Robert Schneider, the erstwhile main brain behind the Apples in Stereo, has finally delivered on the promise that he made to his father more than a decade ago, to release a children's album.

"When I was around 20, I started recording children's music for my little brothers on a four-track cassette recorder," Schneider tells Spinner. "My dad thought I showed great potential and that I could make a living as a children's musician."

So, Schneider talked his father into letting him out of college in order to give music a shot. The elder Schneider thought his son was aiming towards a career in children's music.

Within a few months, though, Schneider found a new passion in a growing band called the Apples and the Elephant 6. "Things really got busy and I never got to work on that children's album," he says. "Even though we advertised it for sale in the first Elephant 6 catalog."

The songs were never far from him though and the catalog grew after his son Max (with former Apples drummer and wife Hilarie Sidney) was born. One day he realized he had eight solid songs. "I thought, 'OK, this is almost an album.' I'm going to buckle down and record three more songs and put out a children's record," he says.

That effort, titled 'Robbert Bobbert and the Bubble Machine,' includes a handful of songs that he wrote for his brothers and for Max. "I wrote the song 'Gravity' for a science fair at Max's school," he says.

In addition to making good on his promise to his father, Schneider got to return to the Robbert Bobbert nickname that his mother used to call him. "To my great embarrassment, she would let it fly in front of other kids," he says. "But now I'm happily Robbert Bobbert again."