This weekend I asked everyone to send me their best stories about dads and music. I hope very much this brings joy to you. If dads are not your thing, or if your own dad was a disappointment, if he is gone now, if the thought of him does not bring up funny musical stories, I hope you can be tender with yourself now. Be the dad you wish to see in the world, whether you have children or not.
Were my rides to school scored entirely by Santana (oft of the “feat. Rob Thomas” variety?) Oh, yes INDEED.
Dad (loving Santana) bought that CD and I totally stole it from him, whoops. But MAN IT’S A HOT ONE
Santana featured prominently in our house when I was young, and I hated his music then and I hate it now. Also my dad would wake us up on Saturday mornings sometimes by playing Steely Dan super loud and to this day when Steely Dan comes on the radio I get immediately and disproportionately angry.
is your dad my dad?
I was going to ask the same question.
Whoa, I had no idea this was a common dad thing. I feel so understood right now. This supports my theory that toasties are, in fact, my people.
But seriously, what is wrong with our dads? You have my neverending sympathy on this.
Smooth was probably Not a song that a 3rd grader should know all the words to and yet I loved it all the same thanks to its constant play in my dad’s car
I went to a free (to me) Rod Stewart concert just to listen to Santana open the show. Worth it.
“my dad still harbors a deep grunge in his heart”
mine harbors a deep disco
MINE. TOO.
We were at an amusement park a few years ago that was getting ready for its Halloween celebration. You walked past and this skeleton started singing Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe.”
Dad walked past it five times and STILL gets excited whenever he hears it.
This coming from the man who picked up seven Renaissance vinyl albums (the band, not the time period) while we were thrifting for new stuff for my apartment.
This is so lame but “Call Me Maybe” is my all-time favorite song because of how it seemingly united the world. I can’t think of another song that every single person I know, regardless of normal musical taste, knows almost every word to and at least considers it a guilty pleasure.
MmmBop.
John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats makes a convincing argument for “The Sign.”
These were amazing to read on Twitter yesterday. Whenever Mallory starts RTing a bunch on a topic, it’s good.
Here’s mine, but it is a mom music story:
We’d bought my older brother a Skinny Puppy CD for Christmas, as it had been on his list. He opened it up, and sort of explained to my parents what it was. My mom nods, and then, clutching at our dog a little absentmindedly, says, “Skinny Puppy… what an awful name for a band!”
That was my first thought too, it is awful!
I saw Skinny Puppy LIVE at an underage club in New Westminster sometime in the early-mid 80’s…#emo-before-emo
I saw them live in 2007, as part of a goth festival thing. They were so loud it messed with my inner ear and made me queasy. Even with earplugs in. I went down a floor of the venue where there was a deejay and I could smoke.
Holy cow, I had no idea SP were still around! (In the 2000’s, anyway.) Huh!
When I was going to goth clubs around the mid-00’s they were still getting played a lot.
My dad once referred to “that movie about M&M, the white soul singer.”
My deep eternal shame as a 12 year old is that I once somewhat unintentionally lied my way into coolness by saying to someone that my favourite music was M2M (a rather cheesy, but sweet duo) and them interpreting it as that my favourite music was Eminem. At the time, I had no idea who he was.
If it makes you feel any better, I know who M2M are because they had a song on the Pokemon: The First Movie soundtrack, which I listened to way more than I listened to any Eminem.
Every time “My Way” played he would tell us it was written by Paul Anka, and that he had met Paul in Vegas. Every. Time.
My Dad likes to make up playful songs about random things. But not as a one-off. He will make it up and then sing it whenever it is relevant for the rest of his life. My favorite is “Lemonaaaaaaaaade, that cool refreeeeshing drink”. EVERY TIME someone mentions lemonade.
He is also a fan of 1) singing songs in response to things you say, like if you happen to say words that are part of song lyrics and 2) making up lyrics to a song and singing them forever, for example, instead of “I’ll stand by you” (as in: won’t let nobody hurt yooooou) he sings “oksana baiul”.
I love this. Based on this alone, I would make an amazing dad.
I am so glad to know there’s at least a small chance my children will love me for these tendencies, instead of murder me.
My dad too, so I started doing it. And now my husband and I make up silly songs, mostly about our cat.
I foster cats and kittens, and often get to name the babies. I make up songs for ALL of them. At my laziest, I just replace all the words with “meow”s. At my most elaborate, I make up all-new feline-relevant lyrics.
That is awesome. 😀
I sing to my dog all the time on walks, with name-specific lyrics. And now my partner does it too because he thought it was adorable.
Is his lemonade song like Eddie Murphy’s impression of Elvis? https://youtu.be/LAVeK0hl4Ag
My dad: “Torn between two pizzas, feeling like a fool.”
I do this. About everything. I am a Dad In Training.
I think I may be your dad…
My dad really loves that Taylor Swift rap song ft. T-Pain, “Thug Story,” and made me burn it onto a CD for him. Twice.
I mentioned this on an open thread recently, but as an adolescent in the early 00’s I got “The Best of Seals and Crofts” and “The Best of Emerson, Lake and Palmer” as back-to-back birthday presents from my dad.
But my dad is not entirely stuck in the 1970s; he has recently developed a deep appreciation for the Black Eyed Peas, and even went to see them in concert.
You guys, I have SO MANY music stories about my dad. Especially the Uruguayan music he made us listen to as children. Also, the fact that the lullaby he sang us turned out to be an anti-slavery song telling a child to be quiet so the master won’t come and beat him.
What is it with dads and old spirituals? My dad always used to sing swing low sweet chariot to me. it’s still one of my favorite songs today and it makes me think of being pushed on a swing set for some reason.
“Duerme negrito”, right? That’s a great lullaby.
Yup! I didn’t speak Spanish until I was older, so I didn’t understand it at all until I was in college (also, he switched out “negrito” for our own names)
my mom sang “duerme negrito” to us as well!
Cannot read through all of these because teh criez.
However!
My dad was for the longest time (like almost 30 years) a DJ who primarily played at weddings and social events, as well as at the local lounge (yes, that’s right, *lounge* – we had one about 10 minutes from everywhere we lived). He started off with records – he has hundreds – and eventually transitioned to CDs before my brother took over the business (my brother still does events occasionally!).
Between sound checks and actual playing, with the fun addition of heavy machinery, I actually have *hearing damage* from the amount of loud music I grew up listening to (I loved it, and it was generally dangerous). We’d go to help Dad set up his equipment – massive speakers, lights, boxes and boxes of music – and then listen while he played the sounds with the loudest bass, or the silliest ones.
My favorite memories are when Dad and I listened to White Zombie while driving to the hardware store in our beat-up truck – we had gone just the two of us, because my brother and sister were busy – and we listened to it turned up as loud as the truck could go. I still have a sweet spot for Thunderkiss ’65.
The other was when Dad and Mom would play silly singles for us, like Biddy McGraw (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cSWvABOXuI) and when we had CDs, The Streak.
I can’t even remember the song they played for the father daughter dance at my wedding, but I do know that I cried so hard that I had to run as soon as the song was over. Ruined my makeup completely. Dad cried too – and that never happens.
When there were work parties or parties for the horse club we were members of, Mom and Dad and I would dance to stuff like Smoke on the Water, which is totally not a dancing song, and I never got out of dancing even on the days I didn’t really feel like it, but it was a huge part of our relationship. I really, really miss that.
Okay, that’s enough. Gonna go cry now.
Sending hugs. My folks are gone now and those memories can be so double-edged. Please go look at the Sansa post as soon as possible for at the absolute worst happy tears.
Hugs appreciated and reciprocated! I am lucky to still have both of my parents, but a lot of the good times are far left behind. The world changes, you know? Memories are always worth having, though.
This is one the most touching tributes to a parent I’ve ever read. I offer my gentle hugs.
Oh, thank you so much! Hugs to you as well!
1. Am unsure if this is a Dad or a Mom story (I suspect Dad), but my parents used to really love Michael Jackson. They listened to the Dangerous album all of the time when I was a baby, and it got to the point where they accidentally conditioned me to eat only when the Dangerous album was playing. This is a True Story that I have confirmed with both parents separately
2. Probably because of this incident and also many years of terrible band concerts, my dad now does not like music much. One time in middle school, Vanessa Carlton came on the radio and he got upset and demanded that I turn the radio off because it was “too loud and noisy”
3. My dad now goes on a lot of business trips, and his favorite Sirius XM radio stations are Watercolors and Spa and they both play elevator music covers of pop songs.
4. My parents are, of course, both baffled by Fetty Wap
I’m baffled by Fetty Wap and I’m 35.
When I finished reading these on twitter last night, I realized that I had subconsciously wrapped myself in a cozy blanket and started rocking back and forth during the process. Stories of Dads and their unique yet universal ways warm me more than gin.
Oh god. My dad’s taste in music is so eclectic and wide-ranging and deep that he has heard everything before it was cool. (He gave me my first Cibo Matto CD! He’s still disappointed that I’m not into Me’shelle Ndegeocello! He’s been to see Janelle Monae with me!) (Is there anything more embarrassing and joyful than your dad JAMMING THE FUCK OUT to Tightrope? There is not.) We used to joke about the one avant-garde piece he loved that was a sonata for four air-raid sirens. Bless.
I hope to be this sort of dad someday. My dad is very much in line with the other dads described – he listens to old American folk music (he and my mom are both big Peter, Paul, and Mary fans, because they are both hippies-who-turned-into-squares), and he listens to Irish folk music, and that’s about it. Some blues and jazz, I guess. And It’s funny, but it’s also kinda sad that they’re sorta frozen, musically, and they just never got into the next 40 years of music. (Which has been…pretty great! On the whole.) But I already feel myself stagnating musically a little bit in my mid-20s, which is inexcusable, because it’s never been easier to find new music.
This is pretty close to my dad. We listen to pretty much the same things (and are always looking for new music).
My dad was the one buying Smashing Pumpkins and Tori Amos CD’s–for himself!–when I was in high school, no lie.
To be fair, I am older now than he was then (I’m 36 and my dad is 55), and I still buy new music, so.
Somehow I ended up being the person who always makes the road trip playlist, and I’ve gotten frequent sibling complaints about “you always play the same dozen Beatles and Bruce Springsteen songs.” Yes, I do, because I know what Mom and Dad like. And what they like is the Beatles and Springsteen.
Well, except for that one time my dad was watching the game while I baked to Hamilton. I tried to turn it off, because The Game is a sacred institution in our house, and then Dad turned around: “What, no Hamilton music?” (I had never discussed Hamilton with him, let alone identified the music. He just knew, like the latent theater buff I always forget he is. And then my mom drifted over somehow and we spent 2 hours just communally listening to Hamilton.)
