Song For My Father

This isn’t a nostalgia project.

It’s a correction.

For a long time, the file on my father in my head was simple:

-- good provider, bad presence, probable car-crash candidate.

I didn’t just dislike him. I waited for him to die.

In the bluntest, ugliest way: I thought the story would be easier if the phone rang one night and somebody said, “There was an accident.”

He worked too much. Yet, he was always around. He watched everything. He meddled. He had opinions about my hair, my friends, my music, my drugs, my everything. He was the wall I bounced off of, over and over again.

And because I was a smart, angry kid, I mistook that wall for malice instead of mercy.

That’s the backdrop. That’s where this whole cycle starts—not with a Hallmark card, but with a death wish.

Now?

Now I see a different man standing in the same frame.

The shape of him didn’t change. The angle of my light did.

This record—Song For My Father—is me turning that light slowly, until the shadows move and the truth comes into view.

The Sleep Doctor.

My dad was a sleep doctor. An anesthesiologist.

He spent his days on that thin line in the operating room—giving just enough poison to still the body, not enough to kill it. He held the sleep of strangers in his hands while saws and scalpels did their work. That’s not abstract to me; he took me to the hospital when I was old enough, walked me through the halls, and let me watch the ballet of nurses and machines.

There are two kinds of jobs in the world. One. The kind where a mistake embarrasses you. And, two. The kind where a mistake kills someone.

My father had the second kind. For decades.

At home, I didn’t see the weight of that. I just saw a man who was tired and in my business. I didn’t see the quiet math he was running: if I walk away from this kid, the way I want to walk away from everyone right now, what happens to him?

Later, much later, he told me the truth in a single, flat sentence:

“I retired at fifty-five because I was about to put a bullet in my head.”

That’s not a metaphor. That’s not a lyric line. That’s a doctor saying he’d had enough of playing God with syringes and ventilators and human fear.

The job ate the work. The calling went sour. The thing he had once loved—helping, healing, keeping people alive—turned into a grindstone pressing on whatever soft piece of him was left.

So he struck a bargain. Two weeks on, two weeks off, sell his call nights to younger men who needed the money.

For a minute, it worked. Then the partners changed the rules.

A colleague retired. The others told him it was time to come back full-time or get out. You can hear the contempt right under the surface: We’re done accommodating your mind, old man. The machine needs you back on the wheel.

He said no.

A short word, but a big one when you’ve built your whole identity around being useful.

He walked away.

From the outside, it appears to be a comfortable early retirement.

From the inside, it was a man choosing not to die, but who had to die, to who he was for so many years - his identity: He had to lay that down. For years, he would lament that simple fact - that he had lost who he was - that he loved the work, but the job came to eat him alive.

He would often retell his stories - his "spcheals" if you will. For one, that he would set his worried patients to ease with a little humor - and say something like: Well, I've done this a few times, so no worries - but, I've only done it on shaved pigs - so, I'll do like I've always done: Watch one, do one, teach one: I'm up to the "doing one" phase right now.

Here we go - and, with that, he would expertly throw a needle, a catheter into somebody's small vein on their hand, or start an epidural on a lady's back who is about to give birth.

He would smile at these stories. Eventually, the stories stopped. And, new things came to town - babies and the woodshop.

The Woodshop and the Babies.

The question “and then do what?” is where a lot of men his age go to die slowly.

My dad went to the backyard.

He built a shop—literal boards, actual hammer, actual nails. I helped some when I was working construction. At the time, it was just another job site to me. Only later did it show up as what it really was: an exit ramp from oblivion.

He started with tables and shelves. Good solid work. Then he found the lathe. By the end, he had three of them, turning bowls and shapes and little polished miracles out of raw chunks of wood.

We have a family creedo - from his mother - my grandmother.

“The quality remains after the price is forgotten.”

Sometimes he lived up to that in the shop. Sometimes he didn’t. That’s fine. The point isn’t that he made perfect heirlooms. The point is: the shop gave his hands somewhere to put the shaking, somewhere that wasn’t his own skull.

Around the same time, my kids arrived—Sophie and Thomas.

