I don’t know when it happened, but there’s whole milk in my four-track. It still works, but the faders are sticky, and it carries a pungent aroma you wouldn’t typically associate with recording gear. My daughter, a two-and-a-half-foot, 24-pound force of nature, has made her presence resoundingly known in every corner of my life, including the artistic spaces. She bulldozed my previous world and, in her wake, I find a garden of existence that’s more wild, vibrant, and unpredictable than before.
Back in my pre-fatherhood days, when I had non-dairy equipment, I felt woefully underprepared for my basic preconceptions of fatherhood. I had spent so much of my life messing around with voice-memo melodies, agonizing over half-finished arrangements, and writing pithy emails to house show bookers — why did I not learn how to use a power drill? What value will I bring to my baby’s life with my knowledge of gated reverb?
Before she arrived, I started doubting every element of who I was; I started thinking that my inclinations as a songwriter were directly contrary to that of good parenting. Exhibit A: I lived a rich internal life, the place from which music emerged, but that isn’t necessarily a recipe for great parenting. (“There’s Dad… staring off into space again”). And, for me, so many songs originated from a place of existential worry; I considered whether this was a source of inspiration I could even turn to anymore. Who wants a dark cloud in the air when there’s a baby around?
As you can surmise, I spend most of my time worrying about things that don’t happen — some of those worries turn into music, but mostly they just ruin perfectly good afternoons. The song “Richard Out in Space” arrived to me, fully formed, through a bone-chilling nightmare I had the evening after my partner and I found out we were expecting. I had visions of a middle-aged man (i.e., me) drifting through space, broken off from some distant asteroid, squinting through his glasses towards a distant sun, and yearning to be part of a whole again. The song chronicles a “worst-case scenario” of a person who separates himself from the ones he loves simply because it is his natural setting to stay alienated; he spends the rest of his life loving a family he can’t bring himself to see. Like Paris, Texas, but with astronauts, and set to music.
Contrary to all this worry, in the weeks before she was born, I started to feel a pull on my heart. It felt like I might love her so much that there wouldn’t be any passion left to go towards anything else, songwriting included. And then she was born three weeks early, and I cried more in her first week of life than I have in decades. Her arrival created a seismic, near supernatural shift in my life that opened a doorway into my soul that is now just perpetually, uncomfortably open. None of the anxieties came to fruition though, because my daughter promptly smashed through them with love and chaos and sweetness and action. So much action.
Not only has my love for music increased, but the impact of all art has been heightened — as has the desire to express ideas and emotions in a direct way. And I bring value to her through my love of music and creation, not in spite of it. Does impostor syndrome present itself in moments of doubt? Yes, for sure: When it hits, I feel as if I’m neither a true artist nor a devoted caregiver, and that I’m never fully doing enough in either realm. I can’t say how to combat this feeling, but it always passes.
These days, my baby will casually strum a guitar with her fingers as she walks past it on the stand or reach up and plunk notes on the piano — she’ll hum a tune. She takes her first steps towards self-expression. We share a love of melody. I bear witness to the songs she loves (she has a tight rotation of about six songs that must be heard daily). I hear her sing her own melodies and ask where they’re coming from. We rock in a chair with her forehead pressed against my face as I hum the tune of the day. Would I prefer to never hear “Yellow Submarine” or “Boom Chicka Boom” ever again? Yes, probably. But at the same time, her musical rituals remind me of why I started writing songs in the first place: to stumble towards a sense of myself and pull the rest of the world just a little bit closer.
