Children’s Music Hour

The Boy fell asleep in my lap tonight. The Missus was watching Grey’s Anatomy in the front room and when he got bored with all the gore and romantic intrigue, he wandered back close to his bedtime to see what I was up to in my office.

I was up to the Weekend Update segment on last night’s SNL, but I know topical humor isn’t really his thing, so I asked him if he’d like to watch what I was watching or listen to music. He chose the music option, so I put on a DVD of Leonard Cohen in concert from his tour earlier this year.

The Boy’s face lit up when the opening menu came on and he saw Leonard’s ancient visage. “Oh, I like him! The man with the hat!”

And as he crawled up on my lap in the medium-sized chair in my office, it occurred to me, my son has to have some of the coolest taste in music of any 4-year-old in his pod.

The first year-and-a-half of his life, he woke up every morning to “The Johnny Cash Show” on bootleg DVD. Whenever a guest artist would start to sing, he’d get agitated and point at the TV and demand “Cash! Cash!” – one of his first words.

As soon as he began to walk, we learned he loved dancing to Rush. (There are YouTube clips to attest to this.) He still likes them to this day. Last week I went to see KISS in concert and I played the whole first Rush album in my office beforehand, and he stayed and danced to the whole thing.

Bruce came next. He released, and we purchased, a DVD of his Seeger Sessions tour at an impressionable time in The Boy’s life. Again, the music was great for dancing to, and as an added bonus, it gave me a chance to talk to him about America. And like a Cash tune, he can spot a Bruce tune a mile away now, even an unfamiliar one. “Bruce?” he’ll ask. Except when it’s Cash, he announces it confidently. “That’s Cash!”

I don’t know what kind of crap he’s being exposed to at day care – although the fact that he knows the Barney theme song is suspicious and unsettling – but it’s a thrill to see him groove to the same tunes as I do at such an early age. I just hope he doesn’t break my heart some day and come home with this ‘awesome’ new music he just discovered and slip “Kind of Blue” onto whatever we’re listening to music on by then.