Not Guilty

You should be proud of your musical taste, even if your friends think it's uncool.

I hate the idea of a “guilty pleasure” when it’s about music. I can’t say I “don’t believe in guilty pleasures” because of course I do. Compulsive shopping, OnlyFans subscriptions, anonymous online trolling…I could go on. There are things people enjoy that should make them feel guilty. Music is not one of those things.

For example I love a lot of pop songs—mostly ballads—from my adolescence. “We’re All Alone” by Rita Coolidge (yes I know it’s a Boz Scaggs song), “Sometimes When We Touch” by Dan Hill, “Here You Come Again” by Dolly, “It’s a Heartache by Bonnie Tyler… I love those songs because they hit me in a certain way. They bypass my thinking brain and go directly to my nervous system.

I started thinking about guilty pleasures after a brief Threads exchange with my good friend and former colleague Tom DeSavia. Here’s how it went:

Daniel is a music producer I admire, and a fellow girl-dad.

One thing I think parents of young kids should feel guilty about is attributing their own taste to their little kids. “Our four-year-old loves Sun Ra and Albert Ayler most of all, though she’s recently begun to show a fondness for the early twentieth century field recordings of Alan Lomax.” Get over yourself. Kids like simple, repetitive, upbeat, catchy music. If your kid truly loves free jazz, consult your healthcare provider. If you want your kids to love music as much as you do, let them listen to what they want. Bragging that your kids have elevated, sophisticated musical taste is a narcissistic trait.

I’ve written about my musical connections with my kids before. Back in the carpool days, we listened to a lot of music together—usually selected by our oldest daughter Anna. When Anna loved a song, we would listen to it over and over again. It started with Sirius XM channels, first Kids Place and then Disney Radio. I forced them to listen to my choices as well, but they rejected most of it. The Beatles, Dolly Parton, and the first Vampire Weekend album got a little traction, but not enough to merit a request.

Then, around 2006, when Anna was four, she discovered the show Hannah Montana.

We didn’t let Anna watch Disney Channel that young. In fact for the first few years of her life, we didn’t even have cable. She watched videos of Dora the Explorer and other age-appropriate shows we checked out of the library. Then in Kindergarten she went to a friend’s house and watched a few Hannah Montana episodes. It’s as if she glimpsed the fourth dimension.

Maybe this is fodder for another post, but I didn’t like my young kids watching Disney Channel because all the shows—including Hannah Montana—made all adults out to be bumbling idiots. Remember how wise adults seemed in the 1950s through 70? The era of Father Knows Best, The Brady Bunch, even Happy Days. Parents solved the problems their kids stumbled into. Shows like Hannah Montana, Wizards of Waverly Place, and iCarly made sure that all adult characters were incompetent morons. If anything, the kids clean up the mess made by the parents.

By the time Hannah Montana: The Movie came out in early 2009, Anna was starting to move on to Taylor Swift, where she settled in for the long haul as a Swiftie. Nevertheless, she still loved Hannah—who by then had begun the long-shot transition to her career as Miley Cyrus (her successful self-reinvention was incredible and affirms Miley’s extraordinary talent).

Anna and I went to the movie together on opening day.

The theater was giving out free movie posters to everyone who bought tickets on opening day. By the time we arrived they’d already given away all the posters. Anna was so obviously crushed that the theater manager improvised and took down the massive official poster—big enough to cover an entire bedroom wall—and gave it to Anna. I still have it in the attic if anyone is interested.

I loved Hannah Montana: The Movie not because it’s any good, but because Anna loved it. That movie was a window into a magical world for a seven-year-old girl. We talked about it quite a bit over the following couple of years because it was our kids’ main frame of reference to what it would be like to live in Franklin, Tennessee, where the movie was filmed on location. We moved here in 2013, when Anna was eleven. We sold her on the cute downtown and horse farms and she believed us because of that movie. Franklin has its flaws and challenges, but we didn’t lie. It is a magical place.

By popular demand I went out and bought the soundtrack CD. It’s a stacked album. Two Taylor-penned tracks, including a feature vocal on one of Anna’s favorites, “Crazier.” There are a few signature rave-ups that I’ve listened to hundreds of times and I never need to hear again. “Let’s Get Crazy,” “Hoedown Throwdown,” and the re-recording of the established hit, “The Best of Both Worlds,” yes, I’ve consented to countless minivan singalongs of those tracks.

The songs that I still consider (not so guilty) pleasures are the ballads: “Crazier,” “Butterfly Fly Away,” and—especially—”The Climb.” That’s what I meant in that Threads post. I love “The Climb.” I listen to all three of those tracks for joy. They transport me.

“The Climb” is a product of Music Row. I don’t know if Jessi Alexander and Jon Mabe wrote it specifically for Miley or if it was pitched. I do know it was written not only conceptually on The Row, but geographically as well, in the offices of Carnival Music on Music Square West, also known as Seventeenth Avenue. I know this because a friend of mine—a fellow music lawyer—used to keep an office in that building. He listened to them write the song through an open writing room door. Just another late morning co-write.

I don’t know much about Jon Mabe and there isn’t much online, but I’ve met Jessi Alexander. She’s amazing. She’s an artist with several solo albums, and she’s written many hit songs for the likes of Blake Shelton, Lainey Wilson, Morgan Wallen, and Luke Combs. I met her when I planned a music publishing industry panel focusing on a single song, “I Drive Your Truck,” a hit for Lee Brice—one of my favorite mainstream country songs in recent years. The panel worked so well that the organization recreated it for several consecutive years.

I’m not really sure if I consider “The Climb” to be a great song in the same way that “I Drive Your Truck” is a great song. I love country songs that tell stories. Tom Douglas is a master in this niche—he’s written some of my favorites, including “The House That Built Me” and “Little Rock.” Those songs are vehicles for the lyrics, for the storytelling. Every year Music Row produces a few of those that really connect.

Alexander’s “I Drive Your Truck” co-writer Connie Harrington, a middle-aged veteran songwriter, heard a story on NPR about a fallen soldier that brought her to tears. That’s what she brought into the writing room. She told her story to the audience of seasoned music business pros through tears, bringing the audience to tears—not just the first time she did the panel, but every time she did it. The song is that emotional to her that it pours out every time. Jessi Alexander cut her own version of “I Drive Your Truck” with Texas country music legend Jon Randall, which I very much prefer to Brice’s hit version.

Unlike “I Drive Your Truck,” which tells a story, “The Climb,” is vague and non-specific, but universal. It’s the kind of sentiment that feels very authentic coming from a young country singer like Jessi Alexander still trying to catch a break. The writer reminds herself to hang in there through adversity live in the moment. It’s not the destination, it’s the journey…The Climb.

It’s an adult sentiment delivered in language that makes sense to a child. It’s also a very satisfying hook that makes you want to sing at the top of your voice. How many times did we join our voices together in the old Honda Odyssey to all sing that line together in full voice? Even Bennett. Pure joy. That’s why I love the song.

Sometimes I love songs because they tell incredible stories. Sometimes I love songs because the chord progression is interesting. Sometimes songs fascinate me because they don’t sound quite like anything I’ve heard. But sometimes I love songs just because they make me feel a certain way. That’s what they’re supposed to do. No need to feel guilty.