My 11 year old son is learning the guitar. He seems to like this teacher better than his previous one, because this one is focusing on whole songs, rather than musical notes.(When I was studying with my son over the pandemic, I liked learning notes, but it was frustrating to go forward, and honestly, the teacher was a bit of a square.)

Anyway, this teacher has been teaching him classic rock, which is awesome. When he starts practicing a new song, and I name it, he’s proud. For example, for the school talent show, my son played Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water”, while everyone else played violins and flutes, and boring stuff like that. My son also learned, “Back in Black”, and now “Enter Sandman”.

“Smoke on the Water” and “Enter Sandman”?

If you’ve been paying attention… somewhere… you might know that I own, and am fascinated with, Pat Boone’s, “In a Metal Mood”.

I should document this here some day, but the tl;dnr is that squeaky clean Pat Boone got in trouble with his predominately older evangelical Christian audience when he promoted his classic rock cover album, “In a Metal Mood”. It played out exactly like how you’d expect it you even half an interest in contemporary American politics — where “contemporary” is defined as the ever damning, past 70 years.)

He already has two of the twelve down and everyone one of the ten remaining are right in the teacher’s wheelhouse of 70s – 80s hard rock. It could happen! My son could learn all twelve song of “In a Metal Mood”, and then I could record him, and make my own legitimate family memory, that just happens to a contain private joke just for me.

I was going to ask if this was too bizarre, or somehow creepy, immoral, or something even legitimately esoteric talk, but now that I write it down, I’m convinced that I should definitely do this, but not tell the teacher my plan, because I’d come off super weird as soon he’d ask the obvious, “But why this album?”

The world is not nearly cool enough for the teacher to note the tracks, and then make an idle — or better yet, probing — noting the similarities to the album. To which I could only stand beaming ear to ear, while saying, “Wow! What a coincidence!”