My life has been lived to a soundtrack. Growing up in an age of ubiquitous car radios, restaurant juke boxes, record players and later stereos, it seems like the popular songs of the day were always playing in the background, over and over. Music affects us emotionally and can evoke strong feelings of all sorts in the listener. In my case it also became a sort of storage mechanism for a lot of those strong feelings.

Forty years later I can hear a pretty mundane pop song like Tommy Rowe’s “Dizzy”, which I heard constantly when I was in my junior high years and I can be overcome with the feelings of being that young teenage boy with a crush on a girl but afraid to tell her or even talk to her. Those sort of emotional memories stay with you and I believe shape you subconsciously.

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I don’t know if it was true for previous generations, but I got so much of my “ethical instruction” from songs that I would here over and over on the radio. Whether it was the Beatles telling me that, “All you need is love”, or The Supremes invoking the Golden Rule in, “Let me get over you the way you’ve gotten over me”, or a hundred different songs from a raft of insightful lyricists.

But of all the lyrics all those songs, I sometimes wonder how much the sad and ironic lyrics of Harry Chapin’s song has saved my generation of male-type parents from making the mistake that many of our dads made not playing a larger role in parenting and thus contributed to my own kids’ generation.

Chapin sings… (more…)