I saw Hamilton with my parents and I knew they LIKED it, but I sometimes have trouble telling when my mom kind of likes something and is mostly being polite and when she actually LOVES something, so I was very pleased when we road-tripped out to visit my little sister at college and my mom already knew every single word to the Hamilton soundtrack like 2 weeks after it was released.
I’m also seeing a lot of potential for a Mom Music playlist. It would be mostly Sting and Enya as far as my mom is concerned.
Mine would be Tom Jones, Engelbert, and lots of loud Tchaikovsky.
My mom doesn’t know the names of any songs, but hers would be Pat Benatar and Billy Joel. She also used to do the hustle in the kitchen by herself whenever a hustle-appropriate song came on the oldies station.
ZZ Top! Moms love ZZ Top.
insert “sharp-dressed man” comment here
Joe Jackson, Look Sharp.
Nothing else compares, afaik, except maybe Adele.
Hey, that’s just a solid album.
/am a mom
Lots of jam bands, but also Bruce Springsteen and Metallica.
I have a lot more music associations with my mom than with my dad. We’d be talking APPALLING (not really, actually completely rad) levels of CSN&Y, Jimmy Buffett, The Beatles, [insert Woodstock].
This has stuck with me to the point that, at our hippie-family reunion this summer, I caught my foot on a thing and tore my flip-flop apart, and immediately ran around singing Margaritaville while waving around the blown-out flip-flop and EVERYONE was singing along.
so much Jimmy Buffett. I’ve got all of it memorized. I find myself absentmindedly singing Buffett all the time.
I … might be your mom.
Yes.
(like, the band called Yes.)
Hah! My dad listened to Fragile so much when I was growing up, I didn’t realize it was older than the rest of the records he was always playing. I was an adult before I noticed the copyright date and realized it was an album he’d bought in Junior High.
I still adore that album. Especially Roundabout. And I’m convinced that early heavy exposure to Yes is why I’m a huge Radiohead fan now.
My mom likes to tell us how she actually streaked on stage during a Yes concert in the seventies. This means she will forever be cooler than any of her children.
oh, absolutely Sting. and Joni Mitchell and CSNY. my mom actually had pretty varied music taste, we went to a lot of concerts together, but those are the ones I associate with her most of all.
When I was a little kid the only albums my parents owned that I liked were Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and I would make them play it on repeat on every road trip. I can still lip-sync most of their songs.
Also all of the “lullabies” my mom sang to me as a child were actually just Jackson Browne songs
The Beatles, Springsteen, those weird Celtic albums, and a shitload of coincidentally-lesbian 90s music. (She has FIVE Indigo Girls albums.)
My Mom after seeing Love Actually, “I’d like a Joni MItchell CD for Christmas.” Dutifully purchased and presented. “Oh, I don’t like this. You can have it”
My mom’s playlist would be 25% Enya/Loreena McKennitt, 50% James Taylor and Simon & Garfunkel, and 25% top 40 rap/hip-hop radio hits (but not the radio versions, “because they take the swear words out and that’s censorship.”)
I love your mom for that.
my mom’s would be Linda Rondstat, Carly Simon, Peter Gabriel, Huey Luis, and Paul Simon
My mother loves what I will refer to as “lesbian music” as a shorthand (for context; I am a lesbian but she isn’t) – Indigo Girls, Jane Siberry, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Sarah McLachlan, Shaun Colvin, Joan Armatrading, Sia, Regina Spektor and so on. I’m fine with most of it and enjoy most of it except for Regina Spektor and Sia, because the former sounds like a toddler yelping and bashing a piano, and she played this one Sia CD so many times that I am now thoroughly sick of Sia.
And yes, there was Enya. And Van Morrison, Simon and Garfunkel, classical music and so on.
She also really loves opera. And she can listen to a song about a million times and never remember any of the lyrics – whereas I am blessed or cursed to hear just about any song 3 times and know all of the lyrics. For crap pop, I can hear the song once and know all of the lyrics. It’s both an excellent gift, and a terrible one – while it’s kind of great to know all the lyrics to, say, Bohemian Rhapsody, or any elaborately wordy independent rock song (Owen Pallett? Mew? I know all the words even if the make no sense) – it sucks when I hear a Train song on the radio once and I will now, forever, know every single word to that stupid song no matter how much I wish I’d forget it.
My Dad also tends to remember the words to everything; my mother and my brother never do.
She likes Dan Fogelberg and Bread. Dad was in to prog rock, but Mom was into the make-out music, which used to embarrass me when I was a teenager. I’ve grown up a little since then. Also, she’s into Dido now.
My mom LOVES the Bob Dylan Christmas album
So. Much. Duran. Duran. They were my mom’s thing.
For some reason, the only cassettes in my mom’s car when I was small were these:
-Hall and Oates
-Billy Joel
-Neil Diamond
and
wait for it
-Motown’s Greatest Hits.
Add Willie Nelson and we might be siblings.
my mom likes to change the lyrics to heart’s “crazy on you” when she wants me to buy an article of clothing. “but it looks PRETTTTY ON YOU!”
I literally have a Mom Music spotify playlist and, yes, it includes Enya.
Both my parents have very wide-ranging tastes, but my mum has influenced my musical taste to a degree that would be embarrassing if she didn’t have significantly better taste than me.
A non-exhaustive list of albums I wish I could claim I bought but were actually brought home by my mother: The Living End – The Living End (responsible for my conversion from boy bands to rock). Beck – Odelay. All the Triple J Hottest 100 cds until they became well, modern day Triple J. Silverchair – Frogstomp. Alanis Morrisette – Jagged Little Pill. A shitload more.
As adults, we have an ongoing music exchange program – she goes to music festivals and buys CDs from independent artists she liked. I hear the CD, and catch them when they come past my town. I buy her CDs from their support acts. She catches the support act when they come through her town… etc. etc. etc.
Of course, she is also responsible for my undying love for Elton John and the fact that my go-to break up album is The Greatest Hits of Bon Jovi, but you can’t win everything.
My mum absolutely loves Tom Waits’ first album. She bought a more recent one (bone machine I think?) or of curiosity and it was, to put it lightly, not her thing (although for 15 year old me in my weird goth phase it was an absolute gem)
Cat Stevens, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Dar Williams, and Carol King. My mom has EXCELLENT taste in music.
Lorena McKennit and Enya and the Riverdance Soundtrack, and that other one? Celtic Ladies? Not sure but she went to see them at Wolftrap.
my mom is a Murphy Brown fan half because of their shared love of Aretha Franklin and half for the shoulder pads.
also she asked me one year for the greatest hits albums of Robert Palmer and Queen. when she put Queen on, she exclaimed, “i didn’t know Fat-Bottomed Girls was theirs! i love that song!”
Elvis Presley, Jeffrey Lewis and my siblings’ band.
The moment when you realize the generation gap has briefly closed when you’re in the car with your dad and he’s singing along to Limp Bizkit’s “My Way”.
No, he’s not actually a Limp Bizkit fan. It’s just that the early 2000s were a strange, liminal time.
My dad used to LOVE Smash Mouth’s “All Star.” “It’s a great song. It’s about going out there and trying your best.”
He was also known for singing the loudest and most off-key at the church we went to when I was growing up. Someone once even said to him, “I appreciate how moved by the spirit you are,” with the same tone of voice Liz Lemon used to tell Jenna that she liked the programs.
I feel like I’m missing out on the most epic burns because I never have been to church.
My not-my-dad-but-totally-a-Dad friend is similar about “Tubthumping.”
Kiefo Nilsson’s comment!!!!!! I got into with Harry Nilsson because of a Netflix doc, and once I saw The Point! (narrated by Ringo Starr, natch) I was completely smitten.
My Nilsson love does not make me into Dad music, in my mind, because my dad was WAAAAY into outlaw country. Been listening to The Highwaymen album with the human house cat I live with because Willie, Waylon, and Johnny are a holy trinty to the kinds of dads we both had (sorry, Kris Kristofferson).
Glad someone else jumped on this. I am old enough to have been raised with the lime in the coconut on a.m. radio during lots of seat belt-free car rides, and it rewormed its way back into my ear and heart almost instantly.
When I was like 8 I got a “Yak Bak” for Christmas and asked my dad to sing into it. He belted out a little bit of “Whole Lotta Love” * and I, being unfamiliar with the song, found it the funniest thing in the whole entire world and replayed it constantly… much to his chagrin.
* Yes, of course it was the solo “waaaayyy down insiiiiiide” part
Dads and Zep! A pairing for the ages.
Ha, my mum is the Led Zeppelin fan in my family!
My dad is completely tone deaf; the only music he loves is the Beach Boys. (I bought him Brian Wilson’s Smile as a Christmas present a few years ago and that remains the best gift I have ever bought anyone ever.)
For my 7th birthday, my dad (and mom) got me a boombox and my first CD–Beach Boys “Still Cruisin’ “
oh my gosh the ONE TIME I’m out being social and not checking twitter, this happens!
My dad would periodically remind me that he went to high school with Weird Al, even though he was obviously a good 20 years older than Weird Al. Of all the fake dadbrags, that’s not even, like, an accomplishment!
Once I was in the car with my dad and he insisted I change the radio station because he was “culturally incapable of listening to rap.”
(I just google-image searched for an illustration of “at least he was honest and didn’t try to pretend he was ‘down,'” but I ALSO found a delightfully dad-y column.)
CULTURALLY INCAPABLE OF LISTENING TO RAP
ooh! I don’t have a twitter but I have a dad music story. When my dad listens to 80’s new wave he liked in college, he does this dance that’s hard to describe but basically involves him bending at the waist and airplaning his arms around aggressively. Sometimes it involves hopping around, or kicking your legs out like you’re half trying to riverdance. It’s hilarious and majestic. My brother is in college, and his friends do this thing where they’re at Cool College Parties and somebody will yell “dance like your dad!” and they all have to do it. Apparently my brother’s friends refused to believe that my brother’s version of dad dancing was real, because it was just too absurd. He had to be making it up! All of their dads just stand around bopping their head when they dance!
But a lot of his friends came and visited my parents this year for 4th of July weekend, and at one point somebody was playing music on the deck and they all started dad dancing. My dad was there watching my brother imitate him and was mostly rolling his eyes. The friends started yelling “Mr sourwatermelons’ dad! Dance! Do the dance!” and he wouldn’t do it and wouldn’t do it until my brother put on His Song (Just Like Heaven by The Cure) and my dad started doing the dance, like he had no other choice, it’s what he Had to Do. But the best part was while my brothers’ friends were standing there gawking at the fact that the dad dance was real (and cheering, because it’s majestic), my uncle (who none of us had ever seen dance before, ever) sprints out of the house and starts doing the same dance at the same time as my dad IN PERFECT SYNCHRONICITY. Reader, I cried.
this is the most BEAUTIFUL STORY and i will be sure to do a tribute dance to your dad at all weddings i go to from now on
yes! the dance is love! the dance is life!
