Family Business: Part i

If you asked me what the most important things in my life were, my family and music wouldn’t easily escape my mind as easy answers. In many ways, like most things on that list, their influence on who I am is intertwined. My family is relatively big as I am the youngest of four children along with my mom and dad. Growing up it was always a full house and with birthdates in the 70’s, 90’s, and 2000’s between us, interests in almost everything were stretched into a spectrum of likes and dislikes and I was able to inhale everything everyone else radiated.

With that being said, though I am my own man, my taste in almost everything is directly influenced by the tastes of my father, mother, sister and two brothers. Especially music. It was everywhere growing up, and though none of us ever mastered any instruments or had a deep passion for it besides church choirs, side-hustle rap careers, or hobbies in deejaying, music is as big an aspect of our family dynamic as anything other than faith.

I am writing this as both a love letter to my family for being great to me as the baby and a love letter to each of these projects that not only were introduced to me by my family inadvertently but became some of my favorite albums as well and shaped my music taste and ultimately, me as a person.

Dad

We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things. : Jason Mraz (2008)

If you know my father, there is no surprise that he was born in South Carolina in 1970. There is also no surprise that he spent a large and important part of his adult life living in New York City in the 1990s. Funk, old school black rock, and 80’s hip hop are a part of his fabric as much as his patented goatee.

However, his taste in music is almost as broad as his shoulders that have carried our family for thirty years. When my brother and I were in elementary school, he would pick us up from school every day as he worked at a closeby market. Around this time, he bought an 07 Chevy Silverado pickup, quite the manly whip. I remember hearing everything from Lyfe Jennings to Avant as every other Thursday, when he got paid, he would take us to Taco Bell or to a gas station for a post-school snack and drink. He would also drive us to and from Thursday night Cub Scout meetings that no one really wanted to go to. It was still fun to be with him and enjoy what he enjoyed. To this day, Thursdays are my favorite day of the week.

I don’t know if he was mesmerized by the light and soulful “I’m Yours” like the rest of the world at that time or just by the fact that blue-eyed soul had returned in a new and fresh way, but when my dad discovered We Sing. We Dance. We Steal Things. by Jason Mraz, it was like a two-year-old discovered a potato chip. As I remember it, he didn’t take it out of the Silverado’s CD port for weeks. I vividly remember him reciting the quasi-scatting riff Mraz goes into near the end of “I’m Yours” and myself looking out of the pickup’s window imagining the girl I would be able to sing “Lucky” to in the future.

More than a decade later, my father has moved on from his Jason Mraz phase and though I never forgot about the two aforementioned tracks and played them regularly, a couple of years ago I listened to the album in its entirety. It is one of the funnest listens I have ever experienced and continues to be. “Make It Mine” is a jubilant celebration of the present-day God gives us all. “Butterfly” is a smooth but modest stew of sexual innuendo and horns. And “The Dynamo of Volition” is some of the boldest and smart songwriting I’ve ever come across.

Jason Mraz has since made me laugh, cry, and laugh with his witty lyrics and masterfully fun catalog. His most recent work, Look For The Good, is a standout in a packed year for music.

Thank you to my Dad for introducing me to this beautiful body of work and for the memories that yielded it.

Because there is football on, I will take a break and do my next family member pretty soon or whenever the Spirit moves, I guess.

By Billy Listyl

October 11, 2020