When I was very young, music was something I mostly heard on the radio. My mother tuned the radio to the oldies station, and that was music. Eventually, I received tapes of children singing songs, and Muppets stepped out of spinning platters singing the same songs I remembered from television. For the most part, my mother’s musical tastes seemed to be the same as my own. She didn’t sing along much with the “Wee Sing” tapes, but we rocked the oldies together.

My father, on the other hand, didn’t listen to music as I grew up. He listened to the news and information station and swallowed Talknet, Paul “the Rest of the Story” Harvey and Rush “Really, Really Evil” Limbaugh.

Later on, I would discover that the cache of records with little “Keith” (my dad’s name) stickers on them that showed he at one time invested into music. Yet, when we visited his parents and I heard the off-key cacaphony of their 12-part version of “Happy Birthday,” it seemed that most of the musical interest was gone. My mother would continue to be the musical guide for my brother and me.

The plates first began to shift somewhere around the time I entered second grade. Once I learned there were actually other choices to come from the car stereo than tape, talk or oldies, I couldn’t stop turning. Mostly, I listened to the songs classmates told me about and stuck the line on the station playing the new, popular music. These were the same songs I heard that summer at the municipal pool, and they still sounded amazing underwater.

I finally purchased my first tape when I was in fourth grade, so I could listen to “U Can’t Touch This” instead of my mom’s new Michael Bolton tape. If she tried to change the tapes back, all I had to do was wait until the chorus came back around and implore my mother to listen. Yet, even the imminent threat implied by “Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em” couldn’t stop her.

In the next few years, the war for the dial continued. The introduction of my own CD player and tape adapter allowed me to play my new U2 and Nirvana CDs. I had saved up for months upon months for the chance to play new tracks, and it would be tough to stop me from commandeering the stereo.

Of course, since I couldn’t drive myself, my mother’s “headache” defense served her well so that the songs were cut as she “couldn’t tell what was going on.” She would flip the radio back to the oldies station once again, until I got a headache from beating my head against the window in time to the music. Both of us had our own ways of making our ailments our advantages, even if mine was a bit more, shall we say, adolescent.

My father responded to my changing musical tastes in a way that was often much more maddening. Around the time I was leaving elementary school, my father had purchased a cell phone. Eventually, I imagine this must have doubled his productivity on each ride from Ames to Des Moines to Ames. However, this only came after an extended time where everyone he knew received the same call with the same script: “Hey, look out your window. I’m in your driveway!”

Once the phone fun came down a notch and the calls were more related to business, the radio was more subtly turned lower and lower and lower until it was off.

Yes, it was better than listening to Rush Limbaugh, but still less fun than hearing the voices of the slightly-older-than-me generation on my new CD player.

As my musical tastes became more and more experimental, the headphones became nearly the only way to listen to music in the car. It was a bit more awkward to sing along, but I think that sometimes my mother enjoyed hearing me sing after I had left the choir. Each of us in our family listened to separate sounds. My brother had stuck with the oldies a bit longer and enjoyed more crossover, but even he wanted something more.

Today, each of us drives and lives in a separate place. My father is dating an opera singer — which has changed his perspective a small bit, but his connection with music feels less personal than my own nonetheless. My mother has become a huge fan of The Blue Band and goes to see their shows almost anywhere within a three hour radius of Ames. She tries to explain to me why she loves it and wants me to enjoy it in the same way, while I’ve become less interested in exposing her to my music.

When she rides in my car with me, I play my music and hope that she’ll just pay attention, but still find the dial in the wrong place after she’s borrowed it for an afternoon.

My brother has taken to listening almost exclusively to Christian music at his home in Florida, but he’ll be returning back to Iowa soon, and I’ll have some more CDs for him to listen to. And soon, they’ll all be attending my choir concerts together again.

Secretly, I’d kind of like to butt heads again and bring them to see what I see in the thousands of albums I’ve loved since I found my own ears, but I think it may be too late. Instead, I consider how I’ll teach my future children how to listen to music and what to listen to, just like my parents must have long ago.