Songs of My Father came from a specific moment. I was in Salzburg, in the apartment in the Altstadt, working through the fragments that would eventually become the album. I had songs about memory, about inheritance, about the things that get passed down whether you ask for them or not. But I didn't have a coherent reason for making the album. I had the emotional weight, but not the throughline. Then I thought about my father. Not in a literal sense. My father and I had a relationship that was complicated and distant in some ways, close and vital in others. The way most father-son relationships are. We didn't have long conversations about music or meaning or_the things that shaped me. We lived in the same house and also in separate worlds. Like most fathers and sons do. But he was always there. In the way I hear music. In the way I make choices. In the stories he told, the records he played, the silences between words that sometimes said more than the words did. In all the ways that you inherit from your parents without knowing you're inheriting. Writing about my father meant I had to stop thinking about the album as just my work. It meant I had to see it as part of a conversation that started long before I wrote the first note. A conversation with the people who came before me, who shaped my voice, who I am still in dialogue with even when they're not in the room. This is why personal albums are so difficult to make. They sound simple on the surface, like you're just writing about your life. But what you're actually doing is looking at the ways that personal is also universal, the ways that your specific father is also every father, the ways that your specific story is also the story of a generation. I didn't want to write a confessional album. I didn't want to air grievances or settle scores. I wanted to write something about inheritance and obligation and love, about the complicated way you inherit things from your family and then spend your life deciding which ones to keep. Songs of My Father is not a biography. It's a meditation on what it means to receive something, not to choose it, and then to have to decide what you'll do with it. Will you honor it, carry it forward? Will you fight it, reject it? Will you transform it into something new? All of the above? That's what inheritance is. That's the conversation I'm still having. Writing the album meant sitting with that question for months. Sitting in cafes in Salzburg, walking through narrow medieval streets, going back over memories and half-memories and things I think happened but might be misremembered. Trying to find the truth in it all. And the truth was that my father was always there. Not looming, not controlling, not the villain in my story. Just there. Present. Shaping the person I became in ways I'm still discovering. Most personal art fails because it confuses intimacy with depth. Because it assumes that writing about your own life automatically gives the work weight. But the depth comes from the work you do to understand what your life means. From taking the specific and finding what's universal in it. From being willing to look at your own story with the same clarity you'd give to a stranger's. That's what I tried to do with Songs of My Father. To write something that was deeply personal but also somehow yours too. Because we've all had fathers, or father-figures, or people who shaped us in ways we didn't choose. We've all inherited things and had to decide what to keep. The album is a conversation with my father, but it's also a conversation with you. About all the ways that we're shaped by the people who came before us. About all the ways that we're still trying to understand what they gave us, what it cost, what we'll do with it. That's why I made it. That's why I make it every time I sing it.
THE MUSIC
If the history is what brings you here, the music is what keeps you here.
Until next time.
Sid
