MILES PARKS, HOST:
The first few weeks of being a parent become a blur - at least they have for me. But in that haze, I can still pick out a few details, specifically songs - the ones that played as we sped to the hospital, as I looked at my daughter at sunrise, as I rocked her to sleep at 2 a.m. so many nights. I'm back from parental leave this week, but I cannot stop thinking about the connection between music and parenting. And I can think of no one better to discuss that with than fellow dad and NPR Music's Stephen Thompson. Hey, Stephen.
STEPHEN THOMPSON, BYLINE: Hello, Miles.
PARKS: So good to have you here to talk about this specifically.
THOMPSON: Oh, man. This is near and dear to my heart.
PARKS: Well, I'm wondering - I want to start big-picture - have you found that, as somebody who thinks about music for a living, that parenting actually kind of changed how you connected with music or thought about music?
THOMPSON: Absolutely. I think I connect to music most strongly through feelings. And I know that sounds like a really corny thing to say, but music has really helped me access a lot of things that, you know, for a variety of reasons have been hard to express over the years. And falling deeply in love with music and developing a real passion for music has given me kind of a cultural language for processing feelings. And I think when you're talking about how important music has been to you as a young parent, that makes all the sense in the world because you are processing new feelings.
I don't know about you, but I - when I became a parent, the first time I held a newborn was 10 weeks before my son was born. I had no experience around small children. I had no experience around babies. I'm the younger of two kids. I wasn't around them a lot as a kid. And so processing the big feelings of what it's like to hold another person in the crook of your elbow, that brings up big feelings that are hard to express, and music is such a wonderful shorthand for processing that stuff.
PARKS: OK, so I asked you to bring a couple songs specifically. I brought a couple songs as well that kind of you think of when you think of kind of how parenting has changed your relationship to music. Was there a single song that you thought about when I gave you this homework assignment?
THOMPSON: Yeah, the first song that sprung immediately to mind was from an album that came out in 2003, right around the time that - you know, my son was born in 2001. My daughter was born in 2004. And this song dropped in 2003 called "Find Love" by the band Clem Snide.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FIND LOVE")
CLEM SNIDE: (Singing) Don't let hurricanes hold you back.
THOMPSON: And Clem Snide's one of my favorite bands. I've been a super fan for 25 years. His voice - Eef Barzelay, the singer - his voice just absolutely wrecks me. And as a lyricist, he's kind of wry and funny, but that just allows the emotion to hit that much harder when it comes through.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FIND LOVE")
CLEM SNIDE: (Singing) Wrestle bears, bring them to their knees.
PARKS: Man, I feel like such a connection to the first song that I thought of as well here. I'm curious to hear if you hear it as well. The song I picked was, "If I Had A Boat" by Lyle Lovett, which I had never heard before until the day that we found out that we were having a child. And let's listen to a little bit of it, and then I want to talk about it.
THOMPSON: Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IF I HAD A BOAT")
LYLE LOVETT: (Singing) And if I had a boat, I'd go out on the ocean.
PARKS: We're both mouthing the words to this song right now...
THOMPSON: (Laughter).
PARKS: ...But I do feel like there are - the things you said about your song, the wry, the humor, I hear that in the Lyle Lovett song. But then at the heart of it, there's also something bigger in both songs to me, like a warmth or a comfort. Are you hearing that as well?
THOMPSON: Well, and just deep insight and understanding about humanity kind of presented in this plain but heartfelt way. I mean, when I saw that you were going to play "If I Had A Boat," that's one of my favorite songs of all time - not just a parenting song, not just a country song, not just a song that I discovered working at a grocery store in the '80s.
PARKS: Oh, really?
THOMPSON: That song has just meant the world to me for almost 40 years now. And part of it is, a lot of the songs that are going to tweak that parenting nerve in a good way are speaking to just really, like, fundamentals of life. And that's a lot of what parenting brings up, right? Like, you're part of a continuum. You're trying to impart everything you see as good in yourself onto another person and trying to improve humanity, right? Like, you're looking at the flaws in yourself and trying to figure out how not to pass those on. That's really heavy stuff. And I think songs that speak to fundamental, beautiful truths but present them in digestible, plainspoken ways, that's going to have enormous power as a new parent as you're processing these big ideas.
PARKS: Totally. Totally drawn to just the simple ways to understand these things that, like you said earlier, I just never felt before, right? The next song you brought is called "Laser Beam" by the band Low. Let's listen to it and then hear a little bit about your specific story with it.
THOMPSON: (Laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LASER BEAM")
LOW: (Singing) I don't need a laser beam.
