Where Are All the Good Songs About Dads?

In search of a hummable melody about fatherhood that isn't trite, cringey, or makes me want to cry in Trader Joe's

I don’t know much about fatherhood with any certainty, but I do know this. No collection of dad songs should ever include anything by John Mayer.

You know the song I’m talking about, right? “Daughters,” in which John Mayer—a man, it’s worth repeating, who once told Playboy that his penis is a white supremacist—sings about girls becoming lovers who then turn into mothers. 

It’s inarguably awful. The only way it could be worse is if it included the lyrics, “Be nice to the ladies, ‘cause one day they’ll be having your babies.”

And yet, Mayer’s musical affront to fatherhood continues to get top billing in just about every annual “Best Dad Songs For Father’s Day” list. 2024 proved to be an especially prolific year for daddy playlists, with sites like Billboard, TODAY, Good Housekeeping, Yahoo, Southern Living, and American Songwriter chiming in with musical suggestions for your old man. 

The most ambitious Father’s Day playlist came from Parade, which picked no less than 77 songs about dads. They hit all the usual culprits—John Lennon's “Beautiful Boy,” Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely,” and of course, that Harry Chapin song that all fathers are contractually obligated to cry along with at least once.

The ideal setting for crying along with “Cat’s in the Cradle” is during a work trip, but it’s also acceptable to do it in a Trader Joe’s if it happens to play over the store’s sound system and you’re in the frozen food section surrounded by strangers. I’ve done this not once but three times. I deserve some kind of dad award for that, right?)

But Parade’s zeal didn’t match the supply of dad songs. Their list includes Guns n’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’Mine,” a song that isn’t about parenting, much less fatherhood, but made the cut because “that opening guitar riff is iconic.”

A few years ago, Oprah Daily posted a list of dad songs that “just might make him tear up” (their words). John Mayer’s “Daughters” was on the list, as was a song from the 1983 Barbra Streisand movie Yentl and not one but two Beyoncé songs. I guess we all have different definitions of what it means to make dad “tear up.”

All of these depressingly obvious (and occasionally batshit crazy) lists for Father’s Day only serve to remind me of one painful fact. There are not many good songs about dads. They tend to fall into one of two categories:

MY DAD IS DEAD AND THAT MAKES ME SAD.

Including but not limited to Mike + The Mechanics’ “The Living Years,” Luther Vandross's "Dance with My Father," Dolly Parton’s “Daddy Won't Be Home Anymore,” and Jane’s Addiction’s “Had a Dad.”

MY DAD WAS A BASTARD AND THAT MAKES ME SAD

Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Name Sue,” Everclear's “Father of Mine,” Cat Steven’s “Father and Son,” Atmosphere’s “Yesterday,” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Adam Raised a Cain,” among many, many others.

There are two minor subcategories, which include MY DAD WAS THE BEST DAD (Loretta Lynn’s “They Don't Make 'Em Like My Daddy Anymore,” Keith Urban’s “Song for Dad”) and I’M GOING TO BE THE BEST DAD (2Pac’s “Letter 2 My Unborn,” Billy Joel’s “Lullabye,” Will Smith’s “Just the Two of Us.”) Every single one, without exception, is abysmal. They’re the music equivalent of somebody handing you the sappiest Hallmark card they could find, full of shitty poetry and zero nuance, and insisting they’d written it personally about you.

Moms have fared much better. The mothers in pop songs are giving great advice (The Supremes' “You Can’t Hurry Love”), doing the best they can in difficult times (Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried”), and telling LL Cool J to punch you right in your stupid face (“Mama Said Knock You Out”).

Dads, meanwhile, are slapping around their kids (James Brown’s “Papa Don't Take No Mess”), giving unsolicited advice (Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach”), feeling bad about the kids they let fall off balconies (Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven”), and generally just not being around (The Temptations’ “Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone”).

We need more quality dad songs. It’s kind of mystifying that we have so few, given how many amazing dad musicians are out there. Like Dave Grohl. That man is pure dad energy. Just look at this photo of him playing with Paul McCartney.

Those glasses! Oh my god, those glasses! They’re pushed down on his face like he’s just been interrupted by a teen asking to borrow the car keys and he was in the middle of reading a book about World War II. Those are the daddest of dad glasses. Those are the glasses you wear when checking the thermostat and about to complain that you’re NOT MADE OF MONEY, DAMMIT!

I’ve been told that the Foo Fighters have at least one song about being a dad, “Come Alive.” It recounts how Dave used to be a self-destructive dolt, drinking and partying and making a rock n’ roll ruckus. But then he became a dad and stopped acting like an asshole. “You saved me the day you came alive,” he sings.

That’s… sweet, I guess? But it doesn’t capture the complexities, the absurdities, the stomach-churning anxieties of being a dad. “You were born and that’s when I stopped drinking” is not going to make me burst into tears in the Trader Joe’s frozen food section.

The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle, my musical crush, wrote some songs during his first few sleepless months of new fatherhood, and I was briefly hopeful that he’d crack the dad song code, creating a song cycle about fatherhood that avoids cheap sentimentality and paint-by-numbers platitudes. No such luck. The only song from those late-night creative sessions that seems even vaguely about parenting is “In Memory of Satan.” But you kinda have to read between the lines to get it.

As Darnielle explained during a 2016 performance at New York’s Bowery Ballroom…

“Short version is, it’s about how you have to worship the devil sometimes. It’s about the evil things inside you that you have to learn to celebrate and live with and think of as a part of the whole that makes up you instead of rejecting them because you won't be able to shake them and sometimes they will need to be, as we say in our Wiccan circles, honored.”

Wow. There’s more parenting truth in that paragraph than every lazy, cliché-ridden lyric in Conway Twitty’s “That's My Job.” Learning to live with and celebrate the evil things. Yep, that’s pretty much fatherhood in a nutshell.

In my search to find one—just one—song about fatherhood that doesn’t make me cringe or want to cry into a glass of scotch, I happened across an old chestnut that I haven’t listened to, much less thought about, in almost three decades. It wasn’t featured on any list of Father’s Day songs, including the Parade one with 77 songs. (I guess because 78 songs would’ve been ridiculous.)

What’s this forgotten ode that nails fatherhood in ways no other contemporary artist has come remotely close? Randy Newman’s “Memo To My Son,” from his 1972 album Sail Away.

It’s sweet without being annoyingly adorable, vulnerable without painting Dad as a dirtbag, and funny in an “I recognize myself in those lyrics” way.

Here’s just a sample:

“Wait’ll you learn how to talk, baby

I’ll show you how smart I am

I want to show you how smart I am.”

Now that’s a relatable song. He’s just a guy sitting with a tiny version of himself, trying to make a good first impression. He’s out of his pay grade and he knows it, but he’s doing the best he can. When Newman sings, “I know you don’t think much of me,” I feel like nothing truer has ever been written about fatherhood. We’re all essentially Fredo from The Godfather, terrified that everybody knows we’re a fraud.

You haven’t truly been a dad until you’ve repeated Fredo’s desperate plea, at least in your head: “I’m smart! Not like everybody says! Like, dumb! I’m smart... and I want respect!”

“Memo To My Son” is the only honest song about being a dad. And unlike John Mayer’s attempt at reflecting fatherhood, it contains no creepy lyrics about your daughters growing up to bang John Mayer and have his babies.

It’s a Father’s Day miracle.