Dear Quivers,
When our first baby was six months old, my wife had to go a business trip. Given the lunatic logistics of pumping during meeting breaks and overnighting milk from Florida to Colorado, the kid and I came along on the trip. A mini vacation!
Except, a vacation isn’t really a vacation with an infant. It’s more like parenting in another place.
I was still looking forward to the trip, though, because those three days in Florida would be the longest I had ever spent alone with my son.
He was at that development stage where he was just starting to wake to the world. Not crawling quite yet, he was mostly lolling around the floor on his back or his stomach, or sitting in a stroller, or—most often—being held someone.
The three days were a blur of naps (two long ones for him every day), too much time spent sitting on the floor of our ground-floor hotel room watching guests tromp down to the pool, and exploring a handful of sites in Pinellas County.
We also listened to your third album Golden Doubt.
Sitting on the floor with an infant, as they half-play with toys, can be magical. It can also be pretty boring after a little while.
So, after an hour of silence that first afternoon in the hotel room, I pulled up new albums on my iPhone for us to listen to, playing them through the phone’s small speakers, despite the compromised, tinny quality.
And it was in spite of this awful listening setup that your album hooked me.
My son and I (and my wife, when with us) spent the rest of our time in Florida listening to the album. Driving around in our rental car, I blasted “Gutters of Love” and “When It Breaks” back to back more times more times than a fully-sentient passenger would have been comfortable with. I hummed “You’re Not Always on My Mind” to earworm-level, loving the irony.
Sometimes, a song or an album hits you at the right time, when you need it.
There was a wonderful strangeness to these few days, spent mostly alone with my son. I needed that time, I think, to feel my way into fatherhood.
I’ve learned over the past two years that there’s not really a script out there for the role of father, but it feels as times as though there’s a soundtrack—and Golden Doubt happens to be on it.
Thank you,
Taylor
Taylor Coe 