A teacher and a jingle writer might be your kid’s favorite band

A few dozen kids jumped around screaming, “Spooky Cat! Spooky Cat! Meow! Meow!” in St. Louis Park’s Wolfe Park in mid-July. No, it wasn’t an early Halloween party, it was a concert by the family-friendly music duo Todd’n’Tina.

Krissy Mondelli and Todd Millenacker, a music teacher and freight broker by day, respectively, have found a passion for writing and performing music geared toward kids that adults can laugh at too. The two joke that unlike Barney or Raffi, they’re intellectuals, and their high-energy, extremely silly lyrics have built a cult following among elementary schoolers.

The two have known each other for more than a dozen years, and first collaborated on a car wash jingle. At the time, Millenacker was writing jingles in his spare time for companies like Little Caesars and Davanni’s.

But T’n’T didn’t ignite until the COVID-19 pandemic, when Millenacker wrote a fateful song about an astronaut wishing to be a dermatologist. He called Mondelli to see if she’d want to record the song for fun.

Launching a band was not in the plans for Mondelli, who teaches music at Pinewood Community School in Eagan. But COVID restrictions were difficult for her creatively.

“So when Todd called me and said, ‘hey, will you come and sing?’ I was like, ‘yes, please! Let’s do something creative together,’” Mondelli said.

The two tested out the music on Mondelli’s students, and received positive feedback in the form of uncontrollable jumping and dancing around the room. They started releasing music in November of 2021, and in January 2022, embracing their explosive band acronym, dropped their first album, “Dynamite!” The trend continued with 2023’s “Kaboom!” and 2024’s “Bombtastic!”

“I’ll just throw songs at Krissy constantly, and then she’s just kind of like, ‘that one works, that one doesn’t work,’” Millenacker said.

Once they’ve narrowed an album down to 10 songs, they’ll record in Millenacker’s basement that’s been turned into a studio. Since both have full-time jobs and families, that means recording on weekend mornings.

Their music videos, 15 in total, are just as silly as the songs. The productions often include costumes, and have incorporated green screens and animation. They’re all done with no budget, and often feature their kids and their friends as extras.

“It’s just fun that we can do this with our kids, and they can see us being creators and just having fun with it as adults too,” Mondelli said.

For “(Not Another) Dinosaur Song” from their 2025 album “The Color Weasel,” the two thought it would be fun to film inside the Science Museum. They emailed the museum and, to their surprise, heard back within a week.

While they started out playing farmers markets, the two have become staples in local concert series and family-friendly events over the past three years. They’ve even had a crowd show up in Morris where they were surprised to see kids knowing their songs.

Fan favorites include Spooky Cat, Jellyfish Chicken and Giraffes Like Peanut Butter. They said in early July, as they were packing up from a concert, a kid yelled at them for not playing “Peanut Butter Pickle Truck.”

“So we played right in the parking lot,” Mondelli said.

On Spotify, Todd’n’Tina have 2,100 monthly listeners. “Jellyfish Chicken” was also picked up by SiriusXM radio. But they’re still amazed that they get to do what they do, singing about astronauts who want to pop zits and giraffes that like peanut butter more than jelly.

“It’s fun to be grown-ups and still be silly,” Mondelli said.