired that i wrote the song and then we just had these kittens and like well what are we going to do with all these kittens put them in space of course and i had a really good friend who works at mccarter theater sometimes and he does the wardroom and costuming and so he came over and helped me fashion little helmets and a little space pack and things for the kittens and we did the rest of it just in my basement with fancy lighting and lots of black gloves and somewhat angry kids and it was really i really like the video and the song is just beautiful thank you yeah i was i was imagining kind of like my heart  on and on from titanic or something like that so and i celine dion you know credit rolling kind of a song so you often kitten seem to be cats are a major theme in your work yeah well there's just so many in my house it's hard to escape so are you one of these rescue people is that what you're i am the rescue people yeah definitely which group are you affiliated with mostly i work with trenton cats rescue when i started this  it was just my parking lot and all of a procreation that was going on back there so i would rescue the kittens well first i just started feeding animals that looked hungry when there was a cat that grabbed a bagel out of my garbage when and then it was god to feed them and then eventually they told all their friends right and they brought their babies and i started rescuing and grabbing kittens and domesticating them and through the method of our which is trap neuter and release right we were able to bring if we have anywhere from five i have five adults that are my own and then after that it's usually three or four at the most six which is too many fourteen is too many cats in my house  but yeah we just keep recycling them and they get adopted and there's just more cats always work out so it's a small apartment that i live in so anytime i'm writing or producing or doing anything creative there's probably a cat or the smell of  cat at least in that room well i know you have a web series called called bird with kittens and i assume that that's a double entendre with these are all cover songs yes and they are all your and people would ask me questions and i would answer them in music video format and they were all songs to answer the question so the songs are about like toxoplasmosis and you know your and smells and things some of those songs wound up on your  yeah i do have a cd of those songs and then just this past year i had had the idea for something called covered with kittens and you know at the time it was just well i would have all these kittens that sing cover songs and just have kittens and then i discovered the annotations portion of you tube videos so you can go into your video and you know add the little captions and that's when it really started getting funnier more entertaining at my end anyway it's because i really wanted to have the kittens being rude to me and when i was doing somebody that could be self i guess that's not i can be self deprecating but through the voice of animals  going i usually don't have that problem it's quite well like yeah yeah yeah so that's that's what i started doing i just wanted to be really rude and curse a lot but you know just through annotations and you do a new show every week so i did it for a week last year for a while for probably think six months or so and that just got to be a little bit much so i cut back this fall and then i started up again in january and we're doing it every other week so i don't have one coming out this week and you know what time is a dog rescue person i heard actually yes she actually showed up at one of our dog rescue places and presented us with an award from the jersey acoustic music oh yeah that was a long time yeah yeah yeah i am i'm open to dogs cats there's cats were well that's are hard because there's so many cats and i know it's a shelter they're always saying you know when people are trying to find a place for cats is that it's really difficult to find a place for a cat because it's just so many of them and i know you the folks at the u n shelter where i do work they are very much involved in the team in our movement i guess you'd call it yeah it's sort of like a cult yeah yeah so let's play another song ok well one of the things that you know if we're talking about lots of different animals sometimes people watching this show have claims that you know we're like cartoons or we're like puppets and i always take offense oh yeah yeah  because you know i'm nothing like a puppet if we want to see real puppets we should see going under i'm glad you said that because i didn't quite know how to get into that conversation with you yes tell me about this because you know first of all the thing i like about it is it seems to be one continuous shot yes yes it is which is very hard to do and you've obviously got  you know a lot of cold feet yes well so the idea just to get people involved with the music video came by having them make sock puppets so i was giving out socks clean socks new socks at shows with you know my address and directions on how you make a sock puppet in case you didn't know and i got back about forty puppets and so that's that was the basis of that whole video and we decided to go for the challenge of a one shot video so we gathered everyone in a friend's basement and where have lots of wonderful people helping out  either moving scenery while we did the shot and it was it's in a big circle around the room and scenery starts changing behind me after i pass through the shot and then other than that there's also there's a video called the making of going under so tell us about going under so what does that song mean for you oh well at the time i wrote it i was at a friend's wedding in the dominican republic which was beautiful and there is some heavy imbibing coming on so there are a few references to possibly indulging a bit too much and that was kind of where it started for me not i wasn't drinking too much well i think it's important to think about you know drinking in this culture and about the creative potential for it because not only you know could you drink and drive but you could drink and drive and you could play ukulele not only could you drink and drive and play ukulele but you could be doing show tunes i and he were going not only could you drink and drive and play ukulele and do show tunes but you could sing every freaking voice basically yourself and so my favorite video of yours is one day more now is there a story behind that i was called driving too many times across the country yeah that's what happens whenever my husband and i go on tour every summer which involves many miles especially kansas and nebraska are particularly painful states to drive through but they make a n excellent scenery for you know driving and making videos because there's not much going on on the highways and when you have that much time in the car you have plenty of time to learn how to you know play an entire  one finale from liam is and learn all the voices and i mean really most i think lame is nerds probably could sing all of that that's that's what you sing in your car basically when you're singing along so i just had to figure it out on the ukulele well let's see  through thank you sarah donner is here live with us in the studio here on the tom and the dog and the show and we are very pleased that sarah has joined us for today's show thank you for joining us and would you be would you have the enough standards to come and join us again on a future tom a dog show i absolutely would thank you very very much we will see you guys next week here on the tom and the dog in the show