This is THE BEST STORY
Please tell me you have this on video someplace.
It makes me so happy that one of Harry Nilsson’s kids weighed in. I love Nilsson so much. Like, more than my own Dad. If one were to measure Nilsson-fandom in units of Dad, which I propose we all start doing at once.
I don’t know if this is my best dad + music story, but it is my most cringeworthy:
Back in college, my French language skills lost to the AP French winds of yesteryear, I very excitedly told my father of this great Serge Gainsbourg duet with Jane Birkin, ‘Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus,’ [YOU ALL KNOW THE ONE] that I’d recently discovered, without ever really listening to the lyrics. This conversation was on the car ride home from the airport for winter break. I very distinctly remember my very sweet Vietnamese-American father — who I don’t think at the time knew that I’d ever kissed a boy, much less Do The Adult — begin to grip the steering wheel very tightly, staring straight ahead at the 405 freeway traffic jamming in front of us. He then cleared his throat and said, very quietly and precisely, “Honey, that song is about …. [another throat clearing] … about …. a man making a woman very …. happy.”
I remember trying (and failing) not to look horrified, and then there was a long moment of silence, and then my dad turned up the volume on KNX 1070 News Radio to listen to the traffic report. We didn’t talk for the next hour on the drive home.
My dad gets extremely indignant when Dexys Midnight Runners is referred to as a one hit wonder (we’re in the US, where they were, in fact, a one hit wonder), and used to request Lou Reed songs when he would go to the disco with my mom in the 80s. He is insistent that the DJ at this retro dance club they go to “just doesn’t rock” because he won’t play “Bitch” by the Rolling Stones.
My dad is like this, except with Soft Cell. Which was actually great for me because how else would I have ever listened to Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, and then where would I be?
My dad, aka KraussFan54, went to see Allison Krauss and Robert Plant on their Raising Sand tour in Oklahoma City. However it had never occurred to me that somehow he had gone through the entire 60s and 70s without listening to Led Zeppelin on purpose. So the day after the show he gives me a call and he is ecstatic and breathless. “Meredith, do you know who can REALLY rock?” He asked with complete sincerity. “Robert Plant! Boy, he was something!”
When I was a child, my dad used to get me to guess what century the classical music he was playing came from. When I was about eight, I correctly guessed that the soundtrack to The Draughtsman’s Contract sounded like eighteenth-century music played on twentieth-century instruments. Nothing I have ever done since or will ever do can top how proud he was of me at that moment.
Also when he’s drunk he’ll put his 1920s Spotify playlist on and insist I Charleston with him because my mum refuses.
augh, this is all so delightfully dad. My dad always insists I dance with him to Big Band for similar reasons (for about a beat…I have no rhythm and he won’t make me keeep dancing, but he always has to try…)
Oh yeah, I like dancing but I can’t Charleston for shit. My limbs don’t do that. He never notices though (or pretends not to).
my mom likes to test me on classical music if she thinks it’s something I should know! Although, in fairness, she didn’t tend to do that until I was actually getting a music degree.
The classical music guessing is absolutely my 9-year-old and his dad, including debates over the merits of various Michael Nyman soundtracks!
When my sister and I were kids and went skiing with my dad, he would sing pop songs to us on the chairlift, but did not know any of the lyrics or melodies. I mostly remember him wailing his version of “My Heart Will Go On,” replacing the “once more you open the door” line with “one, two, three strikes you’re out.”
Also, my dad called me maybe six months after “Royals” came out to say, “Have you ever heard of this Lorde girl? She’s pretty good!”
I feel like that is the true Essence of Dad: discovers new pop culture item 6 months after everyone else, inexplicably believes he is the first person to hear about it. (Actually, my dad discovered Zoolander fully 13 years after it came out and STILL apparently believed he was the first person to hear about it. He would not quit telling me how much he thought I would like this Zoolander movie.)
My father went to a Barry Manilow concert when he was in college – alone- and was surprised to find that the man who invited him out for drinks after was hitting on him. surprised.
Every trip to a sports tournament for myself or my siblings: the entire soundtrack of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Once on the way there, once on the way back.
Was it the Donny Osmond version though?
A short history of music in my family:
My father has excellent taste in music. When we were living in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, he started volunteering at the radio station because they had a HUGE record collection (the biggest on a naval base) and no one knew how to play them. So he digitized all those and started a vinyl-only radio show called Up in the Attic, and then soon after another one called Down in the Basement. He would let me dj sometimes and I would play exclusively Jordin Sparks and Kelly Clarkson. Also, fun fact: The tagline for the GTMO radio channel was “Rockin’ in Fidel’s Backyard”.
For my dad’s retirement, the base flew down an 80s coverband and it was the first concert I ever saw. I knew Cyndi Lauper’s discography by heart, and spent a whole summer working on the whistle solo in Walk Like an Egyptian.
My dad occasionally contributes to an eighties music podcast.
My dad is awesome.
Side note: He’s also a huge Alexander Hamilton fanboy. He always says “I’ve been wanting someone to make a movie about him for forever! It’s such an amazing story!”. He knows the soundtrack by heart and I found out recently that he pushed for my now 15 year old brother to be named “Hamilton”. So now I only call him “not Hamilton”.
You should pitch something to some site about being a Gitmo DJ. I am fascinated.
I’ll interview my dad when I go home for winter break!
This makes me so happy. On Twitter I threw in something about my dad loving sad, sappy ballads and getting obsessed with Dido’s “White Flag.” It gets better though.
This may only make sense to Christians and ex-Christians who remember CCM from 25-30 years ago, but here goes:
On Easter morning, I would wake up to the sound of my dad BLASTING Sandi Patti’s “Was It a Morning Like This” on the stereo at like 7 a.m. “Over and over in a never-ending round…” Wasn’t a morning person then, still not one now, so yeah, happy Easter morning indeed. (And if you’ve, uh, never been subjected to 80s pop CCM, here it is in all its glory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb1ayV5sTtM)
My dad can’t hear the Sandi Patty version without commenting that the Jim Croegaert version is better…
my Dad’s CD collection was the majority of my early music knowledge; I used to look through his CDs and pick out the ones I liked to look at the best. He had such a wide range of musical interests from Classical to the “Flashdance” soundtrack.
My favorite dad music stories: 1. if he ever heard Greek bouzouki music he would IMMEDIATELY start snapping his fingers and dancing in the most embarrassing way possible, especially when out in public. 2. He really liked waking me up on weekends by playing music loudly- christmas tunes and symphonies usually. 3. He played the same CDs over and over on roadtrips, so much so that anyone who has ever driven with him for some time has SOME memory of either CCR, Simon and Garfunkel, or Charles Aznavour (nicknamed Ever-snore). 4. In the late 1940s/early 1950s when he finished his work early, he would sneak into jazz clubs to listen. 5. He had a special place in his heart for the King’s College Choir and played their tunes exclusively come Christmas time.
What is it with parents using torturous music to wake up their children? My mom used to move the tape player to the top of the stairs and blare Anne Murray down into the basement to get my brother and me out of bed. We had to drag ourselves upstairs to turn it off, and then you might as well stay up.
(Maybe Young You liked Christmas tunes and symphonies, though – no judgment! Young Me – and current me, and probably all future versions of me – not an Anne Murray fan.)
As far as I know there was only one musical performance my dad ever cared about–Yanni Live at the Acropolis. He was SO IMPRESSED with that electric violin player. I mean he just couldn’t get over it. I think it is literally the only music he has purchased since 1980.
In recent years, my dad has decided that he needs to own every record he ever enjoyed as a young man. But since it’s been many years since he’s heard much of this music, his memory of it is a little sketchy. Touchingly, he has total faith that my sister or I can look up just about anything on the internet. I was once asked to look up the name of a song sung by a woman about a house on a hill. Strangely enough, I actually found it!
He buys albums in bulk at flea markets and thrift stores. His hobby is to sit down and listen to them with a pencil and sticky notes in hand. He’ll write all the song titles on a sticky note, rate each from 1 to 5, then affix the note to each album. I think he’s about a quarter of the way through.
Despite a vinyl collection that would make a hipster light his own hair on fire in envy, dad listens to the same three albums over and over.
my first semester of college my dad left me a 4 minute voicemail of him singing Cats in the Cradle but changing all the words to be about the fact that I didn’t email him back.
oh my god i just remembered another. I was very small and sensitive when the Pearl Jam cover of Our Last Kiss was released and the first time I heard it on the radio i cried in front of my dad so he BOUGHT THE SINGLE so he could play it when my friends were around and try to get me to cry in front of them!! (this sounds much meaner than I think he intended it to be. my dad just really enjoys pathos).
that is DIABOLICAL.
right?! Now i am thinking about it and getting angry at my father over a nearly 20-year-old transgression that i doubt he remembers!
Parental guilt trip A+++.
This made me choke on a mint. A+++
After I went off to college about 99% of the phone calls I would get from my dad would be one of two things:
1. He read something about Sufjan Stevens that he wanted to share and couldn’t remember which of his children liked him. It wasn’t me.
2. He had seen some band on late night TV and wanted to tell me about them because they were the greatest band he had ever seen. One of these calls was about My Chemical Romance.
My dad, who usually listens to country/Norah Jones/songs about historical battles, once became obsessed with the song “Teenagers” by My Chemical Romance. I threw it on every cd I burned for long car rides to softball tournaments because his enjoyment was so hilarious.
Misread/misunderstood your Sufjan Stevens comment like this:
“He couldn’t remember which one of his children liked [him, your Dad]. It wasn’t me” And I was like “the child who didn’t like their own Dad, that sounds like something Sufjan Stevens would write some sad song about!”
And then I realised that by “him”, you meant Sufjan Stevens.
Well I mean, it was probably easy for him to remember which of his children didn’t like him because the answer was “all of them.”
*Debbie Downer sound effect*
My father introduced me to “Amos Moses” by Jerry Reed. As a kid, I’d ask him to sing it in the truck wherever we were going. School? Baseball game? Shopping? Didn’t matter. Listening to the bassy sound of his voice as he sang–and not half-bad, at that–always gave me joy. But I never actually heard the song on the radio.
