Sun. April 6

 Dan Zanes and Friends won a Grammy last year for “Catch That Train!” It was voted “Best Musical Album for Children.” “That was fun,” says Zanes. “We’d been nominated once before and I didn’t have any feeling we would win but this year, I thought there was a chance. It was pretty emotional at the very least.” The Grammy and the critical acclaim  -Time Out New York calls him  “a titan of hip kid culture” – is “kind of humbling,” he says. “I’m filled with gratitude, and it’s clearly a group effort. What we’re doing is pretty old-fashioned, taking the template from from old Folkways records and updating it for the 21st century.” Zanes and Friends bring their acoustic and electric folk-rock to the Somerville Theatre for a series of shows that wraps up Sunday April 6. One thing though: It’s not exactly kids music.

It appeals to kids, certainly, but Zanes prefers the term “all-ages” – and he’s right. His collaborators on “Train” include Nick Cave, Natalie Merchant, the Kronos Quartet and the Blind Boys of Alabama, and its got a bounce, it’s got a certain grit as well.
“For me,” says Zanes, “it’s important that grownups dig it whether kids are around or not.  I’m always making music I have a strong emotional connection to. It would be difficult if we were making children’s music unto itself – that tends to be about the experience of children and that’s hard for the adults to relate to. What’s been really great about this is I never thought what the world needed a record of all Dan Zanes original material. What’s exciting is digging up tunes and dragging them int the 21st century.”
Zanes got into this field rather by accident. “I had no plans to stop making pop music,” he says. But he had a daughter and “went looking for music we were both gonna enjoy together, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie. I found it, but it wasn’t the sound I heard in my head.” So, incorporating those early icons of folk and blues, the New York-based Zanes made a cassette he distributed to friends at a nearby park. It grew from there. Zanes was encouraged to start his own label for the music, which he did. It became his main line of work, he says, after the one album by the Dan Zanes Trio tanked. “Nobody bought it,” he says. “It was a flop, the best thing that could’ve happened around the time.”
I first saw Dan Zanes with his roots-rock band, the Del Fuegos, in the now-defunct basement rock club the Rat in 1981. I certainly wouldn’t have envisioned Zanes in the world he’s in now. Could he? “I definitely couldn’t’ have envisioned it,” he says. “It was hard to think I’d be the adult in the room later on in life. … but we rarely play for an audience of just kids.” (Kids need chaperones or parents, of course.) “I can age gracefully and have no pretense of being 25.”
 
      The Del Fuegos, who recorded for the hip Slash label, achieved great success in Boston and some beyond. But it came apart at the end of the 1980s. Of course, in the pop music world, youth is a valuable commodity. One could be forgiven in thinking Zanes had his shot, his time in the spotlight, and now it was over.
      “I appreciate having this other chapter,” he says, “having been in Boston and see other talented people not have a second chapter or that kind of luck. I’m having more fun too, I like to go where the fun is. Learning to play the banjo, getting back in touch as music as social thing. The second half of the Del Fuegos, we weren’t connected to the community. But during those early days, we were. Now, I have another opportunity to live that now. Nothing compares to the feeling of ‘we’re all in it together, in the band or the crowd.”
Zanes and Friends have a new disc “Nueva York!” coming in May. (It’s sung in Spanish; Zanes is a booster of America as a great melting pot, and he loves the Hispanic culture surrounding him in New York.) He also has a gospel album, “The Welcome Table: Songs of Inspiration, Mystery and Hope,” coming later. And, he’s working on a pilot of a children’s music TV show for Playhouse Disney.
    For the Somerville Theatre shows Zanes’ Friends are drummer Colin Brooks, guitarist Sonia  De Los Santos, accordionist and saxophonist John Foti, fiddler and trumpeter Elena Moon Park, bassist Anna Lieberwirth, and tap dancer Derick Grant. Tickets are $22. The remaining shows are Sunday at 11 a.m. and 8 p.m.

55 Davis Square, Somerville, 617-931-2000 www.ticketmaster.com