I Learned to Listen From My Dad
He taught me a crucial survival skill when he passed down his rock’n’roll fandom.
If I tell you my earliest memory, you’ll understand the sort of man my dad is. I was 5 years old, in the living room of the ranch-style house my parents rented at the time, and Peter Gabriel’s 1992 song “Kiss That Frog” was playing loudly on the stereo. “Sweet little princess, let me introduce his frog-ness,” Gabriel oozes, “You alone can get him singing…” This truly bizarre track is a play on the Brothers Grimm fairytale “The Frog Prince,” except the titular frog is a horny little guy (something I did not grasp until years later); it’s set to a sickening electric guitar riff and a fuckton of sexy drums. At the end, when Gabriel urges the listener to “jump in the water,” I would leap onto the blue-and-cream rug in the center of the room. That oval rug was my pond, and the hardwood floor was my lilypad. Out of sight in my mind’s eye, my father was smiling, thrilled at how quickly I took to the water that is his music taste.
For a while, I thought everyone had a dad like mine: a kind man who rarely gets angry, who hates funerals and walking barefoot, who taught me and my brother to melt a slice of American cheese on just about anything, who made up silly voices and personalities for our stuffed animals, and who bequeathed to me everything he knows about music, including how to love it in the first place. The single-most important thing he gave me, besides unconditional love, was modeling how to use music in my life. He showed me its emotional and practical roles in how he lives: He does not need much besides his loved ones, his home, and his music.
Picture it: A grown man lying on the carpeted floor of a living room, legs up on the couch, listening to music on headphones in the dark for an hour, multiple times a week. He situated himself this way, in part, because he has chronic back and shoulder pain related to an accident in his early 20s where he was clipped by a semi-truck while mowing grass for the county. But his private listening sessions were also, very clearly to me at least, about processing his feelings. Sometimes, I would spot the faint glimmer of a tear rolling down his cheek and into the yellow foam of his vintage headphones. I saw firsthand that music was a place to seek out emotional mirrors—to feel into and through song lyrics, but also the ineffable emotions that music can channel.
