Generation Z.

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!