I Learned to Listen From My Dad

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. 

At some point in my youth, I realized most kids weren’t explicitly taught to be a music fan by their parents, like they might be with a sports team. My peers didn’t sing early Who hits at the third-grade talent show, or find themselves too scared to sleep after hearing the Beatles’ White Album played backwards. They weren’t being quizzed on classic song intros by age 10, and debating Dark Side of the Moon vs. Wish You Were Here as the best Pink Floyd album by their preteen years. Other kids didn’t steal their dad’s Dookie and Tragic Kingdom CDs, or lose their shit over a handmade comp of ’60s one-hit-wonders like “Red Rubber Ball.” For a long time I felt this made me special, to have this musical bond with my dad; I knew it was an extension of his love. Later, I came to view it as a passed-down survival skill. I inherited so much from him, and the way we both self-soothe anxiety and depression (mine diagnosed, his not) with pop songs is a coping mechanism for a shared genetic flaw. 

There are lighter aspects of my dad’s music fandom that I’ve sought to replicate as well. His memories are totally tied up in the act of listening. He would tell us these stories about his college years in 1970s, how he’d know who to be friends with based on the type of music emanating from dorm rooms. He seems to remember every single person who introduced him to an artist or album that turned out to be important in his life. He has made multiple volumes of nostalgia mixtapes for his dental school buddies using the cover of the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls and replacing the band members’ faces with those of his friends. Nearly 50 years ago, my dad built two large blue record crates adorned with the names of his favorite bands. I’ve coveted those crates, along with his old vinyl, since I was a kid, and last Christmas he finally gave me one. 

Up until Covid, my father was a dentist in a small town in Northeast Ohio. I called him the “analog dentist” because he worked alone, largely without a computer, in an office that barely changed, save for a modern X-ray machine, in the 40-some years he practiced. (Of course this nickname reminded him of a song: Joe Walsh’s latter-day boomer anthem “Analog Man.”) Imagine mint-green walls, a waiting room done up in a mallard motif, a typewriter on the desk, a weathered cardboard box of toys for his young patients, long since grown. He always played the local adult contemporary radio station (98.9 FM) over the stereo, and the thought of my dad stuck in an endless loop of Bruno Mars, Celine Dion, and “Total Eclipse of the Heart” killed me. I thought, This must be hell. But later I heard that he was always talking anyway—usually about his kids, especially his daughter in New York who sometimes interviewed famous musicians. With his hands in a patient’s mouth, he had a captive audience.  

Still, my dad hated his job. I sensed this from a young age, too. It seemed to bum him out that people are so afraid of going to the dentist—truly, I cannot imagine someone being afraid of my dad. He never really wanted to be a dentist in the first place; his upwardly mobile teacher-parents had pushed him to live up to his “potential” and pursue something “serious,” like medicine or dentistry. Every time we watched a rockumentary with scenes set in a recording studio, my dad would say something like: “If I had chosen my job, I would have been a recording engineer.” Professional ears. He never dreamed of being the rock star, he just wanted to be in the room and make himself useful. 

I’ve thought so many times about the kind of life my father would have had pursuing this dream, how there weren’t really college programs for audio engineering when he was going to school in the mid ’70s. He would have needed to be a different kind of person—a more rebellious man, or a less straitlaced one at least. Breaking into rock’n’roll then might have looked something like: moving to one of the coasts, falling in with a music scene, doing drugs, and probably not marrying my mom, a nice Catholic girl he met in high school. Put bluntly: I wouldn’t exist if my dad had chased his dream of being an audio engineer. In some small way, writing about music—chasing my dream—is a form of living out my dad’s fantasies of a life in music. He and my mom have never questioned my choice to pursue a risky path.

It was only a matter of time before the student became the teacher. When his taste became a mere sliver of my teenage musical world, he was still happy to take me to concerts in Cleveland or Pittsburgh. He had his limits, of course: no emo shit, which meant no Dashboard Confessional and dipping out early on Death Cab’s Transatlanticism tour. Eventually this turned into me taking him to shows as my plus-one—big shows, like Paul McCartney’s arena spectacle, Elton John floor seats, and a festival to see two of my dad’s circa-2007 favorites, Spoon and the Raconteurs. I couldn’t help but be proud of him, this 50-something dude in his Rock Hall T-shirt and his dollar-store sunglasses, embracing contemporary bands I’d introduced him to, and loving it. 

This dynamic surfaced in a big way when my mom was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer a few years ago, a disease that’s fortunately in remission now. I took medical leave from work and moved home. My dad and I were together almost every day for four months, often driving back and forth to the Cleveland Clinic to see my mom. We’d listen to Wilco’s “Hate It Here” and wallow in how wrong it felt to be at the house without her cooking up a storm and loving on everyone. (Jeff Tweedy’s words seemed to echo our Saturday chores: “I try to stay busy, I do the dishes, I mow the lawn.”) It was on those 90-minute drives that he first heard the Velvet Underground and Big Star. This was a new layer to our exchange: Now I was introducing him to music from his own era. Apparently he thought VU was much harsher, and was pleasantly surprised at how poppy and melodic Loaded sounds. Big Star’s 1972 debut, #1 Record, quickly became a favorite on those car rides and beyond, which is wholly unsurprising given that my dad’s favorite band is the Beatles. Sharing music was the only silver lining of this horrible time. 

Sometimes I think, The kind of loving childhood I had should be enough to make someone want kids. But I’m 36 and it’s never been a priority—never seemed feasible financially, practically, or ethically. I’m one of those millennials that can’t fathom subjecting a new human to this fucked-up world we live in, maybe because I remember the way things used to be. I remember feeling like major parts of American society, from jobs to healthcare to the federal government, weren’t a complete and total scam meant to wear us down in the name of capitalism. Post-pandemic, I’ve adopted the worldview of, Screw your plan, anything good that happens now is a bonus. I couldn’t fathomably give a child a better life than my own. 

But then I think about having a little buddy, and blowing their mind with loads of life-changing music and art. Sorry I passed down mild mental illness, please accept this gift of love, acceptance, and good taste. I think about teaching them to use music in the same way I do, that their grandfather does. Sentimental as I am, I know that’s not enough of a reason to have kids, especially given the hopeless state of things. And yet every 30-something “music person” I know who’s on the fence has expressed a similar pull to pass down what they love. Which is no guarantee, of course: Many children form an identity out of rejecting their parents’ passions. 

When you don’t have kids, you never have to switch over from being a kid to a parent within the context of your immediate family. I am still my father’s daughter, not someone’s mother. Our dream is to put our shared knowledge to the test and win the Fox game show Beat Shazam. He tells me which old rockers’ memoirs are worth reading and visits the Hearing Things homepage every day with an open mind; he doesn’t usually know what we’re talking about but he tries. He’s going to be 70 next year, and he’s still showing me what music fandom looks like. Keeping his collection intact across ever-changing audio formats is, besides fantasy baseball, my dad’s main hobby. Ever thrifty, he’s committed to burning CDs from the library, scanning the album art, placing them in jewel cases, and finally uploading them digitally—in other words, replicating the effort it once took to be a music fan. 

On a recent vacation in Myrtle Beach, he wandered out towards the ocean and stood there for a while, with his shoes and socks on. He was staring at the water and listening to one of his favorite bands, Heart, on an iPod mini I’d given him a dozen years earlier. I took a video without him knowing it; seeing him lost in the music will bring me comfort when he’s gone someday. Occasionally, as he watched the waves, I’d see him wipe his eyes and think, That’s my dad.