Zach Bryan performs in Quebec City in 2023. The country artist featured in a playlist created by the writer’s daughter, and before he knew it he was at a Zach Bryan concert in Florida.Amy Harris/The Associated Press
Rory Gilfillan is a history teacher at Lakefield College School in Ontario.
As we drove to see Zach Bryan play down in Florida last summer, I was convinced my 14-year-old daughter’s first concert was going to be the equivalent of my father shooting frozen tennis balls at me after I told him I wanted to be a hockey goalie. While the ordeal wouldn’t be as painful, I was certain that her experience of going to a concert would be similarly disillusioning.
Concerts today weren’t like The Who show my friends and I hitched a ride to in the back of a potato truck. And they weren’t like seeing Pearl Jam still giving their all on the long tail end of a career that used to matter. Concerts today were more often watching someone lip sync on a giant TV from a vast distance. Musicians weren’t forged any more. There was no Nirvana playing in their garage and sucking until one day they didn’t and then taking over the world. Artists were discovered: plucked from obscurity on YouTube, American Idol and The Voice. They didn’t play. They performed. Concerts were all choreography masking indifference, voices corrected by autotune, and tickets that cost more than God. Performers showed up late and left early. You got the T-shirt to prove you were there and departed spiritually emptier than when you arrived.
The Who was right. Rock is dead. She would see.
But I was wrong. It wasn’t the first time.
My musical captivity actually began a year before the Zach Bryan concert, while driving my daughter to volleyball tryouts and, when she didn’t make the team, to lacrosse tournaments. Before the big moments in life everyone talks about – marriage, the birth of a child, the death of a loved one – it’s the first goal, the first time you make a team when it’s not automatic, competing in games that matter and are played into the twilight of a long Canadian spring evening. For my daughter there would always be life before lacrosse and all that followed after. That first season on the team, we were launched on a tour of the hinterland: Owen Sound, in the middle of nowhere, and Burlington, in the middle of everywhere. And like every great adventure and coming-of-age journey, we needed a soundtrack.
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Growing up, mine had been dominated by Kenny Rogers, not by choice but by paternal fiat. People who say they love Kenny Rogers are really saying they love tracks like The Gambler and Coward of the County. No one ever mentions the lesser-known Duets record that launched a thousand easy-listening stations, or his beloved Christmas album. And Kenny Rogers was absolutely benign compared to the breadth and sheer scope of the Rita MacNeil catalogue – a cleaning lady from Cape Breton who presaged and foreshadowed Susan Boyle, covering such immortal classics as Land of a Thousand Dances and From a Jack to a King. Even with Canadian content regulations, you can always just change the station. Riding in a car with my dad, I didn’t have that option.
I wanted my daughter to have a better life, and while I had no intention of being the cool Dad, much less seeking that North Star of a lost generation of parents who thought that being best friends with their kids was healthy, I wanted to at least be accessible. So whenever we set out on the road to a tournament, I let her make the playlist.
Early on it was clear that I was never going to get Drake any more than my father was going to get Soundgarden. I didn’t understand what he was singing about, and as a teacher, I found his swearing both gratuitous and jarring. His song, Nokia, with lyrics comparing a woman to a prostitute, was abhorrent to me. I found Doja Cat abrasive and she seemed intent on doing the work of misogynists for them.
Country, while cheesy, was at least less explicit. And I found I could bury it behind the sounds of my Subaru’s broken air conditioner. Every now and again when I was paying attention, I would mock Zach Bryan’s Pink Skies, saying that he sounded like he’d swallowed a washcloth or had spent the last 20 years lighting one cigarette off another. I said Tyler Childers sounded like a hillbilly and that Megan Moroney needed to worry less about the “cheatin’ men” in her life and more about her lack of self-confidence.
But Gandhi was right: First you laugh at your daughter’s music, then you fight it and then you lose.
Somewhere on the way to a field located in the depths of a Jane Jacobs suburban cautionary tale, I had started to recognize their songs. Then I started to have ones that I “didn’t mind.” From there it was a steep and slippery slope to falling for Childers’s Charleston Girl, Maroney’s Tennessee Orange and, yes, even Bryan’s Nine Ball. I started talking in what I think was a Southern accent. I was hooked.
It turned out that Bryan was slated to play in Tampa while we were going to be down there during March Break this year. Maybe because her tween friends had started going to concerts, or because she was in the blast radius of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, she begged me to go. The tickets wouldn’t require me to remortgage the house, so I acquiesced despite the fact that I was sure it would be a disappointment. And then, in the immortal words of Trapper from the ancient television series M*A*S*H, I managed to “screw up in reverse.” The Bryan concert was about to validate every one of my daughter’s concert fantasies.
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Zach Bryan played until I couldn’t stand up any more. He sang into the setting sun. People were dancing. He appeared happy and thankful to be on stage, playing with his friends. My daughter knew and sang the lyrics to every song. Two college girls in the row ahead of us danced and laughed the entire night. It was magical. I didn’t feel a shared catharsis like I remembered experiencing when I was young, but my daughter was right: A concert could still be great. And, I learned that my musical taste didn’t have to be cryogenically frozen in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s death.
We only get so many Thanksgivings, so many Christmases, so many birthdays while our parents are alive, and a dwindling number of years where our children are still interested in us. My daughter won’t always be 14. Some day I will be dead. These special celebrations are important, but sometimes, life happens in the car, in that space between one track ending and another beginning. It’s in the profound conversations masquerading as banter. How French fries taste better after winning a bronze medal. In debating what a song lyric means and whether or not you could hate an artist but love their art. The openness that comes when you’re away from home. A boy she likes at school. A girl I liked when I was in Grade 6 and some things that broke my heart but helped me later on. Conversations that could never happen at home.
The most special moments might just happen while listening to music, on the way to somewhere else.