The first time I actually heard the recorded version? 2004, playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
When I was small, the music in the house was mostly Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, Billy Joel, and Elton John, because my father’s approach to music was to buy CDs that my mother might appreciate whenever possible in an attempt to draw attention away from the music he enjoyed a bit more (folk, bluegrass, blues, etc). That stuff came out on Sundays when my mom was working– Mostly Nanci Griffith- Other Voices Other Rooms on repeat, honestly.
In fourth or fifth grade, I went through a big Oldies phase.
Eventually, my dad got bored with that, and convinced me that I needed to start watching VH1 because of this talented new group called “Hanson”. His plan, seemingly, was to get me into the popular music of the day, so that I would listen to it all and then filter the better stuff to him, so he wouldn’t have to bother. Honestly, it worked pretty well for him. Of course, every so often now he sends me Really Great songs/albums that he’s discovered recently, often things I gave him 5 to 15 years ago. Not that long ago, he was really excited about Tori Amos- Little Earthquakes.
I follow one of my daughter’s playlists on Spotify that she uses to bookmarks songs/bands she likes. She has excellent taste in music and it keeps me relevant-ish!
My dad used to wake my brother and me up for church by coming into our rooms and making up songs about us being sleepyheads. He would accompany himself on either the guitar or the bongos. Alternatively he would just throw a cat on our beds.
My stepdad on the other hand has multiple CDs and records of birdsong and he listens to them often with singleminded focus.
Which of my children are you?
Which of my dad’s are you??
I am now so insanely grateful that my Dad didn’t have bongos when I was a kid.
First comment, but I can’t not. My dad drove my sisters and I from London to Sweden, listening to nothing but Joan Baez and Joan Armatrading the entire way.
Years later he also got me on to Tegan and Sara.
He took me to my first concert when I was 14 (Bob Dylan, dreadful).
He’s South African, and when my daughter was born, walked her round the garden every day for hours singing Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Miriam Makeba songs to her.
Also loves Odetta, Joni Mitchell, and Ye Olde Mediaeval Englishe Folke Musick, which he sings with gusto.
Is the only man I know whose music library contains more female artists than male.
My dad took me to Bob Dylan when I was 14 too (nobody else in our family wanted to go). I had just started my period and was still really uncomfortable dealing with it without my mom around, and we ate at Swiss Chalet and I got sick after. Also I smelled pot for the first time. (My dad: “I haven’t smelled that for a long time!”) I will treasure the memory of that evening forever, naturally.
My dad took the whole family to see Dylan when I was 7. He taught me Dylan’s “Joker Man” when I was 2. Once when I was 10, I went in to his room while he was sleeping, and woke him up. He reached out and took my hand and said, very seriously and with great importance, ” Dylan’s real name is Robert Zimmerman.”
I’ve also seen Glen Campbell and Johnny Cash in concert 3 and 2 times, respectively.
I went to Joan Armatrading with my Dad a couple of years ago. It was amazing, and such a nice thing to do together (we had ONE CD of hers growing up, so when she played songs from earlier/later albums I was somewhat disconcerted)
My good friend’s mother made her burn a sexy mix cd for her & friend’s dad before they went away on a weekend trip. I die laughing every time I hear the Pointer Sisters’ Slow Hand now.
My husband also sings “House of the Rising Sun” with lyrics about our dog! He has made many songs into songs about our dog. Or our daughter. Or both. Though our beloved dog passed away a few weeks ago and there has been little singing of late.
Lyrics please! I might have to try your dad’s version accompanied by a banjo.
There was a dog on [street name]
They called the [dog’s name] dude
He’s been the ruin of many a carpet
something, something, something…
It’s funny that “carpet” almost scans to the weird emphasis Eric Burdon puts on “poor boy” in the Animals version.
My dad went to see the Jennifer Hudson version of Dreamgirls TWICE in theaters, then asked for and received the soundtrack for Christmas. Now he plays it in the car constantly and never fails to say “That girl can SING” during And I Am Telling You.
i already said this on twitter but i must say it again:
My dad has an iPod he bought used in 2003. There are 70-80 songs on it. Most are old-school country. (George Jones, Waylon Jennings, Charlie Daniel, our lord and savior Johnny Cash.)
The ipod also includes:
• The Macerena.
• Pour Some Sugar On Me.
• Paradise City (my suggestion).
• The Hamilton soundtrack (my sister’s suggestion, goddamnit I hate her for it).
The iPod lives on a dock on the back porch, so he can hear his music while working in the garage or while drinking beer by the fire pit. The iPod is always on shuffle.
Thank you. <3
Oh, my God, imagining the shuffle transition from George Jones to Hamilton to the Macarena right now. Thank YOU.
i’ve been avoiding the Hamilton soundtrack and then I was home over Thanksgiving drinking wine by the fire and in between all the country classics of my childhood, suddenly some fucking show tune would come on. “You have to listen to the whole thing, it’s great.”
way to betray your firstborn, DAD.
Also, the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack, on tape, has been part of my family’s dinner-music rotation for 15 years. I have never seen the movie and I never will. I hate every song.
Last year I was walking down a crowded street in Sweden and some street musicians were playing “Big Rock Candy Mountain” and I almost started crying. The song followed me across the OCEAN.
Dad, singing along to Cindy Lauper in the Car: Oh, I’m waiting for your change of miiiiiind!
Me, tween, embarrassed: Dad, it’s change of HEART.
Dad, snarling: Well, it MEANS the same thing!
My dad’s Christmas list this year consisted of five Elton John albums.
That’s it.
Oh, and the biography of James Monroe.
He also asked that his ringtone on my phone be “Monster in the Mirror” from Sesame Street, specifically “that wubba wubba woo woo woo line”
When I was wee, I once asked for a walkman and an album called ‘Elton John – Love Songs’.
I got the walkman, but instead of buying the album, my dad took his vinyl and made me a mix tape called ‘Elton John – Lovely Songs’.
At the time, I was annoyed, but now it’s a cherished memory.
Dad music memories, in no particular order: he is heavily into Van Morrison (he literally once washed our house’s windows while listening to “Cleaning Windows” on repeat for like…3 hours) and ferried us around to folk music festivals every summer. We listened to Paul Simon’s Graceland all the way through every Sunday when we cleaned the house. He is completely tone deaf but LOVES to sing. He introduced me to Dar Williams. His droning, off-key rendition of The Christians and the Pagans is *kisses fingertips.*
When he was a kid, my dad knew the woman who originally sang “Bobby’s Girl.” He made us listen to it every single time it came on the oldies station because “she used to be my friend!”
That song drives my dad nuts. “It’s if I *were* Bobby’s girl not *was*. And she shouldn’t sit around pining for him anyways.”
My mom uses those exact arguments when my dad turns up the song!
a dad’s dad music story: my grandpa spent a good 20 years thinking The Who and Doctor Who were the same thing. He only figured it out due to a bewildering and still joked about Christmas gift exchange about 10 years ago.
I’d fully support a Roger Daltrey-based Doctor Who/The Who/Highlander TV series crossover.
My dad is obsessed with 90s and early 2000s R&B, especially Missy Elliott and Destiny’s Child. You should hear his rendition of Independent Women; it’s touching.
Just checking — is your dad Barry Humphries? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYrruiRU9uQ
(Anyway, tell him he has great taste. Miss E really is So Addictive.)
My dad went through a 5 year phase of listening solely to a Herman’s Hermits Greatest Hits cassette tape while driving. He’d listen to “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” then fast forward to “I’m Henry the Eighth.” Repeat ad infinitum.
I didn’t think I had any particularly interesting Dad music stories, but then I read the one about ringtones! My dad’s ringtone is the Monday Night Football theme. He loves it so much. He has no idea how to make ringtones happen though, so whenever he gets a new phone he just hands it to me and is like, “Alison, get me my ringtone back”.
A bunch of years ago, we bought my dad Woody’s Phillips’s A Toolbox Christmas as a joke. He actually plays it every Christmas. I actually have a few of the songs on my Christmas playlist because it makes me nostalgic.
My dad was the first in our family to make iTunes purchases when I got my first iPod. As a result, for awhile the only two songs on my iPod were Rod Stewart’s “Forever Young” and Judy Garland’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”
My dad bought the first Tori Amos album I heard, and thus introduced me to sapphism. He also used to fondly remember the good old days of velvet posters and Deep Purple. His propensity to listen to Reba was balanced by his love of King Crimson and loud exclamations that “Yes had the best bass lines ever”.
My dad still tells the story of how he left his Best of Van Morrison CD in a rental car somewhere in Mississippi. This was probably a decade ago.
My dad’s taste in music tends to vacillate between opera and sappy 70s love songssongs, with a little bit of dad rock for good measure.
Or, as he’s put it before, “from Gilbert and Sullivan to Gilbert O’Sullivan.”
(and yes, I grew up on patter songs as lullabies)
My brother and I weren’t supposed to watch MTV growing up.
One day when we were about 13 (him) and 11 (me) we were of course watching MTV. The Wallflowers video for One Headlight was on when my dad walked in.
Him: You shouldn’t be watching music videos.
Me: But that’s Jakob Dylan.
Brother: He’s Bob Dylan’s son.
Dad: Oh, well that’s OK, then.
My dad loves to sing patsy cline’s “crazy” way off key and with the r replaced by a w. Maybe because of Madeline Kahn and/or Gilda Radner?
He met and his friend, when they were in high school, asked Elvis if he wanted to go to a bar with them, but he declined and said he was going to see a girl. They grew up near each other, in Mississippi.
Lastly, my dad loves to dance and is a tall, athletic man (or was) and at his first encounter with my mom, at a fraternity party in the early 60’s, she came away thinking that he was the sweatiest man who had ever lived and then she realized her beehive hairdo was completely flat on one side. Horrible first impressions, but I think he was really just being his fun self. They met up again years later, were married for 35 years and then divorced.
He also bites his lips severely when dancing and now listens to a lot of blues and we all have a hard time with the repetition, but it makes him happy.
My dad mostly listens to classical music, but he’s also a big Tom Lehrer fan – he used to sing Lehrer’s The Elements to my brother and I as a bedtime song. I still remember a lot it from memory. (There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, etc, etc). I used to joke that this is what happens when engineers raise children, until I realized that really, it’s just what happened when MY dad raised his children.
We once had “The Best of Kenneth McKellar” stuck in the car’s tape player for a year — I still know every lyric (even the one’s I can’t understand, by heart).
My Dad listened to classical radio non-stop, which meant singalongs to the CBC Radio 2’s “Disc Drive” theme.
Lastly (and best) he puts the speakers against the windows every Halloween and plays English church bells change-ringing out the window to “scare away the ghosts”. You can hear it down the whole block. (Let’s just say Nine Tailors is his favourite Wimsey novel).
He does the same for Victoria Day backyard fireworks and the 1812 Overture.
