Before too long, most of us begin down that path of understanding what it was like to be our parents. We start to finally comprehend just why they were the way they were. We get why they raised their voices when they did, why they swatted us when they did and why they were exasperated when they were. We fully appreciate why they were set off and why we felt the overwhelming urge to argue with them about so many things, until everyone just sort of gave up. We were right and they were just old. It so happens, we've found, that they were usually right and we were just young.
We start to have kids and it's inevitable that we start to sound like our parents, spouting all of those lines that we found so canned and somewhat glib, as if they were attached to nothing and hardly pertinent. It was a response that they used like a skeleton key and it always got our goat when they did it. Many of those lines don't seem so arbitrary anymore. They are succinct and effective - at least in trying to get a point across.
With the Vancouver, British Columbia, band Said The Whale, there are examples of these five folks doing a considerable amount of thinking about just what the repercussions are of love and what leads of love. There are plenty of nods toward children and that genuine article of a love that sticks to two people with such a bond that it deserves an autopsy when it expires. A song like, "Father," sounds like a touching tribute from a son to a dad that seems to say, "I get it now. I get you now." He goes on to say that he appreciates it all and now sees that none of it was easy. Not one day went by, when his father was being a dad, where it was easy, where there weren't endless apprehensions and worries. It's sung, "Married and stable/Seems so simple," but it's known now that it wasn't simple and that man had nothing to fall back on should he have failed as a husband and a father. It was that man who was "afraid for the little ones and always relied upon." For some, it's all that is wanted. They just want to find love and be relied upon.