A Gentle Reader has asked me to pose the following question to the rest of y’all: what are the best rock\/pop\/soul\/etc. songs about parenthood?<\/I>\n
It’s a tough one. I thought I would just open up the music player and easily come up with ten songs for a Parenthood Mix, and then I’d open it up for y’all to fill in the last few tracks. The problem is ... rock songwriters don’t write about raising children. They write about cars, they write about girls, they write about girls in cars, but they don’t write about raising children.\n
All right, let’s get to it. There are three main categories of Songs About Parenthood that come up in these discussions. First, there’s the category typified by Stevie Wonder’s song for his daughter, “Isn’t She Lovely?” These are songs to celebrate the birth of a baby. Miracle songs, songs of love and awe, songs of near-generic happiness and, occasionally, terror. Songs that come to mind include the Barenaked Ladies’ “When You Dream” and Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young”. Sometimes the child isn’t a baby, like in the Eurythmics’ “Beautiful Child”, but it goes in this category because it’s essentially just an expression of love coupled with a somewhat frustrated urge to protect, that is, a celebration of the existence of the child, not a song about actually raising the child.\n
The second category is a song of advice, given from a parent to a child, often one who is explicitly too young to yet understand such advice. My favorite of these is the XTC song “Garden of Earthly Delights”, but I’m also fond of a Fred Small song called “Everything Possible” (this may be outside the genre restrictions, being essentially folk, in which genre you will find more such songs). “Sean” by The Proclaimers could be in this category, too, but I’m pretty sure it’s an older sibling giving advice (Sean, I’d say the best one came from Tupelo, Mississippi\/I’ll tell you know that grown men cry, and Irish girls are pretty\/Though fear and hurt and care can lead me to despair\/I saw why I’m here the morning you appeared), not a father.\n
The third category is songs by Paul Simon.\n
You’ll notice that the first two categories do not involve any actual parenting. Mr. Simon writes about, oh, taking his nine-year-old son to Graceland, or telling his kids about the first time he met their mother. Or tucking his boy in to bed, or about his hopes for his child’s future. Like that. As my Gentle Reader put it, good songs about being a good parent, or trying to be a good parent and missing the mark occasionally, or what have you.<\/I> I’d like to have more songs in this category, the Paul Simon category. Not by Paul Simon, but songs about being a good parent, or trying to be.\n
Well, I’ll mention a few songs that came up in my musing. The first thing that came to mind was “Stay Up Late” by the Talking Heads. It’s from the sibling’s point of view, actually: “Mommy had\/a little baby\/There he is\/fast asleep\/He’s just\/a little plaything\/Why not\/wake him up?” It’s not really about parenting, except that it’s really (I think) a parent singing from the pretended point of view of the older siblings. David Byrne also wrote a very odd song called “Now I’m Your Mom” about transgender parenting (“Oh little girl\/Please understand\/And listen to the words I say\/I was your dad\/Now I'm your mom\/I hope you'll comprehend someday”) but it’s much more about the gender thing than the parenting thing.\n