The Homegrown Dadlist: We're Giving Our Dads The Aux For Father's Day

We inherit a lot from our dads — habits, phrases, opinions, quirks, and sometimes entire parts of our personality. Our taste in music is one of those things too. Although the road to that is a little longer for some of us. Maybe we spent our teenage years making fun of the songs they played on long car rides, only to find ourselves returning to those same tracks years later and finally understanding why they loved them. Or maybe we were surprised to discover that they were into some of the same music we were. Somewhere along the way, those songs became part of our own lives.

For many South Asians, music is a way through which we reach our fathers, who otherwise remain emotionally walled up, thanks to the patriarchy they were raised in too. A lot of us grew up with dads who showed care in more subliminal ways, and songs could be that space where you ended up meeting them halfway. Through a favourite singer, a cassette played every weekend, a song they insisted on replaying in the car, or a tune they absent-mindedly hummed around the house, you got a glimpse into parts of them that rarely came up in conversations. Sometimes the songs became a window to what they were nostalgic for, what they dreamed about when they were younger, or simply who they were before they became our dads.

For Father's Day, we asked the dads of the Homegrown team to share some of the music they love. This playlist brings together the songs that resonated with them and eventually found their way to us, too.

Iconic. What else could be said? This was the track that marked a an incredibly successful shift from Akon's signature R&B to a heavy, dance-oriented Euro-club sound. Released in 2008 on his album Freedom, the highly recognizable chart-topper broadened his global appeal and cemented his status as an international pop-crossover star. This was also a landmark track in a genre that makes you move but also pulls on your heart strings at the same time. A genre that I call: crying-at-the-club.

A classic in every sense of the word. 'Dharani Mandala Madhyadolage', better known as the story of Punyakoti, is a beloved folk song, tied to the childhood memories of a whole generation of Kannadigas especially a dad who grew up in rural Karnataka. This is a masterclass in storytelling, taking a simple image of a cow peacefully grazing in a field and turning it into a tale filled with tension, suspense, impossible choices, and a final twist that no one sees coming. That it's a story of a parent-child relationship is reason enough for it to be a perrenial dad favourite.

A dad anthem if there ever was one. Despite the title, 'Summer of '69 'isn't really about the year 1969 as much as it's about looking back at youth and remembering a time when life felt limitless and every friendship, band practice, and summer romance felt like the most important thing in the world. Released in 1985, the song has become one of the definitive soundtracks for nostalgia itself. For dads, it's the kind of track that instantly transports them back to their own version of those "best days of my life". There can't be many songs with a better success rate at turning grown men back into teenagers.

No self-help book could motivate you the way Daddy issues do; there are few forces on earth more powerful than wanting to make your dad proud. This track is about having a parent who believes you're destined for something great while you're still busy figuring out who you are and where you're headed. What makes it special as a dad-favourite though, is the that somewhere between becoming a father and watching your own children figure life out, he comes full-circle — understanding both — the expectations of his father and the uncertainties of his child who is now standing at the edge of adulthood, just as he once did.

Every dad likes to believe he's tough until his daughter starts growing up. Created for Coke Studio, this song moves between memories of cradles, sleepless nights, getting older, and eventually letting go, all while holding onto the promise that the bond between a daughter and her father remains unchanged. For a girl-dad, this is basically emotional terrorism — four minutes of being forced to remember that the tiny person who once held your finger now has a life, dreams, opinions, and a future of her own, and yet they can't help but love every second of it.

Belonging to a pre-therapy era, our dads didn't have attachment style quizzes, but they did have Kishore Kumar and his poetics of detachment. This song, particularly, has been the soundtrack for people trying to make sense of the unpredictability and impermanence of life. Using a boatman drifting along a river as its central image, the track reflects on the fact that nothing lasts forever — plans change, people come and go, and the shore you're looking for is rarely where you expected it to be. You try to make peace with it all. To be a dad is to master the art of letting go.

Melancholy is many a dads' first wife. No matter how goofy he appears to be with his dad jokes, you will also, undoubtedly find him tapping into his inner Ryan Gosling on a fine rainy evening as he stares out the window with his chai. My Dad could give Ryan in 'Drive' a run for his money too, but the whole time this was his drug of choice on the CD player. I could never cringe though, because Ghulam Ali can and will always give you an existential crisis, target demographic be damned. All I'd wonder as the passenger princess was, "Damn, who hurt you?"

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