PARKS: So my understanding, Stephen - tell me if I'm wrong here - is that this song was playing in the delivery room when one of your children was born. Is that right?
THOMPSON: So when my daughter was born, she was the second of my two kids, and I thought a lot about what did I want to be the first song that she heard in the world? And this...
PARKS: No pressure. No pressure.
THOMPSON: No pressure at all, all the world's songs.
(LAUGHTER)
THOMPSON: You just have to set the tone for this person's entire life. And, you know, my daughter's named Grace, and the chorus of this song, as sung by the late great Mimi Parker, is just, I need your grace. And she's kind of intoning the word grace.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LASER BEAM")
LOW: (Singing) I need your grace.
THOMPSON: When you're thinking about the first voices that your children are going to hear, I recommend Mimi Parker of the band Low, who had one of the most beautiful voices I've ever heard in music. And the songs that we've picked are slower and quieter, but there's a throughline with these three songs where they're taking big, grand ideas and simplifying them, making them digestible for our feeble, sleep-deprived brains.
PARKS: All right, so I do want to kind of pivot the energy a little bit here. We have been living in this sort of kind of peaceful, reflective...
THOMPSON: We're in lullaby zone.
PARKS: Exactly. Lullabycore is what I've been, like, calling it this year.
THOMPSON: (Laughter).
PARKS: But then there is this whole 'nother brand or genre of song that I have found myself drawn to. I listened to Shaboozey's "Bar Song" probably 150 times. That sort of, like, get you pumped up, get you amped, I-haven't-slept-in-24-hours sort of energy song. So then your last song that you've brought here is called "You'll Be Bright" by Cloud Cult.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU'LL BE BRIGHT")
CLOUD CULT: (Singing) All the things you love, all those things that may hurt you, all the things you shouldn't do, all the things you want to.
THOMPSON: Yeah, I wasn't a brand-new parent at this time, but I was getting divorced. And I pray it never happens to you. That will redefine your relationship with your kids in a lot of ways, and it causes you to question a lot of your - it certainly causes you to question a lot of your decision-making. And this song, to me, even though my kids weren't newborns when it came out, it put me in those new parenting feelings at just the right time.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "YOU'LL BE BRIGHT")
CLOUD CULT: (Vocalizing).
PARKS: I want to ask a big-picture question, Stephen, 'cause one of the things I've been thinking about as all of these different songs have hit me in all of these ways to the point where I'm - I honestly think I could listen to that Lyle Lovett song and cry at any moment, you know?
THOMPSON: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
PARKS: Like, it could just get there now...
THOMPSON: Oh, it's just - and now it...
PARKS: ...For the rest of my life.
THOMPSON: For the rest of your life, if you were an actor, you could make yourself cry...
PARKS: Well...
THOMPSON: ...Instantly.
PARKS: ...So what is the connection? Your kids are much older than my, you know, 1-year-old is. What is the connection that they have now with these songs that mean so much to you? Is there any sort of connection there? Am I dreaming when I think of, like, God, what is my daughter going think of when she hears, "If I Had A Boat"? You know, what is their connection to these songs?
THOMPSON: It's really hard to tell, and kind of the beauty and the sadness of it is that it's entirely up to them. And one of the pieces of advice that I give to new parents who ask about wanting to impart their cultural loves on to their kids is to say, basically, one, make sure that it's a two-way street and that you're sitting down with them and letting them tell you about the things that they love and let them get you into new things. Let them be conduits of discovery for you as much as you are a conduit of discovery for them.
That's one piece of advice, and the other is you just don't control it at all. Your kids are going to be on their own journey. They're going to have their own set of influences, only one of whom is you. And you can hope, and you can hope that that song will radiate for them the way it's radiated for you. You're very lucky in that you are trying to impart one of the greatest songs ever recorded.
PARKS: (Laughter).
THOMPSON: It is an easy song to love. And I have been able to pass along some of these big parenting songs onto my kids. My kids love Clem Snide. They love Eef Barzelay. My daughter still listens to those demos. If she's struggling to fall asleep...
PARKS: Wow.
THOMPSON: ...She'll still put those on. She's heard them literally thousands of times. But I don't know that necessarily, as she's moving through the world, she's even - it's not her band. Like, she has her own artists that mean a lot to her. I have my own artists that mean a lot to me, and those don't always intersect.
PARKS: NPR Music's Stephen Thompson, thank you so much for sharing all this with us.
THOMPSON: Thank you, Miles.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "IF I HAD A BOAT")
LOVETT: (Singing) And if I had a boat, I'd go out on the ocean. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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