My dad blasted Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” in the hallway outside our bedrooms every year to wake us up on the last day of school.
Yes! This one really represents peak dad to me.
Definitely Peak Dad.
For as long as I can remember my dad has periodically sung my name, always in the same 4 note melody. I thought it was this little ditty he’d made up for me when I was tiny, wasn’t that cute, etc etc, until I was fully 24 years old and was listening to the radio and out of the blue heard something shockingly similar. I called home and made him explain…turns out he’d just been singing the chorus of “Victoria” by The Kinks to me for my entire life.
My Dad basically only really likes Bruce Springsteen. He is a fan of some other bands (the Clash for example) but he will always within 3 notes of a Springsteen song turn up the volume. We can not drive in or through New Jersey without listening to Springsteen. Our entire family has been to at least 3 Springsteen concerts each with him.
Dad dancing to Rosalita at my first Bruce concert, age 13 – utter mortification
Dad dancing to Rosalita at our Aunt’s 50th bday party, age 25 – the best thing ever
He’s really into that air piano playing.
my dad does not listen to any music that isn’t church choir music, but one time he and my sister were in the car, and she passed a music station, and “1234” by the Plain White Ts, and he was like, “don’t change it, I like this song.”
that has never happened before or since.
These were great, so I racked my brain trying to think of one about my own dad. All I could come up with was an affinity for Ray Stevens that I think each of us kids shared and then outgrew.
The best thing about my parent’s love of this particular cover band is that they both refuse the believe that they aren’t world famous. There were people form Canada on the cruise, CANADA, LK.
My dad is the reason I cannot refer to “We Didn’t Start the Fire” as anything other than “We Didn’t Start No Combustible Reaction”. He is also incredibly certain he was on a camping trip in the 70s where a young James Taylor wandered onto their campsite and played guitar for him/his friends for several hours. In high school, I went to more Jimmy Buffett concerts with him than any other concert combined.
Also, a more longform Dad Music story: it’s been a family joke for several years that my sister “stole” the song “You Are So Beautiful” from me as her dad/daughter song, based on the fact that, when I was six years old, I walked in on my dad dancing with my then-infant sister and singing it to her. And promptly broke out into a horrible, jealous tantrum, because he always used to sing it to me, and now there’s a baby everyone loves more and sings to.
My sister recently got married, and for her dance with our dad, she picked “Unforgettable”. When I was talking with Dad afterwards, I mentioned that I’d been certain they’d be dancing to “You Are So Beautiful” and he looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘You know that’s already been reserved, right?’ It’s honestly a miracle I didn’t cry myself into a puddle right there.
I forgot one! My first Christmas not at home, he called to ask if I wanted him to send a copy of the Jimmy Buffett Christmas album so I could “open presents in the right atmosphere.”
You Are so Beautiful makes me slightly ill because my mother is an infant mental health specialist, and part of the particular branch of infant mental health she’s into involves showing video to parents. They edit video of parent/child interactions specifically to the song You Are So Beautiful. My mum…often edits video without headphones on D:
I once secretly recorded my dad making up songs as he did the dishes. This particular song was an operatic number. The lyrics were as follows: “When you’re blue, it could be indigestion.”
I’m a dad. The first song I ever bought on iTunes was “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-a-Lot.
Also a couple of years ago I got a phone call from my dad because he and my mom were at an REO Speedwagon/ Styx concert at the state fair and they thought I needed to hear whatever song was playing.
This is the Daddiest post ever. I don’t think it can ever be surpassed.
I’ll share a Dad music story: my Dad was Greatest Generation and seemingly as square as they come. The day that Elvis died, two of my school friends were staying overnight. We had a giggly seance in the spare bedroom… and what do you know, the ghost of Elvis kept showing up at the closed door, crooning “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.”
John Renbourn? Wow, that impresses my inner musical Dad to no end.
Late night voicemail from my Dad once: “Sis. I need to know who sings the song ‘Creep’. Call me back.”
Love ALL of these stories, and thanks for adding the comment about those of us whose dad-relationships aren’t quite “normal.” Very thoughtful!
This is a Mom story: My mom had a little song she made up to sing to us girls while rocking us when we were little that she called “Mommy loves the baby”. Years later I heard the Australian folk tune Waltzing Matilda, and realized it had the exact same melody. Mom has no recollection of ever having heard this song.
Both my parents have really beautiful voices and have participated in choirs/musical theater for their entire adult lives. For a brief time while my sister and I were young, we were a singing family group that visited local churches. Every car trip involved singing rounds or adding harmony parts to whatever was on the radio, and still does whenever we’re all together today. I have very little in common with my parents’ tastes musically, but I will always remember singing together with great fondness.
The soundtrack to my dad-related childhood is NPR generally and, on weekends, our local affiliate playing something called “Old Harv’s Blues Review. ”
Also as a small child, my mother lectured my father to stop playing so much Bob Dylan around me because she was worried I’d turn up at school growling OOONE DAY YOUUU’LL BE IIIN THE DIIITCH, FLIIIIES BUZZING AROOOUND YOUR EEEYES at the other kids (which I did not, to the best of my knowledge, ever actually do).
Are you my long lost sibling because we must have the same father. So. Much. Dylan.
BLOOD ON YOUR SADDLE.
I had a month-long writing period where I annoyed the shit out of my housemates because the only music that would let me make words was “Idiot Wind.”
My dad was hopelessly square, but he loved the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, and Peter, Paul and Mary, for some reason. I consider this sort of hippy music, so I find his taste odd because he was in the Navy and Did Not Approve of hippies. He also listened to Anne Murray on repeat. When he was so sick with cancer (he eventually passed away when I was in high school), he listened to her constantly. Still can’t stomach her.
My sister and I teased him about his taste and when we got a computer with iTunes, his playlist was David’s Real Music. I decided to be contrary and put “real” in quotation marks on his and make mine Elizabeth’s Real Music. To this day, this is the title of my tween/teen music playlist.
Even though my dad’s gone, this post was a gift. Thanks, Mallory!
So many Dad music stories to share.
Never listen to reggae while driving.
Steeley Dan playing was a sure sign we were going to be grilling fajitas for dinner and that my dad was in a great mood.
My dad loved Tool and The Cranberries and Warren G and Dylan and fancied himself the worlds best air guitarist.
You can judge someone accurately by their musical taste and beware of anyone who says the “listen to everything” because it’s important to have strong opinions.
Try not to drink too much before a show.
Always accept the joint in a crowd as long as it’s not at a Phish or Dead concert.
Live music is best music.
Steeley Dan playing was a sure sign we were going to be grilling fajitas for dinner and that my dad was in a great mood.
This is the Dadest.
My father listens to both kind of music: country AND western.
He was once trying to remember the name of the song “Black Water” by the Doobie Brothers — in the middle of the night when the entire family was asleep in the car — and woke me up so he could yell “Mississippi mud! Water! Rolling water!” at me repeatedly in an attempt to jog one of our memories about the actual name of the song.
Dad music stories! My dad is great and loves music so much. He regularly tells us all about going to see Bob Seger in high school gyms, and other bands that were big in the Detroit area at that time too. In high school he took me to the used CD store about once a month and let me get whatever I wanted and he got me into Elvis Costello and Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits and weirder stuff too. He took me to all-ages concerts and festivals and gave me CDs I had never heard of but loved for my birthday.
In the new year he is going to take guitar lessons for the first time and I am really, really hoping he meets some other dads and starts a dad band.
The musical eras of my father since I was a teenage (I just want to add this is a man who got to see Chuck Berry live):
The Abba/Diana Ross era
The Enya/Loreena McKennit era
The Cher “I Believe In Life After Love” era
The Lady Gaga Era (His favorite song “Poker Face”)
The Kesha era
And now the Taylor Swift/Adele era. Truly my Dad is a pop enthusiast.
My husband (now a dad for several years) just LOVES national anthems. On Saturday mornings he likes to go on YouTube with our son and play one after another and then discuss which country’s is best. Factors include if the song makes you tear-up during the Olympics or if you could imagine going off to war to that soundtrack. So far I believe the top scorers are USA, France, Germany, and South Africa. He actually wanted us to consider using an anthem in our wedding.
My own dad stopped buying pop music in like 1968, but during the Jesus Freak movement of the 1970s, bought several albums of pseudo-Jewish Christian music and used to love to sing along. I cringe. Then he told me authoritatively that there was no good rock or pop music made in the 1970s. On the other hand, I now have an encyclopedic knowledge of the songs of the 50s and 60s as a result of listening him with him throughout my childhood, and I was free to discover the music of the 1970s (etc) for myself.
A few years ago I was going through some of my dad’s junk and I found one or two old vinyl records he had–Steppenwolf and Black Sabbath. I mostly knew him to be a fan of British Invasion and mellow country & western music, but he explained that in college every single morning when he woke up he would immediately play “Paranoid” to get ready for the day.
whenever a Doors song comes on the radio he has a compulsion to explain that Jim Morrison has a unique vocal performance because he sings from the chest.
Finally, when he drove to Denver to see Bob Dylan, he financed his trip by stuffing his car with cases of Coors and bootlegging them back to Iowa like in Smokey and the Bandit.
Also, i used to make up lyrics to “Hush Little Baby” because I couldn’t remember the real ones. My daughter would get enraged if anyone else sang the “right” version, and I’d be summoned to the bedroom to sing the “real” version. I remember only part of the lyrics, but they went something like
Hush little baby/ Don’t say a word/ Daddy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird/ If that mockingbird won’t sing/Daddy’s gonna buy you a diamond ring/ If that diamond ring won’t shine/ Daddy’s gonna buy you a gold mine/ If that gold mine runs out/ Daddy’s gonna buy you a Guinness Stout/ If that Guinness Stout gets drunk/ Daddy’s gonna become a kung fu monk/…
it went on forever, because that kid was hard to get to bed.
Also, I used to make the family listen to pipe and drum music on the way to various highland games comps around Texas. I’m a monster.
That is AMAZING and absolutely Peak Dad, good job sir.
I made up mockingbird lyrics, too. Yours starts out okay, but I go to:
if that diamond ring won’t shine
Mama’s gonna buy you a copper mine
if that copper mine has no ore
mama’s gonna take you on a trip to the shore
if that beach trip gets rained out
Mama’s gonna buy you a kettle with a spout
if that kettle won’t boil your tea
mama’s gonna take you to a new country
if that country has no queen
mama’s gonna go out and eat ice cream
…which is a pretty mean threat to lay on the kid, but by the time I get to ice cream, I *really* wanted the kid to go to sleep already.
Hahaha, those are great!!
