Songs for My Father

We are giving my father an MP3 player for Christmas (I can say this here because he has no clue I have a blog), and because I am the only Klein with personal high-speed Internet service, I have been deputed to download all the music from his Greatest Hits collections. This is no small task, as he's been making mix tapes of his favorite music since there were tapes to make them with. So I am sitting here now on Napster (his MP3 player came with a free one-month subscription), and I'm filled with such affection for my father at this moment, listening to all his dear Daddy music: Steely Dan, and Bread, and Brooks and Dunn, and Fourplay (a smooth-jazz group he inexplicably adores), and Crosby Stills Nash & Young, and Toto, and the Commodores, and more Steely Dan, and Paul Simon, and Hall & Oates*, and Billy Joel, and some guy named Brian Culbertson. (I like a lot of this too, of course, after years of hearing it from him, and I'm grabbing an extra Bruce Springsteen song here, an extra Phil Collins** track there for myself.) And then there are the surprises: "Disco Inferno"; Wilson Phillips; a song by Point of Grace, an excellent Christian female quartet. It makes me feel as if my father is here with me, earnest, intense, a good man, a little dorky, but always loving, and often a little unexpected -- here with the resonances in my own tastes. It's a surprise gift for myself in putting this together for him.
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* I'm also downloading the "Anchorman" medley of "She's Gone," featuring Will Ferrell musing, "Heartache is a bitch. But you know what's worse? Catching fire barbecuing while drunk. It's no contest."

** "Against All Odds," which I will add to my collection of great 1980s power ballads. Rock on.