Overview:

We asked our newsroom and readers for their “Dad Music” picks, those songs that make you think of your dad — or, for our dad readers, what they play for their kids.

Springsteen? Check.

Steely Dan? Check. 

Mourning a bygone childhood with your dad presiding over the car radio? Sadly, check.

“Dad music” is easy to poke fun at, and low-hanging jokes on yacht rock abound. It’s a nebulous label, not really a “genre” as much as an experience dependent on your particular taxonomy of dad. Your dad music mileage may vary. That’s why we opened up our “Dad Music” picks to the newsroom and readers of our newsletter, who did not disappoint in sending in tracks. 

My dad had a kid and a union job by the time he was 18 years old in 1980s New Jersey, so it would be sacreligious for my choice to not be Bruce Springsteen, particularly “The River” or, when I want to think about him as a motorcycle-driving Hoboken teen, “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City.”

Mike McInally, our contributing editor and a certified Lookout Dad, copped to loving Steely Dan. (He wants it known, to help his case, he also loves Earth, Wind & Fire.) Lilly St. Angelo, our education correspondent, went for The Beatles.

For Ashli Blow, our environment and public health correspondent, it’s all Jim Croce. In particular, the song “I Got A Name.” 

Oftentimes, when I’m coming home from a long hike or backpacking trip — driving the interstate, watching the pine trees lining the winding road — I have to play that song.

“I’ve got a name / And I carry it with me like my daddy did / But I’m living the dream that he kept hid / Moving me down the highway …”

The song always hits me right in the feels, because my Dad did so much to set me up for a life of independence and adventure. The time I spend in the mountains and wilderness are beyond anything either of us imagined. 

But the song doesn’t stop there. Croce goes on: “I’ve got a song, like the whip-poor-will.”

That little bird — often camouflaged on the branch where it perches, with a call that sounds like its own name — was a secret whistle between my dad, my sister, and me when I was little.

Last year, my dad came to visit, and we went hiking and fishing in the Snoqualmie National Forest, whistling our song along a glacially-fed river.

As Croce says: “A song I carry with me.”

In compiling our playlist, our readers skewed from jokey to personal. Marty Wilde wrote that he teases his kids every Father’s Day by playing a track from the soundtrack to the animated Disney movie Moana: “You’re Welcome.”

Christine Zeller-Powell submitted a song from her brother James Zeller’s band, Ponies of Harmony, called “Evenin’ Train.” That train is the local train whistle that Eugene residents know well, and Zeller sings: “I still hear my dad say, ‘That’s the sound of the evenin’ train leaving town.’”

But the award for my favorite reader submission was an entire playlist. Shane Rhodes sent in “Mike Rhodes (aka Dad)” in memory of his father, who died in 2014. Rhodes wrote that he puts on the playlist whenever he wants to go back in time to the 70s, when he and his brother would road trip with their dad in his plush Ford Econoline van. 

“Now I play them for my kids on road trips so they have a connection to him and the music he liked,” he wrote. 

Is it misty in here, or is it just me? Happy Father’s Day, Lookout readers.

Annie Aguiar is the Arts and Culture Correspondent. She has reported arts news and features for national and local newsrooms, including at the Seattle Times, the Washington Post and most recently as a reporting fellow for the New York Times’ Culture desk covering arts and entertainment.