Two stories:
1. My dad used to drive me to the babysitter’s house when I was very little and he used to belt out “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie it’s…” then point to me to finish with “AMORE” as loud as I possibly could. I am now nearing 30 and this remains a vivid (and dear) memory.
2. In the 6th grade I asked for a Blackstreet cd and my dad purchased the Backstreet Boys instead. To this day, I have no idea if this was a case of Dad-obliviousness or his way of avoiding the embarrassment of getting your 12-year-old daughter a sexually explicit cd as a gift.
Oh, man, I have such fond memories of singing in the car with my dad when it was just us.
Some of the most Dad music stories:
1) I enthusiastically played “American Idiot” while we were riding in the car together, circa 2005. “Oh,” he said, “this is fun!” (He is a liberal, but I’m still not sure how much he was paying attention to the lyrics.)
2) When my parents took me to see Les Miserables as a birthday present in high school, he was a bit unenthusiastic, as he generally thought musicals were kind of boring. He came out of the theatre a convert, and enjoyed singing along to my London cast album on occasion, especially “Master of the House.”
3) My dad loves sad lady singers, which he largely passed on to me. Included: Joni Mitchell (he cries on cue at “River”), Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, and probably more. I’m also pretty sure he was the one who amassed all the Streisand albums currently sitting in my record collection (not my mom). He’s just a sucker for a lady in musical distress.
I am hoping he will enjoy Hamilton when I play it for him over Christmas.
My dad’s hobby for the last several years has been collecting obscure jazz CDs — he has more specific criteria in terms of time period and style than that, but I don’t know enough about jazz to really understand them — which he then never listens to. They go in a stack in the living room; occasionally he pulls a few off the stack, puts them in his car, listens to each of them through exactly once, and then puts them in a box in alphabetical order. Every year my mom pulls about five CDs out of the bottom of the not-yet-listened stack, gift-wraps them, and gives them to him for Christmas, and every time he is pleasantly surprised — “How did you know I wanted this CD?!”
LOVE
My dad was indirectly responsible for a lot of my formative media consumption. In junior high I would come home to his empty apartment after school, sneak a rotation of his CDs off the shelf, and listen to them on Big Old-School Puffy Headphones while reading his copies of Kurt Vonnegut books.
A lot of the music was archetypal Dad Stuff (and helps to explain my abiding love for Steely Dan, Elvis Costello, and Rush), but he also had and has a taste for singer-songwriter ladies. I think he might own everything Shawn Colvin has ever released, for instance. As a result, he had Little Earthquakes by Tori Amos, which my thirteen-year-old-girl self quickly latched onto as something of a holy document.
I eventually experienced the epitome of a Mortifying Dad Moment when we were listening to that album together. Either he’d come home early to find me listening to it or he’d put it on of his own accord, I don’t recall.
He turned to me right after the line “Boy, you best pray that I bleed real soon; how’s that thought for you?” in “Silent All These Years” and asked, “So, you know what she means by that, right?”
I immediately clammed up because OH MY GOD DAD WHY ARE YOU ASKING ME THIS yes I know but WHY ARE WE HAVING THIS DISCUSSION
“The Summer of Endless Moody” = the summer we drove from IL to CO and my dad refused to listen to anything but “The Moody Blues Live at Red Rocks.”
The Dylan moment: Dad takes me into the den, sits me down, and says seriously, “I think it’s time for you to hear something.” Plays me Bob Dylan’s “Idiot Wind.” On vinyl.
Dad and the historical songs of Al Stewart–on Between the Wars: “They had the opportunity to make the world so much better, and they just fucked it up.”; on Joe the Georgian: “Joe the Georgian is Stalin. What a fucking asshole. You remember that.”
I once caught my dad singing Defying Gravity while mowing the lawn. I could hear him over the mower.
I was in a play in middle school where I had to howl like a wolf. Sadly, howling remains a life skill I do not possess, and all the other wolves made fun of me. So I came home crying about it and my dad got all excited and said, “I know what you should listen to!”
And then he put on Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London on repeat and howled around the kitchen for an hour.
Dads love Warren Zevon. It’s Science.
My dad would sing the first lines of “Amazing Grace” as “a grazing mace, across my face will cause my head to bleed” (while we were in church).
My dad got me listening to the Indigo Girls when I was 8. We would listen in the car and harmonize. Ugh I love him.
My Dad and Mum both listened to what I might refer to as “suspiciously gay music.” I distinctly remember a lot of Pet Shop Boys and Queen from my Dad, and with my Mum it was wall to wall Indigo Girls. If I were in But I’m A Cheerleader, I would have had to say that that was my “root.”
He was also a radio presenter until I was about 5 – he presented the breakfast show. At one of his previous radio jobs, the music supervisor sent him an annoyed typed letter, about how Dad thought that the music supervisor’s selections just weren’t good enough (he kept picking his own music to play, instead of whatever pop thing the radio wanted him to shill.) I’ve read the letter, it’s hilariously bitchy.
My dad still maintains that “The Power of Love” (or possibly “Relax”?) by Frankie Goes to Hollywood is the best song ever.
Myra’s very much Does Not Sing. I’ve only heard him sing the National Anthem and the Air Force fight song. However, once my sister and I were singing along to Benny and the Jets, when for one brief, glorious, high pitched “Benny” he joined in. It is one of my most cherished memories.
My dad used to sing bits of songs. Two particular songs – ‘Feelin’ Groovy’ by Simon and Garfunkle, and ‘You May be Right’ by Billy Joel. But a.) he used to sing only one to two lines of each, and b.) he used to sing them to us kids. Feelin’ Groovy, sure, but You May be Right? To your kids?
Could be worse, though. He said his dad used to walk around the house singing ‘Happy Birthday’. My brother’s song is ‘Take on Me’ by A-ha.
I forgot my funny dad music story! He and my mom went to see Toots and the Maytals – they might have won tickets, as I don’t think either of them are big reggae fans – at an outdoor theatre in Berkeley… and were then surprised that so many people there were smoking pot.
I do not like the Rolling Stones. I told this to my dad one day and he told me, very seriously, that I was probably not listening to them LOUD enough, and what I needed to do was imitate what he does in his truck, which is put in ear plugs and turn it up loud enough so you feel it in your chest *pats chest meaningfully*
Oh, also, my mom loves to sing songs to my sister and I (‘You are my sunshine” and “Skidamarink” from the Elephant Show). We were singing to each other in the kitchen once and her dog started howling because we sounded so bad (or maybe she just wanted to sing along).
My dad is Northern Irish, and from a Protestant Unionist family, but when I was younger he used to blast Catholic Republican ‘rebel songs’ from the hi fi. Being woken up on a Saturday morning by “RODDY MC CORLEY GOES TO DIE, ON THE BRIDGE OF TOOME TODAY” vibrating from the room below was not the best part of being 14.
I do know all the words to Fields of Athenry though.
When I went through a prog rock phase in my early teens, my dad solemnly handed over his vinyl copy of Yes’s “Relayer.” It was a strange moment — one I suspect he had been waiting for since the day I was born.
Considering that he was officially a Bad Dad, it’s not an album I listen to often. Still and all, for years afterward the only subject either of us could freely talk about was music, so I guess that’s something anyway.
Oh, man, is this a great post. Such a rich tapestry of Dads and Dad Music™. My dad is actually pretty well rounded in terms of musical taste, but he does lean very Dadly in his car fallback—it’s almost always Springsteen.
-When my brother and I were in high school, he would wake us up on the weekends by playing Zeppelin’s “The Song Remains The Same” at an ear-shredding volume until one of us dragged ourselves out to turn it off.
-He never really worried about censoring his music taste when i was younger, so I ended up with Maxwell’s Silver Hammer as one of my favorite songs until I realized what it was actually about. And the fact that he played Warren Zevon’s “Excitable Boy” frequently explains a lot.
-His most recent music purchase is the (new?) Foo Fighters album, and he is ridiculously proud of himself for it. He thought I would be very impressed, and I am, and it’s adorable how he always skips to the last track “I Am A River”.
-He rented a car recently and found an unlabeled mix CD of quasi-current pop hits: Hozier, Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, etc., and joyously incorporated it into his binder, saying, “hey, this stuff is pretty good!”
Now it is Christmas Dad season, which means he will play Luciano Pavarotti’s “O Holy Night” cd with the all-boys choir on repeat and STRONGLY PROTEST any alternates.
When I was a baby, my dad would blast Huey Lewis & the News in order to drown out my crying when he didn’t know what else to try. I find ol’ Huey very calming to this day.
Oh my god, I’m the same age as everybody’s dad! My dad died a couple months ago, and while he pretty much a washout as a dad, he introduced me to a lot of classical, oratorio, and opera, which ended up being pretty useful when I was trying to land a job at the opera, and the founder wanted to know my favorite opera and why. I had absorbed just enough to be able to fake my way through a beginnings of an answer before distracting him by asking about his, which took care of the rest of the interview. (got the job, going on 5 years here)
I had the same thought about being the age of the Dads! My father is a musicologist and quit listening to any popular music when the Beatles broke up. For years whenever anyone mentioned anything to do with post-1970 music he would screw up his face to look baffled and displeased and ask “Do you mean like ‘Afternoon Delight’?”
I also have a fond memory of his seeing the Spice Girls on 60 Minutes when they were big, and cracking me up by singing “Tell me what you want, what you RILLY RILLY RILLY want!” in a super-high falsetto. (He is a deep bass.)
I have never met my maternal grandpa, as he died from a heart attack when my Mom was 19, but from what I’ve heard, and seen on old 60’s home movies, he was a quiet man 12 years older than my Grandma.
And when I began loving My Fair Lady, my Mom piped up, when Freddy began “On The Street Where You Live,” and she said, “Oh Dad used to sing this song all the time! He’d start ‘I have often goooonne down this street befooorrree,” and we were like ‘DAD ugh this is SO embarrassing!!”
And it always makes me feel like I know him a little better.
MY Dad I owe my love of Herbie Hancock & jazz too, having discovered his HeadHunter tapes in an old cabinet. 🙂
I was reading this list to my parents last night from Twitter and my mom started crying a little bit remembering how her dad couldn’t really sing but he used to sing “Goodnight, Sweetheart” to her. I really wish I’d gotten to know him.
Every car ride we took as a child, my dad sang “Chantilly Lace” by Jerry Lee Lewis. Only four lines of it though: “Chantilly lace and a pretty face and a pony tail hangin’ down / A wiggle and a walk and a giggle and a talk made the world go round.”
He’s not into music at all, and that’s still the only song I’ve ever heard him sing. Mysteries!
