For all of my life I did not enjoy music. I had actually made a decision when I was much younger to not enjoy any music at all, which is very surprising to me now. I was reading though one of my journals that I had to write in my 8th year of school. In the journal I had said that I had never liked music and I would never like any kind of music, and I stuck to that train of thought for a very long time. For the longest time I was just being a fool for not finding joy in an art that made so many people move, feel and in a certain sense, grow.

About three or four years ago I was on a car trip with my father and he was playing some of his CDs. Near end of the trip a song came on that I had never heard before. The song was “The Impression that I Get” by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones; even though I didn’t know the name of either the band or the song, the trip was a fun one and the song soon faded into memory, at least until a few years later. Those few years turned into another road trip with my father. I love my family and my father very much, but, sadly, we never really had a connection with music. Until around this past year I had no interest in music at all. I didn’t like Rock; I despised Pop music; I was indifferent about Rap music; and I had a growing distaste in Country music. All of the genres of music had no gleam of nostalgia or happiness on them, and I began to lose small connections with those who had a love for the things I had not a care about. On this latest road trip I was snoozing in the passenger seat, the scenery passing by the window as we were on the way up to New York to pick up these huge engines for a 36 foot Uni-Flight boat that my father had bought and is now refurbishing.

Soon sleeping became boring to me and I just let my thoughts wander and the tone and rhythm of the song from that trip in the past popped back into my mind. I pause in my wandering and I focus on the thought, the memory of this small patch of music nothing short of an amazement and wondrous joy to me. I looked out the window into the night (I remember this so well) we were driving up a ramp, to enter yet another northbound interstate, streetlights cast small patches onto the otherwise dark asphalt. I turn to my dad, and I asked: “Hey dad, remember that trip to the lake that we took a while ago?” He glanced at me and asks back: “What trip?” I answered: “That trip that we took with one of my friends, about two years ago.” I remember that he was silent for a while then he would nod and say: “Oh yeah! I remember him. What about that trip?” I asked: “Well you played a song on the way there, I don’t know what its name is but the chorus was something like ‘I never had to knock on wood’ or something like that.” My dad smiled at this and he said: “Oh, that? It’s by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, I listened to them a lot in high school.” He pointed to the back seat and told me: “Get the CD case and find the CD with a guy in a black suit on it.” I did as he asked and I soon found this magical album. He played the whole CD, and the next 40 minutes passed with me, a smile that told me what I was missing in life and my father smiling as I formed a better connection with him.

After we finished the whole album we talked about the music and a lot of other father son topics, and when I asked him what type of music it was he just said it was “Ska.” I had never heard of such a genre and my Dad had said: “I don’t think most people know about it. My friends and I listened to some different stuff when we were in school”. After the week had passed I came back home and I didn’t listen to the songs for a while afterwards, sadly I had forgotten the name of the band, and the genre it belonged to (The genre is a bit of a sub-genre, and I had never heard of it until my dad told me). After a few weeks I was sitting at my computer, and the tune popped back up in my head and I simply typed in what I could remember into YouTube. Now I knew the song, I knew the band, and I knew what music could actually do; how music can make you feel, give you a drive or just bring back memories of old. I am very happy that this happened, my only wish is that I knew what music could do long before that road trip with my father.