Songs of My Father didn't start in a studio.
It started on a Tuesday evening in Salzburg, in the apartment in the Altstadt, when I was thinking about the album cycle for Songs of My Father and realized that the whole thing was built on an absence.
My father had been gone for years by that point. Not dead, just gone. We were in contact but not in proximity. We had a relationship that was respectful but distant. The kind of relationship where you love someone but you're not sure you know them very well.
And I realized that most of the songs I'd been working on were about that gap. About the things he gave me that I inherited without understanding they were inheritances. About the conversations we never had. About the lessons that came sideways through his choices rather than through his words.
One afternoon I found myself thinking about a specific moment. I was maybe sixteen, seventeen years old. He was playing a record. I don't remember what album it was, but I remember the sound coming through the speakers, and I remember him in the room with me, not saying anything, just letting the music play. Just being present with the music.
That moment became the center of the album.
I wasn't thinking about my father's voice or what he said. I was thinking about what he didn't say. About the way presence could be a kind of communication. About the way you could express something to your child just by choosing to listen to something beautiful together.
I sat down and wrote a song about that moment. Not a narrative about it, but an emotional echo of it. A song that tried to capture what it felt like to be in the room with someone you love and understand them not through words but through their choices, their tastes, their presence.
That song became the spine of the entire album.
Everything else got written around it. Every other song I composed was asking a question that this first song had raised. What do we inherit from our parents? What do we understand about them only after they're gone? What is the conversation we never have but somehow still happens?
The album isn't about my father specifically. It's about that universal experience of inheriting something from someone you don't entirely know. Of loving someone and having questions about them that will never get answered. Of understanding them better after they're gone than you did when they were present.
This is why so many people have responded to it. Not because they kenew my father, but because they have their own fathers. Or grandfathers. Or mentors. Or people who shaped them in ways they didn't understand until much later. Everyone has that experience. Everyone has someone who gave them something without naming it as a gift.
Making the album meant sitting with that. Meant understanding that the inheritance isn't always clear while it's happening. Meant trusting that the song could contain the question without needing to answer it.
That Tuesday afternoon in Salzburg, thinking about a moment of listening with my father, was where the whole thing started. Not with a concept or a plan or a decision to make an album about my father. Just with a memory, and the realization that the memory meant something, and the need to sing about what it meant.
THE MUSIC
If the history is what brings you here, the music is what keeps you here.
Until next time.
Sid