My dad was a huge Deadhead (literally followed them around the country and world — helped by the fact that he was selling drugs to the concertgoers and possibly the band — had every concert on tape, took me to my first New Year’s show when I was less than a month old, etc.). He died in 1995, about one week before Jerry Garcia, which we all thought was probably on purpose. He wouldn’t have wanted to be in a world without Jerry.
Other memories include: he bought my brother and I Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The White Album as the only two (non-Grateful Dead) must have albums of all time; one of my favorite memories was driving down the freeway singing along to Brown-Eyed Girl, which I understood to be Our Song (and many years later, actually listening to the lyrics and getting squicked out about the bleachers, ha).
Thanks for all the stories everyone!
Road trips as a kid were often to the soundtrack of Dr Hook, specifically Sylvia’s Mother and Cover of the Rolling Stones. My dad liked to sing bass along with them, with as much pathos and desperation that he could muster (and desperation on a cross-country road trip with 8 kids was…..a lot).
He had such a crush on Wonder Woman’s Lynda Carter that he bought her debut 1978 record.
With female singers, it was all about Linda Ronstadt and Buffy Saint-Marie–I think he had every album each of them had done. And to a much much lesser extent, Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton.
Dad surprised us all when he announced that Fine Young Cannibals were actually pretty good. And when he bought my sisters the tapes of Vanilla Ice and Milli Vanilli.
in a bonus round, when I was a kid, my mom had a mixed tape that included, among other things, “Fighter” from the third live action Ninja Turtles movie, “Flowers on the Wall” as it featured in Pulp Fiction and The Pretenders’ “Back on the Chain Gang,” along with edited highlights of the Talking Heads. I’m exceptionally fond of all of them to this day.
I think the MOST Dad Music thing my dad ever did was play the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack at least on every leg of every single road trip we ever took, which included a two-day-there,-two-day-back trip we made twice a year to our ancestral stomping grounds in western Michigan. Of COURSE my mother did not let us watch the movie itself until we were 18, but I’ve known the RHPS soundtrack by heart since I was probably… 8? 9?
By the way, that soundtrack does not really make a whole lot of sense if you have zero concept of the movie (because you, a child, are banned from watching it). I was very confused by the lyrics but LOVED it anyway.
Oh and obviously he LOVED Weird Al and any/all parody songs.
There’s a song called “Cheerleader,” by Deidre someone, which is a mostly-spoken-word, very sarcasm-heavy song written in the first person about a girl who really really wants to be a cheerleader. The point being that it’s stupid to be a cheerleader because it’s cliquey and everyone is named Brittany. But when we moved to a new town the week before I started high school, and I decided I wanted to become a cheerleader to make friends, he found this song and played it for me NON-STOP. It didn’t help in the sense that I still became a cheerleader, but it did help in the sense that I became a one-season cheerleader with a sarcastic attitude, which ultimately was probably for the best.
Ahh, Rocky Horror. My parents knew that they were guaranteed to get harmony in the backseat if they put on the Time Warp. My sibs, at 8, 7, and 5, all trying to do the Pelvic Thrust in seatbelts….. Memories!
(I ended up performing in the show, both music and movie, many times as an adult. And they always came to see it. Now THAT was awkward…)
I remember my dad having two albums in his car when I was in high school. One was Sheryl Crow’s “C’mon C’mon” (“Don’t you love this soak up the sun song?!”) The other was Enya. My dad is a Southerner, hunter, and used to own a construction company. Life is an enigma.
My dad and his girlfriend are very very into music, particularly the local scene in my hometown. He makes me go to shows whenever I’m in town. He’s much more popular than I could ever be, I just sit quietly with a beer and smile politely.
When I was a kid, he would BLAST Tragically Hip (or the Who. Or maybe John Coltrane, dependent on mood and season) every Saturday morning at 9am on the dot and I posit this is how I am able to sleep through anything to this day.
Oh and growing up, the album we listened to on Christmas morning was Mario Lanza. Yep.
My dad loves “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits and always cranks the volume when it’s on the radio. One day I heard the muffled noises of “Money for Nothing” coming from outside, and I looked out, and my dad had gotten back from his errands and was sitting in the car, listening to the song on full volume. He didn’t want to come inside until it was over.
I also spent a lot of time listening to Genesis, Meatloaf, and Fine Young Cannibals as a kid. I thought the lyrics for “She Drives Me Crazy” were “she drives me crazy like old bananas” rather than “she drives me crazy like no one else” until I was about 10. We would regularly have family dance parties to “Paradise by the Dashboard Light,” a song I didn’t realllllly understand until I was a teen and then I was much too mortified/cool to partake in a dance party.
“If dads are not your thing, or if your own dad was a disappointment, if he is gone now, if the thought of him does not bring up funny musical stories, I hope you can be tender with yourself now. Be the dad you wish to see in the world, whether you have children or not.”
My father was a slightly intimidating presence for much of my childhood, and the gentle, bumbling Dads of The Toast are comforting and inspiring to me. Thank you!
Some years ago I was going through my parents’ record cabinet and discovered two different recordings of the West Side Story soundtrack. I thought this was kind of weird – who needs two copies of the same soundtrack? Then I realised that one was the movie version and the other was the Broadway version. Asked my parents what was up, and it turns out that ONE WAS MY MUM’S AND ONE WAS MY DAD’S AND THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED WHEN THEY MERGED THEIR RECORD COLLECTIONS. Dad got really excited and asked me to put on Gee, Officer Krupke because it was his favourite song off the album, and Mum immediately got super offended at the idea that anyone would prefer Gee, Officer Krupke over America. It was incredibly cute.
Something like five years ago I bought my mum The Best of Van Morrison for Christmas and immediately regretted that particular life choice, because she played it on repeat for a week.
My dad used to sort-of sing “I just want to go home… I’m tired and I want to go to bed” at the end of long car drives. It wasn’t until *last week*, while reading a Miss Fisher mystery, that I found out it’s actually a line from a song from 1925 and about trying to go home after you’re drunk. I guess my Dad always just sang the first two lines to protect my preteen ears: http://www.metrolyrics.com/show-me-the-way-to-go-…
my dad sings this too and I knew he didn’t make it up but I had no idea it was about drunkenness until this very minute. Thanks!
My visit at Christmas will include being asked multiple times who sang some Christmas song on the radio and each time my dad will be disappointed and surprised I don’t know the answer.
My dad likes to sing what I suspect are the jingles for the most popular tv and radio ads of the 70s and 80s.
I was playing A Tribe Called Quest in the car one day….my dad asked “Who is this, the French Prince?”
he meant Fresh Prince, and was still wrong
Growing up, the music I remember my dad listening to most was A) Frank Sinatra (the soundtrack to a ten-day family RV vacation to Yellowstone) and B) REM. He had all these great stories about seeing classic bands in the 60s and 70s (Zeppelin, the Stones, Hendrix), but my mom was the one who wanted to listen to them. Dad wanted Marc Cohn and Chris Isaak.
In the past ten years, a former high school friend has become a pretty well-known musician and Dad got into her music a lot, even taking me to a concert with him. Now when one of her albums comes out, he buys two copies, one for me and one for him. The most recent one I pre-ordered from Amazon so I could get an autographed copy (which is weird to have because I got pulled over with her in my car senior year), and he was disappointed that I’d gotten my own instead of waiting for him.
ok so. my dad, when I was a teenager, presented me with the following albums on CD (which were *new!*):
– the clash, london calling
– bob dylan, blood on the tracks
– the greatest hits of crosby, stills, nash (& young)
– joni mitchell, blue
– joe jackson, look sharp
….and:
– enya. lots of enya.
“in order to cultivate proper musical taste”
and when I hear these albums I am immediately sixteen and in my dad’s pickup.
that is all. I shall proceed to read the comments.
My dad will take classic rock songs and turn them into contemporary Christian rock songs. “Calling Dr. Love” turned into “calling Jesus Christ”.
My dad stopped paying attention to pop music around the time he graduated high school. He’s mostly a classical man with an unfortunate lean towards instrumental easy listening. A few years ago, he asked if I’d ever heard of a rock star called Bono, because he kept hearing about this Bono guy in the news. My dad had never heard of U2 (I own several of their CDs) and thought Cher’s ex-husband had become a human rights activist. Dad was really confused, because he was pretty sure Sonny Bono was deceased.
Why didn’t I see this beauty sooner?
Coloneldad picks specific parts of songs to be his favorites. For example:
Werewolves of London. The whole song isn’t his favorite. It probably isn’t even in his top ten. But when he hears about “a werewolf drinkin a pina colada at Trader Vic’s, his hair was perfect” he will shout “DIP!” at the top of his lungs with a massive grin on his face. Every. Time.
I have yet to come across a genre that he does not like. Most recently he’s incredibly into very light, very synth-y, very European sounding pop. I’m blaming it on the Army’s deciding to send him to France a few years ago and the twenty-something year old Frenchman who was his driver/requisitioned traveling buddy. He came away with a new appreciation and understanding of the French people and their culture, a stronger sense of unity with his Gallic brothers in arms, and an undying love for dubious pop. Vivien, what hast thou wrought?
My dad loves karaoke with a fiery passion. One of his greatest performances to date was “Saturday Night’s All Right For FIghting,” on a cruise.
My dad rewrote Christmas songs (and sometimes other songs) to be about my pet gerbil. Sometimes I still catch myself singing them his way instead of the real way.
Easter vacation, 1998. My younger sister and I, aged 12 and 14, fly to Alberta to visit our dad. We spend a week driving from Edmonton to Tofino and back, with four cds: Bob Dylan – Knocked Out Loaded, Lou Reed – New York, Carlos Santana – Smooth, aaannnddd Ani Difranco & Utah Philips – The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere. Brownsville Girl is still my favourite Dylan song.
A few years ago Leonard Cohen played my hometown. My dad bought tickets right away, and then the local CBC radio station had a contest where you could win front row tickets AND backstage passes. My dad entered as many times a possible using both legit means and some rather shadier ways involving fake names. AND he won! Legitimately, I am given to understand. His date was a lady he just begun courting. They will celebrate their second wedding anniversary in two weeks.
My dad used to blast “Jump Around” by House of Pain (windows down) when he had to drive me to my dance class because “that’s what you’re going there to do, right?!”
My dad, despite not otherwise being at all musical, is a truly excellent dancer. Actually good, not just dad good. Well into teenagehood, my sisters and I would dance with my dad at parties and weddings because he had so much fun.
His criteria for liking music is intelligibility of the lyrics. He likes Cake and Kesha for this reason.
This is me and my mom. She taught dance for decades, and I was one of her students for a bit, and now she and I totally jam together at all weddings.
My dad was driving me and my friends to an Incubus concert in high school and suddenly he turns to me and says “do you know what an incubus is?” I said no. “It’s a creature who comes into your room at night and rapes you.”
