December 17, 2025

When Lincoln was 8 or 9, we got him a discman. You know, like the walkman but for playing CDs.  I don't remember him owning many CDs at that point, but as a result, he gained two important sins from his father's musical nerdiness: the beauty of a mix "tape" (CD, obviously, in this case), and the power of personal relationships with songs.

A little bit, first, about the mix tape. Is there anything more foundational to music ownership, memorialized by Nick Hornby in one of the greatest books ever, Hi Fidelity? I must have made close to 100 or so mix tapes or mix cds in my younger days; in a ridiculously seemingly mythical story, I once drove 250 miles to get a mix tape back from an ex-girlfriend. So I must have felt pretty damn proud when Lincoln wanted one to complement his new discman. This first mix CD was something he called Lincoln's Way Cool Songs, fifteen songs from a handful of artists, almost entirely Morrissey/The Smiths, James, and The Boo Radleys. We designed a simple CD cover using three clip art images: snare drum and drum sticks; guitar; and recorder. Yes, you read that right . . . a recorder. Don't ask me why. Could we not find a piano image? That recorder alone should belie the "coolness" of the songs.

Even if we are considering the fifteen songs on the CD, his friends certainly would have questioned the coolness of songs never heard in their homes or cars. At the heart of the CD are four tracks from The Boo Radleys' 1998 swan song, Kingsize, a brilliant album that the band may have hoped would launch them from relative obscurity into Britpop kings. Not only did that not happen, but the band broke up within months of Kingsize's release. While Kingsize's fifteen songs include multiple instances of britpop perfection, any poor, stupid, trapped, 9-year old listening to Lincoln's Way Cool Songs may have struggled to find that on "Free Huey," three plus minutes of Sice screaming "and you know you gotta be all you can be" over wailing guitars. (It tells you everything you need to know about The Boos self-destructive ways that "Free Huey" was the first single released from Kingsize). Certainly the coda on "Blue Room In Archway," "can't you read the sign on my window/why don't you leave me alone?" (that last line also screamed), while the back up singers croon "blue room in Archway," would have sent up some red flags.

But that takes me to my second point. Pundits frequently claim now that headphones have completely destroyed communities of music, groups of people listening to music together and responding en masse. However, I think that sees pop music too singularly as a public entity. While communal listening mattered to some degree in my life (hearing "Bohemian Rhapsody" for the first time while playing basketball in my friend's driveway, all of us with stunned reaction to the sudden insertion of opera; my best friends and I hearing the first strains of The Cars while waiting for a Boston concert to begin and collectively thinking, "we need to check that out"), for me and probably other true pop music nerds, songs first and foremost require a private place, usually being played for individual listening, whether on a cheap turntable in our bedrooms, in the cassette player in our beat-up first cars, in our walkmans, or discmans, and now through our Beats headphones.

That's what Lincoln gained at age nine, choosing these Smiths' songs, James' songs (more on them next time) and these Boo Radleys' songs because of the emotional reactions they generated in him. With the exception of the first track and the last track (an outlier, random fourth artist, added, I believe, to placate his mother and me), the songs of Lincoln's Way Cool Songs are grouped by the artists. So that means late on the CD we get the trio of "Free Huey," "Blue Room in Archway," and "The Future is Now." However, for whatever reason, he launches the CD with the 6 1/2 minute "High As Monkeys," and the opening lines, "try to put yourself in my place/it's written all over my face/I'm closer to God," let alone the depressing chorus: "now we're high as monkeys/now we've come so far/you and I are simple friends no more." All I know is that I could see the intensity in his face when he put on his headphones and cued the discman to start playing the disc. At that point, music was taking him higher than monkeys (or The Monkees).

I don't know why he chose "High As Monkeys" to open the CD, and I'm not going to ask him. (Maybe he can't even remember.) The response may be too personal. For years I desperately wanted to get friends to love certain songs (and artists) as much as I did, but all I succeeded in doing was making myself more annoying (is that even possible?). Music nerds thrive on private moments with songs; maybe the rest of the world don't (or can't), but then again these are the people who don't wait in anticipation for a new release. It's fine -- we can coexist, you just won't find us at the same concerts.

Thus I have had to be a bit of a reluctant dad in stepping back and letting Lincoln find musical gems as he wishes. As much as I agree with him that Kingsize is The Boos greatest album, I have waited for him to dig into their 1993 Giant Steps to discover their greatest tracks, something which he has started to do within the last year or two. In fact, it was as I was finishing my edits on "The Unexplained," my last Sins of the Father entry, that he came in raving about the incredible opening three songs from Giant Steps: "I Hang Suspended," "Upon 9th And Fairchild," and "Wish I Was Skinny."  All those even before we hear "Barney (and Me)" and "Lazarus," the songs college radio first blasted into my orbit. You don't have to lead music nerds to water, but it helps to get them in the vicinity.

So Lincoln's Way Cool Songs may not seem cool to my average reader. Again, that's fine. We can continue to co-exist. I'm just glad Lincoln is comfortable enough allowing me to pry open a door and let me shine a light on this artifact of our lives. 

Rest of Sins of His Father series