As far as I can tell, my father has only ever really enjoyed one very specific form of popular music: Folk music, as sung by women with high and sharp and crystalline voices, without a whole lot of accompaniment. He's maybe the only person I've ever heard make the argument that Joan Baez was a more vital artist than Bob Dylan. He never really cared about the Beatles and openly disdained the Rolling Stones. He liked a few Motown songs but lost interest when the label's sound became even vaguely psychedelic. In the early '90s, he got slightly into new-age stuff like Enya and Clannad, but I think that was only because those women's voices were pretty similar to the folk singers he'd always liked, and also because he liked the movie Patriot Games. I once asked him about Leonard Cohen, and he said he thought he'd once fallen asleep at one of Cohen's shows. As it turned out, he was wrong. It wasn't Leonard Cohen who put my dad to sleep; it was James Taylor. He couldn't tell the difference. They just weren't what he was into. But he was so into that very particular lane of music that I get a sort of instant Pavlovian stress-reaction when I hear any of that stuff. It puts me right in the backseat of a crusty-smelling station wagon, driving all up and down the East Coast to go visit obscure relatives, listening to Judy Collins or Laura Nyro or early Joni Mitchell. Point is: For my own goofy personal reasons, I have deeply ingrained prejudice against any singer-songwriters who sound like they'd fit into the Stuff My Dad Likes lane. Anything that sounds like that has to be really fucking good to break through my built-in wall of resistance. And the new Joan Shelley album is really fucking good.