Readers Poll: The 10 Best Songs About Dads
Last weekend was Fathers Day, so we decided it was a good time to have our readers vote for their favorite songs about dad. Turns out there aren't a ton of, "gee, you sure are a great dad" songs. Most of them address absent fathers, distant fathers, dead fathers or fathers mourning their dead sons. These 10 songs would make one bummer of a playlist, but here they are.
By Andy Greene
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10. Mike and the Mechanics, ‘The Living Years’
Hit songs don't get much sadder than Mike and the Mechanics' 1989 hit "The Living Years." Written by Genesis guitarist Mike Rutherford and Scottish songwriter B.A. Robertson, the song is about a new father dealing with the death of his own dad. Throw in Paul Carrack and a children's choir and you have a very unlikely international smash hit. It came out at a time when every project by a current or former member of Genesis seemed to shoot up the charts. The song has been covered dozens of times over the years, by everybody from John Tesh to Alabama.
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9. Eric Clapton, ‘Tears In Heaven’
If "The Living Years" doesn't make you tear up, then "Tears In Heaven" should do the job. Eric Clapton wrote the song about the death of his four-year-old son Conor, who fell to his death from a New York City apartment window in 1991. It was Clapton's biggest hit in years, and a key moment in his massively popular MTV Unplugged concert. What most people forget, however, is that it first appeared in the widely forgotten 1991 Jason Patric movie Rush.
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8. Dan Fogelberg, ‘Leader Of The Band’
One of Dan Fogelberg's biggest hits was 1981's "Leader Of The Band," a loving tribute to his father Lawrence Fogelberg. "He was a musician, educator, and band leader," Fogelberg wrote in 2003. "I was so gratified that I was able to give him that song before he passed on. In his final years he was interviewed many times by the national press because of it. He went out in a blaze of glory, which meant a lot to me and my family."
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7. Eric Clapton, ‘My Father’s Eyes’
Eric Clapton grew up believing that his grandmother was his mother and that his mother was his older sister. He never knew his father. The confusion and sorrow surrounding all of this led him to write his 1998 hit "My Father's Eyes." By 2004, Clapton couldn't handle the emotional strain of performing this song – as well as "Tears In Heaven" – and he stopped playing them both in concert.
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6. Bruce Springsteen, ‘Independence Day’
When Bruce Springsteen got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999, his thoughts turned towards his father Douglas, who passed away earlier in the year. "I've got to thank him," said Springsteen. "What would I conceivably have written about without him? Imagine that if everything had gone great between us, we would have had disaster. I would have written just happy songs . . . He never said much about my music, except that his favorite songs were the ones about him. And that was enough." The greatest song about their complex relationship is 1980's "Independence Day," in which Springsteen admits that "we were just too much of the same kind."
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5. John Lennon, ‘Beautiful Boy’
When Sean Lennon was born in 1975, John completely abandoned his career so he could be a full-time "house husband." He was a pretty horrendous father to his first son Julian, and was determined to get it right the second time around. In the summer of 1980, John began writing songs again – and one of the personal ones was "Beautiful Boy," about Sean. The song contains one of his most-quoted lines: "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans."
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4. Neil Young, ‘Old Man’
Neil Young didn't write "Old Man" about his father. It's about the foreman of the the ranch he bought around the time he wrote the song – but Young's father, the Canadian sportswriter Scott Young, initially thought it was a tribute to him. In his book Neil And Me he describes the awkward conversation when Neil explained the song to him. "Something I should clarify," he said. "You know that song 'Old Man?' It isn't about you. I know a lot of people think it is. But it's about Louis, the man who lives on my ranch and looks after things for me, the cattle and the buffaloes and the feed and all that. A wonderful guy." Scott said he had a one-word reaction: "Oh."
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3. The Temptations, ‘Papa Was A Rolling Stone’
In the early 1970s, the Temptations' sound grew funkier and more psychedelic. The best song from that period was "Papa Was A Rollin' Stone," written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong. While a legend has persisted for years that Dennis Edwards didn't want to sing the song because his father actually died on September 3rd, he actually died on October 3rd. What angered the group more was the long instrumental section before their vocals started, but when the song became a gigantic hit they learned to live with it.
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2. Harry Chapin, ‘Cat’s In The Cradle’
If this poll was about the saddest songs of all time, Harry Chapin's song "Cat's in the Cradle" would probably come in first. The inspiration for the track came Chapin's wife Sandy, whose first husband had a distant relationship with his father. "My wife really came up with the basic concept and many of the key lines of this song," Chapin said. "As Stravinsky once said, great artists steal, bad artists borrow. I desperately want to be a great artist, so I stole this from my wife."
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1. Cat Stevens, ‘Father and Son’
Cat Stevens' 1970 classic "Father and Son" is about the gulf that often exists between generations. "Some people think that I was taking the son’s side," Stevens told Rolling Stone in 1973. "But how could I have sung the father’s side if I couldn’t have understood it, too? I was listening to that song recently and I heard one line and realized that that was my father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father speaking." The Flaming Lips song 2002 "Flight Test" sounded so similar that Cat Stevens' publishing company filed a lawsuit. According to Lips frontman Wayne Coyne, Stevens (now known as Yusaf Islam) now gets 75 percent of the song's royalties.
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