On watching my kids fall in love with music too

I had one of those small conversations with my daughter recently that was just lovely.

We were chatting about the sort of things you can’t live without, the essentials, not the grand philosophical stuff but the everyday truths, and without even pausing to think about it, she said music. Not family, friends, chocolate, TV, or swimming, just music, straight in at number one.

I felt absurdly proud, and not in a showy way, just one of those internal pats on the back that parents do when something lands exactly where you hoped it might.

Music has always been a big presence in our house. Piano lessons matter here and practice is taken seriously, but listening and singing is the real calling, properly listening, falling in love with songs, learning how different sounds make you feel, figuring out which bits of music follow you around long after the track has finished. I’ve written enough on here about the artists and albums that shaped me, the songs I carry around as postcards from earlier versions of myself, but none of that comes close to the feeling of watching your own kids build their relationship with music in real time.

They love the stuff we play them and, rightly or wrongly, they are shaped by it. Supertramp sits happily alongside Metallica, Madness drifts into my friend's band Loopy, Manic Street Preachers meets French jazz, Eurovision arriving this year with my involvement in it being in Basel, and it all somehow makes sense. Watching them tackle the words of The Logical Song or What Became of the Likely Lads is one of life’s great amusements, half remembered lyrics delivered with total conviction, confidence wildly exceeding accuracy, but the spirit bang on every time.

And the deeper magic in it all is that much of what I play them carries my own history with it. These are songs my parents played to me, songs attached to kitchens, cars, holidays and silence, and now they’re quietly being rewired into another generation.

Then, slowly but inevitably, you see them starting to step away from your taste and build their own. The eldest went to her first musical in London this year, Matilda, and adored it as well as now disappearing down a full K-pop rabbit hole after hearing it at a friends house - these are playlists on constant rotation, Spotify working overtime to keep up with it all. And I love it. That point when your influence softens into the background and their own world starts pushing forward is a sign you’ve done something right.

And then there’s the car.

The car is sacred ground, musical territory. I’ve barely buckled up and the kids are already calling out requests. After a brief flirtation with Frozen and a handful of Kinderlieder playlists, we mostly skipped the baby music phase entirely and went straight to the good stuff, long drives with proper soundtracks, hands drumming on knees, the odd air guitar from the back seat, and a growing understanding that music isn’t just something you tolerate on a journey, it’s what makes the journey work in the first place. Some of our best conversations happen with an album playing softly under them, the road unfolding ahead, the day making a bit more sense because something decent is playing.

When I was a kid, music was tactile. You owned it. You touched it. A cassette went in, a CD came out, a track was skipped with a chunky plastic button. My kids don’t have that. Music is invisible to them, everywhere and nowhere at once. It just appears.

So we created a ritual of our own.

A separate Music user account on the living room MacBook, stripped back to basics, no apps, no nonsense, just Spotify and the speakers. They choose what to play, they control the room, they decide the atmosphere. No Alexa mishearing them, no unexpected playlists, no technological theatrics, just music when they want it, how they want it.

It’s our modern equivalent of rifling through a shelf of CDs, except now the shelf happens to be infinite.

And maybe that’s why I loved our chat so much. Because when your child puts music first, without thinking about it, without trying to give you the answer she thinks you want, it tells you something’s lodged in the right place. Music as comfort. Music as identity. Music as something you feel rather than just hear.

If my kids grow up understanding that, if songs become their companions, their memory keepers, their way of getting through bad days and amplifying good ones, then I’ll happily take that and consider it a small parenting triumph.