My wife always used to
compare my time on the road as a booking agent/tour manager with that of my experience of
being a camp counselor. I saw some similarities with that analogy but I
see many more now, as a parent of two young children. As my boys grow
older, I am experiencing more and more deja vus, and sometimes, my sons
say or do things that take me right back to my days of being in and out of
concert clubs.
For example, whereas I used
to coordinate the details of a show with a club and make sure that bands
had clean towels in the dressing room, I am now asking my boys to wash their
hands before meals and after using the bathroom. Also on show dates, the
line-up of a show determined what time sound check was and what time we had to
be in the club. In my life today, every morning, I am reviewing the
boys’ homework, making sure the boys' lunches are packed and that we are out
the door on schedule to get to school on time. I also remember paying
close attention to the liner notes of an album and seeing who the bands/artists
would credit for making the recording possible. This translates to my
current world in the way that I remind my boys to say: “please” &
“thank you”.
It does not end with everyday
life, but also carries over to the conversations I have with my sons. It
just might be how my brain works, but music and lyrics are always cycling in
and out of my head. As a result, their actions and words allow me to
introduce them to music from my past that is new to them. Recently,
my boys were trying to delay bed-time by walking around in circles and singing,
“we’re walking in circles / we’re walking in circles”. They did not
realize that they were copping the 1998 Soul Coughing song “Circles” in
which Mike Doughty sings, “need to walk around in circles, walk around
in circles /Walk around in circles, walk around in.” I immediately played
them the song and they were laughing hysterically. Or the other day when
my younger son had a eureka moment about a question he had earlier in the day
which led him to let out a dramatic “Ohhhhh” which quickly turned it
into a chant “Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh”. Of course, he never would have realized
that he was directly lifting the New Kids on the Block lyrics from the 1988 song “Right Stuff”.
For as many connections my
boys and I make on a regular basis, I am learning that we are not always
traveling the same path to get there. We recently went roller-skating and
while I was asking the DJ to play Deee-Lite's 1990 song "Groove Is In TheHeart" they
were excited to ask for Justin Timberlake’s 2016 song “Can't Stop the Feeling”.
Thankfully the DJ played both songs and we laughed in circles all
the way around the Neville Roller Drome.
Thanks for reading!
