When I was in high school, I listened to Cat Steven’s Greatest Hits (http://www.allmusic.com/album/greatest-hits-mw0000191886) so much that I practically wore out the tape cassette – the sound degrading until it sounded like AM radio (to anyone born after 1990, what I just wrote might as well be in Chinese).
At that time, that record was my go-to whenever I wanted to wallow in melancholy, to feel like the sad adult that I thought would make me wiser, and less connected from the boarding school I was at that made me so miserable. It was emo before there was emo (I guess that makes Cat Stevens proto-emo?).
To the teenager in me then, it was a general sadness. It was sentiment, without context. But Cat Stevens’ voice and brilliant songwriting made it feel specific. The song Father and Son in particular – a call-and-response, of a father’s advice to his son, and the son’s rejection of his father’s ways. The father in that song represented to me everything I resented, not necessarily about my own father, but about authority, the “man”, the rules, the invalidation by others of my own ambitions, goals and dreams. I wanted to be my own person, but the world was bringing me down.
Twenty years later, that very song – same lyrics, same performer, same track – it struck me in a different way when it came up on my playlist while I was running errands. I knew every line of those lyrics, but this time, I identified for the first time with the father’s lyrics in the song:
I was once like you are now, and I know that it’s not easy,
To be calm when you’ve found something going on.
But take your time, think a lot,
Why, think of everything you’ve got.
For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not.
What makes this song brilliant is how it can be interpreted in completely different ways, depending on the person (and even their age). Until recently, I felt the father’s lyrics in the song were intentionally written to be condescending and disconnected from his son, who responds with:
How can I try to explain, when I do he turns away again
It’s always been the same, same old story.
And now, I get what the song is about. The father is telling his son to be grateful, to appreciate the present time, to cherish your relationships. And the sad thing is, the son is the one who isn’t listening (and is in store for learning the father’s lessons the hard way). The way Cat Stevens sings the father’s part in a way that I hadn’t noticed before – as if from a place of “I’ve been there, I know.”
The lens in which we experience the songs, movies, and books we consume change with age, as life circumstances layer on top of another. But more importantly, the stories we tell of our own lives.