A bit of background--I was born in 1964, in Arlington, Virginia.  I grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, in the close-in DC suburbs.  The first album I bought was Station To Station, by David Bowie.  It's the album with Golden Years as the single.  It's Bowie in his Thin White Duke phase, and it's a really good album.  The title track still has my favorite guitar solo of all time.  Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, Graham Parker, and Tom Petty were the musicians that blew my head off.  They are the reason I became a musician.  To my young mind, everything at that point in the 70's was denim, big hair, guys with lots of facial hair, and overly cheesy, drawn out songs.  It seemed that every guy was trying to prove how sensitive he was, in a really schmaltzy way, (think David Soul, winged hair, and vans- everybody had their custom van).  And then I heard My Aim Is True.  Elvis Costello's first album.  My sister, Sheila, had bought it, and I had mocked it at first.  The songs were too short, I thought.  I was looking at the jacket. It was the usual sibling taunting.  But when she played it over and over, it really kicked my ass.  We came to it late-- within a month or so, his second album, This Year's Model, came out, and when I heard Graham Parker sing "So all of you be damned, we can't have heaven crammed, so Winston Churchill said,  I could have smacked his head" on the song Protection, from his album Squeezing out sparks, I was IN.  Those records were kind of my Ed Sullivan moment, in the way that you hear older musicians say that when they saw The Beatles, or Elvis Presley, MUSIC MATTERED. This was also just about the time that my friend Greg Ruff and I had gone from making "comedic" bits on a tape recorder to trying to make funny songs, to making real songs.
 

I saw an article today about how millenials HATE Bruce Springsteen.  I have encountered this many times, working, as I do, in bars, where young people congregate.  There is a certain shock, almost, when I mention that I LOVE Bruce. And I will lay it out here for you now.  I understand that nobody wants to dig the music that their parents loves.  My ex-wife and I have, what I consider, as a musician, really good taste in music.  In the car, (and I was a stay-at-home dad, back before that was considered cool) I was the DJ for my sons. What did I play for them? Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, They Might Be Giants, Talking Heads, Graham Parker, The Clash, John Hiatt, Joan Armatrading, The Minutemen, Squeeze, The Sugarcubes (Bjork's old band), Nat King Cole (He is probably the greatest singer ever), Calexico,  Patty Smith, of course The Beatles and Stones, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Muddy Waters, etc...   All of this stuff that is really amazing, cool, and fun.  And that brings up one question: what do you do when your parents listen to this type of music?  You go elsewhere.  It is part of the natural process to either disdain or actively hate what your folks like. It is what every generation does.  It needs to find itself. My two sons, weaned on all this music, listen to vastly different things than I or their mom did.  My older son listens to INCREDIBLY fast Japanese technopop.  My Younger son listens to showtunes.  He is majoring in musical theater, and he has schooled himself on the history of that music.  My friend Woody, with whom I have played music for a bazillion years, has one son who is turning into a fine musician.  He is into the arena rock that both his father and I have hated forever.  No child worth his salt can come up exactly loving what his parents loved.  My children never got in any of the trouble I got into as a youth.  They had to establish themselves as themselves somehow.  Eventually, my hope is that they will come to see the value in the music that I have loved.  Certainly, I think that they will do what I have done since my father's death, which is to try and understand and know the person through these things we leave behind. My father was not very communicative: I have been trying to get to know him now, after his death.  It is like trying to find something by echolocution. While a very stoic man, I now realize that he was VERY sentimental, and felt very deeply.  So now, as I go through his things, I agonize over how much I didn't know him, or his heart.