THE LITTLE THINGS : Linda Arnold Sings of Such Weighty Matters as Popcorn, Baseball

Ever since that Canadian with one name (Raffi) and a guitar showed up, children’s music has become an increasingly hot ticket. Now, kids have a much broader musical field from which to choose, compared to when the options were Burl Ives singing “Blue-Tail Fly” or Burl Ives singing just about anything else.

Calypso to country, rap to tricycle rock--it seems every children’s singer worth his or her suspenders is working to make kids more musically sophisticated. Children’s lyrics contribute to this. Once dominated by nonsense and nursery rhymes, they now are a forum for larger issues like environmentalism and world peace.

Children’s entertainer Linda Arnold is a departure from this. The guitar-strumming Arnold, who describes herself as a “contemporary folk singer,” offers simple, catchy, sometimes silly tunes for young children in a voice as warm and sweet as a lingering hug. Arnold will perform two concerts Saturday at Orange Coast College.

“Imagination is the Key” is Arnold’s pet phrase, and she accents it in concert with a menagerie of fantasy characters, including Tyrone the dinosaur, Daisy Bell the purple cow (actually folks in cartoonish costumes, but you can’t tell a toddler that) and several large puppets.

Social themes are sometimes addressed, but they are done so gently and from a child’s perspective. Mostly, topics stay on more familiar territory, like making popcorn, daydreaming and playing baseball. In concert, kids are encouraged to play and sing along, sometimes on stage.

The mother of two children, Arnold has had a somewhat lower profile than other children’s singers. Although she has been a performer for eight years and has written nearly 250 songs, she didn’t release any recordings until 1988 (she was picked up by A&M; Records in 1989). Her album titles include “Make Believe,” “Happiness Cake,” “Peppermint Wings,” and her latest, a Broadway-inspired mix of show tunes and originals entitled “Rainbow Palace,” as well as a story-based music video called “Linda Arnold’s World of Make Believe.” A fifth recording, this one mostly lullabies, is due for release this summer.

In the early years, there were relatively few concert dates. Instead of long tours, Arnold chose to stay closer to home, dividing her time between family, writing and other projects, including hosting and appearing on “Pickleberry Pie,” a nationally syndicated children’s radio show that won the 1991 Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Gold Medal Award. (The show airs locally on Northridge station KCSN but does not reach Orange County.)

Mixing a singing career with family life hasn’t been easy, said Arnold.

“Like any working mother, I juggle,” she admitted during a phone conversation from her Santa Cruz home. “But my children are my most important priority, so often I work my work schedule around what is important for our family.”

There have been artistic dividends, however. Often, when searching for song ideas, Arnold has had to look no further than her own children--daughter Ariel, now 15, and son Toby, 9.

“Whenever I’m with the kids, subjects that they are dealing with come up--whether it’s bath time or playing in the mud or going to sleep, or maybe personal issues,” she explained.

And, says Arnold, she often does her best work while going about the everyday business of being a mom.

“I’ve always made up melodies about anything I’m doing,” she said. “It might be raining, and I’ll make up a tune about it. If it’s a good start, I’ll take it back to my studio and work on it.”

The kids also provide a test audience for songs already in the works, she added. “I’ll sing a song to my kids, and if I hear them singing it outside while they’re riding their bikes, I’ll know I’m onto something.”

It was Ariel who got the partnership rolling at age 5, when she provided the inspiration for the airy “Do You Know What Magic Is?”

“We were singing back and forth around the house and she said, ‘Let’s write a song,’ ” recalled Arnold. “I asked her what it should be about. She thought about it and said, ‘A short giraffe on a crooked path.’

“We worked on it for about two days. I just kept asking her what should happen next. We went to get a pizza, and we wrote the pizza verse. . . . It was fun.” Ariel has become increasingly involved in Arnold’s music. She has performed on several recordings and, when proximity and school schedules allow, appears with her mother in concert.

“A lot of artists are very inspired by what their life is about,” Arnold observed. “And my life is about children.”