My Favorite Album in the World
My favorite album in the world is On and On by Doug Midgley. I realize I may not be an entirely impartial reviewer. Doug Midgley was my dad. But I also mean it. I listen to this record constantly. I rock out to it. I learn from it. I find little gems and jewels in songs I’ve known my entire life, and somehow they still surprise me. Sometimes I hear a lyric differently because I’m older now. Sometimes I notice something in the playing. Sometimes I simply get the enormous pleasure of hearing my dad be completely, unmistakably himself.
One of the great joys of my life has been putting his music onto streaming services so other people can hear it too. And if you are one of those people, thank you. Every week or month, when a report arrives from Spotify or Apple Music and I see that somewhere, somebody pressed play on one of Doug Midgley’s songs, it genuinely delights me. You are helping keep his music alive. I suppose that means even more to me because I’ve come to realize that keeping his music alive is something I started doing long before I knew that was what I was doing.
You don’t always know what a moment is
There are moments in life that seem perfectly ordinary while they are happening. Or exciting, perhaps, but exciting for entirely the wrong reason. Then enough years pass and suddenly the camera pulls back. You see the whole picture. I have one of those moments with my dad.
I was nine years old. By then, he had been living with cancer for about a year. An experimental treatment had paralyzed his vocal cords, leaving him able to speak only in a breathy whisper. And yet we still went to Strawberry.
The Strawberry Music Festival took place in Yosemite, and it’s easy to understand why my dad loved it so much. Music. Nature. People gathered together because they loved songs. We also had relatives running the Iron Horse Popcorn stand, so Strawberry wasn’t simply something we attended. We participated. I served popcorn to anybody who ordered it. I painted my face. My dad painted his. We had work to do and music to hear, and oh, what fun we had.
My dad also sang on Hog Ranch Radio there every year as part of the Breakfast Club. One of the songs he always performed was an original called “Beer,” built around the wonderfully uncomplicated sentiment, “I like you much as I love beer.” Everybody loved it.
That particular year, though, my dad couldn’t sing it. So he asked me to.
Naturally, nine-year-old Allison did not process this as a poignant intergenerational transfer of artistic stewardship. Nine-year-old Allison processed it roughly as: I AM GOING TO SING ON THE RADIO. This was, as far as I was concerned, excellent news for the Allison Show.
We changed “beer” to “root beer,” and with my dad playing his Hummingbird guitar beside me, I sang his song. When I finished, everybody applauded. Then my dad stepped back in. In that soft, breathy voice the treatment had left him with, he told the room he was especially proud of my voice and announced that I was going to sing a song I’d heard on the radio. So I sang Des’ree’s “You Gotta Be.”
What follows is the whole performance, all six minutes and 52 seconds of it.
Strawberry Music Festival, 1994.
Listening to the recording now, I hear something nine-year-old me couldn’t possibly have understood then. First, I sang a song my dad could no longer sing himself. Then he stepped forward and told the room he was especially proud of my voice and made space for me to sing another song.
He didn’t only hand me his song. He made room for mine.
After “You Gotta Be,” the room stood up.
I remember the standing ovation, and I also remember very distinctly assuming it was for me. Which, to be fair, is exactly what a nine-year-old would assume. But adulthood has given me another understanding of what at least some of those grown-ups in the room were probably seeing. They knew my dad. They knew what he was facing. They had just watched his little girl sing a song for him that he could no longer sing himself, then watched him turn the microphone back toward her.
There’s a photograph from that performance that I treasure. I’m up there singing, and my dad is sitting behind me with his guitar, looking at me.
Look at his face.
For years, that recording and that photograph were simply pieces of my childhood. Now I look at them differently. My dad died the following year, and somewhere along the way I began to understand that this may have been one of the moments when he passed me the torch.
Not because either one of us announced it, or because I promised to preserve his catalog or someday release his records or even become a songwriter myself. I was nine. I was thinking about applause. But the torch passed anyway.
Hindsight is funny
Of course, hindsight does not always reveal something profound. Sometimes hindsight reveals that you were an absolute goober.
Around the same era, I used to fly to Ohio every summer to spend about a month with my grandparents. People occasionally acted as though this must have been some tremendous hardship. Poor Allison. A month with her grandparents. Those people had clearly never met my grandparents. My grandparents kicked ass.
They were funny and active and so absurdly fit that when we went running together, I sometimes pretended my shoe had come untied so I could stop for a minute without admitting I needed a break.
On one of my flights to visit them, I met a flight attendant named Tracy. I still remember him. He found out that I loved to sing and, in an act of tremendous generosity that I suspect no airline would permit today, invited me to sing a song over the airplane’s PA system. Naturally, I said yes.
I sang my song. The passengers applauded. Then they asked for another. And I sang the exact same song. Again.
I cannot defend this decision. Apparently nobody had briefed me on the fundamental concept of an encore. I don’t really believe in regret. It seems like a fairly useless emotion. But if I did have it to do again, I probably would have taken advantage of my captive airplane audience to debut Song Number Two.
I suppose that story has its own little gift for me now too. The same child who once had exactly one song prepared for an airplane full of strangers eventually became a songwriter. Life has a sense of humor.
The picture gets bigger later
I think that’s what I’ve come to love about looking backward. Not living backward. Looking backward. There is a difference. I don’t think the point is to spend our lives wishing we’d understood everything sooner. We couldn’t have. We were busy living it.
Sometimes you are nine years old and your father is handing you a torch, and all you can see is the microphone. Sometimes the thing that feels like a funny family tradition turns out to be part of your inheritance. Sometimes a photograph becomes more precious decades later because suddenly you can read the expression on someone’s face. Sometimes a song you’ve heard hundreds of times waits until exactly the right day to tell you something new.
Meaning has a way of arriving in layers.
Maybe there are moments in your own life whose significance you couldn’t possibly have understood while they were happening. A conversation. A trip. A person who encouraged you. A place your family always went. A ridiculous little story everybody still tells. A song. Years later, the pieces begin arranging themselves, and you realize: Oh. That mattered.
I know that feeling very well. These days, sometimes I get in the car and put on On and On and crank it up. My dad is singing from the past. I’m singing with him in the present. And somewhere else, according to a tiny number on a streaming report, one of you might be listening too.
What an extraordinary thing.
The music kept going.
On and on.
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