That sure was a fun car ride for me and my friends.
At my fifth birthday party in 1988, the music my dad used for musical chairs was George Michael’s ‘I Want Your Sex’.
When I was 7 and sick with chicken pox, my dad called our local radio station to request my most favorite song: Blinded by the Light (Manfred Mann version obvi). He was at work, but made sure my mom had the radio on so I would hear it when he called.
I hadn’t even recognized my dad’s voice when he was on the air, so I was like, “Oh, there is another very sick little girl out there who loves Blinded by the Light! Wow!”
As my mom was explaining it all to me, those bastards played the Springsteen version. I was very sad and confused, but it was still pretty cool.
I failed at expressing this in 140-character format, but my dad used to randomly burst into one of two lines from songs, except he would insert one of his 6 children’s names into it. One was “Oh where, oh where has my little [name] gone?” The other was “And they call him/her, [embarassing childhood nickname.” I probably heard him sing that second song 3-4 times/week my entire life. It was not until an episode of the Simpsons in my teen years that I discovered he’d borrowed the tune of Paul Anka’s “Puppy Love”
My dad has always had a huge and varied music collection. In one of my larger errors of judgement, I taught my dad to use bitorrent.
I was visiting home last year and complained that I didn’t have time to search through his music collection to pick up all the stuff I wanted. Two months later, for my birthday, he sent me a 500 gig hard drive, FULL of torrented music from Of Monsters and Men to The Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band via just about everything you can imagine. There was 10 gigs of Elton John alone.
My dad is going to land in jail and it’s all my fault.
I don’t even care that this is late and will be buried in the sands of time/comments:
One of the greatest mysteries in my family is how I know the actual tune to “16 Tons”. My father (a lawyer) loves this song and taught it to me when I was a bitty little thing. My father is amazing, but he cannot carry a tune in a bucket. But still, from my tiniest age, we have sung this song together. Me singing the actual tune, Daddy singing the Daddy version, and both of us going into an extended dramatic howl/yodel on “I OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWEEEEEE MYYYYYYYYY SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUULLLLLL” at the end of the chorus every single time. Obviously this was our father/daughter dance at my wedding. My father has given me oh so much in my life, but this might be the best of it.
Last week I accompanied my dad to see one of the members of Genesis in concert. Let me tell you, almost the entire audience consisted of middle-aged white dudes, so I was in a SEA of DADS. During the intermission my father (who cannot go to a single concert without talking to complete strangers) turns around and starts chatting with the group behind us. It reached peak dad when they were listing prog-rock bands and someone goes “and, Yes (the band)” to which the group replied “yes, of course” followed by all of them chuckling in dad delight and going “Yes? Yes!”
The story I tell people so they can know everything important about my dad:
When he was a young man in the navy during Vietnam, some friends took him to a concert in upstate New York. He was the only one with short hair, and he hated every second of it.
My dad was at Woodstock and did not enjoy it.
Late to the party, but:
My dad loves music, and in the 80’s when I was a kid he bought a lot of records that he would blast on his high-end speakers. Some of which (Talking Heads!) I love as an adult, some (Styx?) not so much. One of my earliest memories is of me playing with Strawberry Shortcake dolls while my dad blasted “Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!”
We were the first people I knew to have a CD player, and he now has quite a music collection on CD as well, to which he adds to with fair regularity. As a teenager I rebelled by becoming a Beatlemaniac and listening to mostly music from the last 1960’s, when my parents were in elementary school. (Well, that and Bjork.)
But I also grew up with Weird Al and compilations of Doctor Demento, for which I am very grateful, and to this day my dad will randomly burst out with “I was walking down the street….when something caught my eye….and DRAGGED IT FIFTEEN FEET.”
My Dad spent his formative years in Western Berlin jazz clubs, and that’s all he listens to till this day. Consequently, he was rather disappointed when he encountered “actual” jazz in America after the end of the Cold War. He’s so disappointed that none of his children developed a taste for jazz, but I suspect that is only a matter of time.
My dad used to sing songs from My Fair Lady in the car as he drove me and my friends to school. It became a school-wide joke.
I find this post deeply moving. Bookmarked forever. I unironically aspire to be ALL of these dads some day.
my dad owned two cds. one had “Feliz Navidad” three times. the exact same, just three times. the other cd was of a 23 piece band where everyone played a different sort of gourd.
That is the all time funniest dad music comment. Of all time.
My dad hates disco because of the “synthetic drumming.” After all, “The Grateful Dead had TWO drummers!” One of my most treasured memories in the world though is listening to a mix I’d made for him as we road tripped to my grandmother’s, and how excited he got when the last track, “Time Has Come Today” by The Chambers Brothers, came on. “This is JUST what we need!” he exclaimed, and blasted the stereo in exuberant parental defiance (grandmother being not so found of rock n roll).
My dad once went to a classical music concert where one of the pieces was set to the sounds of Arctic birds.
I still have that album on my computer.
So my dodgy Irish dad and I shared the ability to sleep anywhere but in a bed when I was a child. He took me to see “The Jungle Book” and promptly dozed off when the lights went down. There were four other quiet families in the theatre. He remained asleep until “King of the Swingers” came on. He stood straight up and said loudly, “JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH” and sat back down.
Hearing Louis Prima out of context jolted him right out of his lovely nap.
My dad caught the tail end of a PBS special on Tuvan throat singing 15 years ago and now whenever he has a cold he tries his hand at it. He also impersonates the french horn during the “West Wing” theme song.
Old Louis Armstrong 78s (generally more instrumental than ones of Armstrong singing) and the soundtrack to Hansel and Gretel. I got a big crush on a girl in kindergarten because she looked like the illustration of Gretel on the album cover.
So my dodgy Irish dad could sleep anywhere but in a bed when I was a child. He took me to see “The Jungle Book” and promptly dozed off when the lights went down. There were four other quiet families in the theatre. He remained asleep until “King of the Swingers” came on. He stood straight up and said loudly, “JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH” and sat back down. Hearing Louis Prima in a Disney movie shocked him awake.
At the party where my parents met, my dad got so drunk he picked up the 7″ record that was playing and took a bite out of it. It was ‘Midnight at the Oasis’.
my dad is a huge hipster. best verbatim quote:
“Yeah, I actually saw Elvis Costello in 1980. He was the opening act for Prince. It was okay.”
Once when I was in high school, my stepdad told me that he saw Jimi Hendrix play live. “What was it like?” I asked breathlessly. “He was good,” my stepdad said. I waited for more, but that was it. Jimi Hendrix was “good”.
My dad is a Mississippi bred Republican who shares a birthday with Ronald Reagan and loves it so much he named his second born Reagan (not me). The man owns, loves and gleefully sings along to 4 CDs: Whitney Houston, Aimee Mann, Reba McEntire and Trisha Yearwood.
My dad is a pretty talented bass player! He was in some bands when he was young, and then stopped to be a dad instead, but now he is in a dad-band with other dads! They meet weekly in my parents’ basement to play covers of the Beatles and other dad-type bands. My mom is long-suffering.
He’s been a lot happier since he started playing music more regularly, though. I think he missed it a lot but it’s hard to play on your own when you’re just the bass player.
But after all, aren’t we all bass players?
My dad plays Tom Waits songs on the ukulele and it is surprisingly charming!
Also once told me a very light-on-detail story about a road trip he took in his youth during which it took the passengers several hours to realize that the Pink Floyd tape was playing the same 30 second loop ad infinitum.
My Dad has a knack for making parody lyrics and there are very few secular Christmas songs I can hear without immediately thinking of my Dad’s lyrics.
Examples:
I’m screaming at a white sheep dog (I’m dreaming of a white Christmas)
Walnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost donuts on your nose (The Christmas Song)
Oh, and it’s not just one line. Often the whole song gets rewritten. We used to do it in the car together. It always makes me smile 😀
My dad has an epic vinyl collection that used to be (apparently) even MORE epic, but his ex ended up with about half of it in the divorce that happened years before I was born. Over 30 years later, he will still occasionally be sure he has a particular album, and then when he goes to look for it, be miffed that it isn’t there. A small selection of things he had that he has no longer: the original Broadway cast recording of “Camelot,” Linda Ronstadt’s Spanish-language album, ABBA’s “Waterloo.”
This “Um, well okay. Here goes. My dad wrote the lime in the coconut song.” lead to Overwhelming Dad Envy.
Although mine played Fela every morning as he drove us to school, singing along and drumming on the steering wheel. As a result, the first song I learned all the way through was Fela’s Lady- “If you call am woman/ African woman no go gree/ she go say/she go say “I be lady o!” which I think is a good sort of song to learn at a young age.
One time as a kid I had a nightmare about some reptilian monster. When I told my dad about it he went hmm, pulled a record from his progrock collection, and asked wether it had looked anything like the thing on the cover. It was a armadillo tank on ELP’s Tarkus album.
This is such an exciting topic that I have gone to the trouble of resetting my password so I can share this:
My late father was for many years a reggae and jazz saxophonist. He released a few records with this one band Reality and his family had a few copies, now all lost. I had tried to find the recordings online, but to no avail UNTIL a Brazilian DJ uploaded a track onto Youtube! And when my siblings and I commented he said Reality is still popular in Brazil and people go crazy over my dad’s sax solos! Who knew? I got to hear him again and see a photo of the band I had never seen before – ALL THE FEELS
My dad adores classical music, especially opera. My fondest memories are also the ones that used to be the most cringeworthy. He “conducted” histrionically while driving the carpool to school. He woke us up by blaring the 1812 Overture, The New World Symphony, or Jupiter. He used to buy me cassettes (I’m 34) that told stories about plucky heroines who interacted with composers, like Katrina the Venetian orphan, who had a romantic adventure during Carnevale under the benign eye of Vivaldi, her orphanage’s music master. As a result, I too love classical music and will certainly embarrass the crap out of any potential progeny.
My dad made up a silly song for my sister and me about frogs doing ballet. I sing it for my kids now.
My father is a retired English accountant. Nothing brings him more joy than dancing to Gretchen Wilson’s Red Neck Woman. Nothing.
“Cause I’m a redneck woman
I ain’t no high class broad
I’m just a product of my raising
I say, ‘hey ya’ll’ and ‘yee-haw'”
“Victoria’s Secret, well their stuff’s real nice
But I can buy the same damn thing on a Wal-Mart shelf half price
And still look sexy, just as sexy as those models on TV
No, I don’t need no designer tag to make my man want me”
My dad has memorized which songs are included in Billboard’s Book of Top 40 Hits, which spans 1955-1985. He also reads road atlases for fun.