Grey DeLisle and The Roughhousers Debut Video for "Toenail Soup"

Grey DeLisle

The Americana singer and voice actor presents the newest video from her upcoming family music album, “Princess Mike.”

Grey DeLisle doesn’t usually like children’s music. “Even the stuff that people say is really good,” she adds, laughing. That may come as a surprise since she has made her living as a voice actor in cartoons since 1996, and has been the voice of Daphne in the Scooby Doo franchise for more than 20 years now. She’s also Martin Prince on The Simpsons and has had roles in almost any significant recent cartoon franchise including Star Wars: The Clone Wars, DC Superhero Girls, and Unikitty to name a few. As a songwriter, her tastes have run toward classic country, with a vintage sound and style that evokes a glam Nashville circa 1960-something.

But she wrote “Toenail Soup” from her upcoming album Princess Mike during the COVID shutdown to entertain her children.

“I was making up silly songs to keep them interested in music,” DeLisle explains. She was home schooling her three kids and like so many parents, was forced to become inventive. “I had my autoharp, and I let them come up with every gross thing they could think of.”

We’re pleased to debut the video for “Toenail Soup,” the third video from Princess Mike. DeLisle will release a video for every song on the album before it is finally released on October 7.

Princess Mike is very much a product of the COVID shutdown, from the songs and their lyrics to the composition of the band. All of the family togetherness drove DeLisle to Facebook, where she had previously been an occasional participant.

“I was dying for some adult interaction,” she says, laughing.

There she became Facebook friends with Eddie Clendening, who played Elvis on Broadway in Million Dollar Quartet. When she told him about the songs she was writing, he pointed out that the Australian children’s music powerhouses The Wiggles started off as a rockabilly band. That revelation led to The Roughhousers, the Cadillac band they assembled with like-minded souls including guitarist Deke Dickerson, pianist Carl Sonny Leland, bassist Murry Hammond of The Old 97s, and X’s drummer DJ Bonebrake.

It’s a band that would have been hard to pull together under normal circumstances, but COVID had shut down the touring and gigs that would have scattered the musicians across the country. DeLisle got everybody together—vaccinated—for the three days to knock out the album. She has experience with collaborating long distance with musicians in other cities, but “there’s nothing like being in the room together,” she says.