Will Avery’s “ABC World Tour” organizes the world into 26 riddles, one per letter of the alphabet, each withholding its city until the child has already arrived there through food, architecture, or a specific cultural image. The call-and-response structure carries the pedagogical weight. A destination named before its details is just a word; a destination earned through clues becomes a place.
The riddles do the real work. Pepián beef stew in Guatemala City, lavash in Yerevan, Nasi Goreng in Jakarta: these are entry points through the body, through eating, through the specific weight of a local thing. The Parthenon appears alongside a friend to play with. Christ the Redeemer stands high, then the drums come in and the samba starts. Each city gets two or three details, never more, and the selection tends toward the concrete and the participatory rather than the monumental alone.
The chorus holds the pace: phone in hand, snappin’ pics, moving city to city as fast as possible. That framing is contemporary and deliberate, a child who travels the way children now understand travel, through screens and images and the accumulation of places seen. The alphabet is the spine, but the speed is the argument. Twenty-six cities, one beat, and the world made small enough to sing through before the song ends.
