Life can beat you down if you let it, if you take its ignominies personally, if you let your energy flag in the face of the onslaught of travails known and unexpected. Daily routines can numb us to the point of despair, cloud our vision such that the beauty of life is missed in favor of the obvious frustrations and ugliness. Especially upon my return to a car-based life this fall, I fell prey to this chasm, overly focused on how much time I was spending on I-70, not the people I was with, not the sights that we were speeding past. Once I reset my viewpoint, everything shifted. And, as is often the case, it was the soundtrack that was the final catalyst.
I have a very active, very sweet, very friendly twelve-year-old daughter with whom I am extremely close. That bond has been strengthened by a lot of factors, but the amount of time that we are in the car together is a prime one. We flit from school to climbing practice to competitions to dinners to adventures to home and there is rarely a quiet moment between breathless conversations and the constant aural inputs. Once I remembered how special and fleeting this time is, how soon she will no longer need a chauffeur, how soon she will be off onto her own adult life, I redoubled my appreciation for our rides together.
If we are going to be in the car a ton, we might as well enjoy it. Given that technology has perfectly integrated our booming speakers with the limitless musical reach of the internet, we are not limited to a handful of tapes or CDs, relics for which Violet has absolutely no reference. Still, we get hooked on certain songs and they are replayed to the point that, if they were on cassette, they would self-destruct in the way that people of a certain age remember with a mélange of nostalgia and pain. I occasionally long for my old flipbook of CDs, the browsing so perfectly tactile, the mixtapes made by girlfriends long past reminders of the follies of young love. But mostly we dig the ability to queue up that perfect song instantly, lungs ready to belt out the tune so that our brains are no longer troubled by its melody.
It would be tempting to use our seemingly infinite time on the road to be a capital-F father and lecture my offspring on the classics, those musical roots that begat her current obsessions. I could wax poetic about the wizardry of Hendrix, the mayhem of Zeppelin, take her further back still to the true beginnings, the ballads of the enslaved that birthed the blues that were then coopted and commercialized. I could reminisce about seeing the Dead with Jerry, about peeping early Outkast, bore her to tears with rambling recountings of concerts in the decades past, with what it felt like to open a jewel case and play a new album for the first time. Instead, I just sneak some of my favorites into our shared playlist and she humors me, the influence less overt and more osmosis.
More surprising to me is that the musical education is flowing more in the opposite direction. When I took Violet and her friends to the Eras Tour movie, it hit me that I knew almost all of the Taylor Swift lyrics by heart. When the girls are rocking out to the latest Olivia Rodrigo or Sabrina Carpenter or Benson Boone as we blast home from climbing practice, I do not hesitate to join in the chorus, my raspy voice lending a baritone to the higher pitches of the preteens. It’s not a matter of fitting in or trying to be cool – I definitely do not sound or look cool in these moments – it’s that I actually enjoy the beats, the angst, the callback to my younger days. While I still crank some Future or Weezy or Goose in my ski helmet on powder days, I also will throw in a Paper Rings or some Sia as I cruise.
When I am old and creaky, or at least older and creakier, the sense memory of these car concerts will be with me, will recall this perfect time in Violet’s adolescence, when we were as tight as two people can be.