Laurie Berkner "the queen of kids music," will perform at the 40th anniversary of the New Jersey Lottery Festival of Ballooning this summer. Alternative rock band Everclear will play on opening night on Friday, July 28. Lit is the other band scheduled to perform. The largest summer-time hot air balloon festival in North America will be held July 28-30 at Solberg Airport in Readington.

Berkner, who grew up in Princeton, will also bring her greatest hits tour to the Union Performing Arts Center in Rahway with two shows on Sunday. The sensory friendly performance is sold out, but tickets are available for the second show that day.

News 12 New Jersey’s Carissa Lawson interviewed Berkner where she talks about her Jersey roots and how it helped shape her musical talent.

"One of the reasons we moved to Princeton was actually the music program at the public schools there,” Berkner said. "It brought me to a place where I could go ahead and learn guitar and start to write music and feel like I can be a musician."

When Berkner graduated from Princeton High School, she says she had such a good musical foundation. Instead of studying music while attending Rutgers, she majored in psychology. She joined a band and played at coffee houses and restaurants around her New Brunswick campus. After graduation and while working as a music teacher in Manhattan, Berkner got advice from another teacher that would become the foundation for her musical success.

When Berkner started singing songs at birthday parties, her parents thought she was so good and loaned her money to make her first album. Now, with 14 award-winning albums and kid's music concerts all over the country, she has become kid's music royalty.