I believe, and I've said this openly in the family - that if Sophie hadn’t come along when she did, my mother might not be alive today? Because, that little girl gave my Mom a good reason. And that's all there is to say about that. But, Moms: Oh, brother - "Just give me a good reason!" is all my mother ever needed to get up and go. Hopefully, she ain't gonna make you be her reason today, if you can hear me there, sons and Moms out there. Sophie and Thomas? Yes. Me. No. Stay me at home. Not happening.

"Just give me a good reason!" Ok, well, he's got the shop to piddle around in. Leave him be.

And she would say - ah - ok. I like this.

And if the woodshop hadn’t existed, my father might not be alive. Two small miracles: a baby and a room full of sharp, spinning steel and sawdust. Somehow, between the two of them, they held the marriage and the man together.

That’s the version of my father that stands behind these songs.

The sleep doctor who walked away before he shot himself.

The woodworker who made bowls instead of pulling triggers.

The grandfather who let my children climb into a story that was safer than the one I grew up in.

Supper, Not Dinner.

There’s another piece of his geometry that only makes sense now.

We didn’t eat “dinner” at my house. We ate supper.

My mother cooked. My father came home. We sat at the table.

Phones rang. Friends called. The outside world buzzed for attention.

His response was always the same:

“We are eating supper right now. I’ll call you back when we’re done.”

Or, to me:

“Tell your friend we’re eating. You can call him back later.”

As a kid, that felt like prison.

Why can’t I just take the call? Why is this boring, awkward table sacred?

Because it was all he had left. That’s why.

When the hospital owned his days and the on-call pager owned his nights, that one slice of time—supper—was his small act of refusal, his act of defiance, if you will. The job could have his expertise. The partners could have his sleep. The phone could have every other hour.

But the table?

The table was his.

He guarded it clumsily, imperfectly, sometimes annoyingly. But he guarded it. I didn’t see that then. I just saw a man interrupting my social life.

Later, when the drugs had me and my life was the opposite of structured, he had every socially acceptable reason to cut me loose. My brother asked him more than once.

“Just put him out. Let him hit the street. Let the world do what it’s going to do.”

He didn’t.

He picked me up. From school. From tennis. From nowhere. From hell.

He kept a chair for me at that same supper table.

It wasn’t warm and fuzzy. This is not a Disney story. There were nights when the air at that table was so thick you could chew it. But I was there. And he didn’t lock the door.

That’s a kind of love I only understand now, when people my age are throwing their hands up and saying they can’t handle less than what he handled for years.

Refiling a Man.

It’s one thing to say, “I forgive my father.” That phrase is cheap now, worn out from overuse in self-help books.

What’s harder—and what this project is actually about—is refiling him.

Taking him out of the “enemy” drawer and putting him somewhere more accurate.

Not saint.

Not monster.

But a good man under impossible pressure who still refused to abandon me.

That’s what “A Good Man He Is” sings.

That’s what “The Sleep Doctor’s Son” confesses.

That’s what “Supper, Not Dinner” laughs about, just enough to let some air in.

These are not abstract meditations on fatherhood.

They’re case files on one man.

And that’s why the album title is singular: Song For My Father.

Not songs about some archetype.

One long song, broken into tracks, pointed at the same person.

Why Put This Out in Public?

Some of this work could have stayed private.

I could have played these tracks in the car on the way to his house, handed him a USB drive, and called it done.

But part of honoring what he did is saying it out loud, where others can hear it.

There are sons out there who will never get this far with their fathers.

There are fathers out there on the edge of their own bullet, wondering if it matters that they’re still picking their kids up from whatever metaphorical tennis court they’re lost on.

If anything in this cycle does its job, it will say two things.

One. To the fathers. It mattered that you stayed. Even when nobody thanked you. Even when they hated you for it.

And two. To the sons and daughters. Look again. The man you filed as a villain might be the one who quietly saved your life more times than you can count.

I don’t owe my Dad a rewrite of history.

I owe him the truth—finally told with all the pieces in the frame.

This is the truth, sung and spoken. – This is the Song For My Father.