My youngest daughter turned sixteen years of age this past year. It is hard for my heart to believe that “the one who completed our family” when she was born has now reached the stage where she is eagerly contemplating a life of her own, complete with a drivers license, income from a full-time summer job and high school graduation awaiting the end of this upcoming school year. Our daughter has designs on becoming a teacher. Like her parents, she finds being in the company of small children brings her a certain amount of joy. Thus, for much of the summer, we have travelled as a family to a variety of universities in the province that offer the courses she needs. In doing so, we have talked a lot about how university life was for her mother (in Thunder Bay) and for me (in Toronto). By sharing our stories with her, our daughter has come to see that perhaps she has more in common with her nerdy parents than she had initially allowed herself to believe. It seems as though the life experiences our teenage daughter is gaining on her own and with her friends are causing her to change her perception of our family dynamic. As parents, we are becoming viewed less as all-knowing rule makers and more as the strong yet, flawed humans that we truly are. As any of you with adult children can attest, if you are fortunate enough to have a loving relationship with your child then, as they enter adulthood, you become less of a mentor/mentee tandem and more of a caring friend to each other. In our case, one of the ways that this phenomenon is manifesting itself has to do with music.
Like me, my youngest daughter has always preferred to keep her musical tastes more on the private side. I listen to music at home mainly through headphones. She listens mainly through AirPods. As a result, the only way I had any sense of the type of music she was into was whenever she would grace us with a snippet of a song as she moved about the house or when she dropped some singer’s name during suppertime conversations. In her early teenage years, the songs she would sing and the names she would drop were often unknown to me. I would banter with her about the validity of her choices and offer my own artists and songs in reply. In time, she came to better understand and appreciate my sensibilities and began offering up music that she thought I might actually understand and like. One of the first examples of this was when singer Noah Kahan for appeared on the scene a few years ago with his hit song “Stick Season”. *(You can read about Noah Kahan here). She played his entire album for me and her sister one evening. I appreciated her desire to share a part of her world with us. I was also pleased that she appeared to listening to entire albums by the artists that she enjoys. Who listens to entire albums anymore? Maybe more young people than I was lead to believe. For the record, I believe that listening to entire albums is a good thing. The next artist that our family was introduced to was Canadian singer Tate McRae. *(You can read about Tate McRae here). The thing that was great about Tate McRae was that our daughter asked if we would take her to see Tate McRae performing live. We agreed to do so. My wife, her sister, my two daughters and my niece all went to Tate McRae’s concert when she played in Ottawa. That concert was the start of a string of live concerts that either my wife or I have attended with our daughter. In that time, we dragged her to see Trooper and Glass Tiger in Niagara Falls. My daughter and one of her friends took me to see Madison Beer in Toronto. The best part about that concert (for me, anyway) was that we got to watch it from a private suite at the arena. Watching from a suite is definitely the way to go if you can ever manage to swing it yourselves! *(In addition, our daughter also attended the Kendrick Lamar/Sza concert with her bff and her bff’s mom). It has been a terrific year of live concert experiences for our daughter. But, it has also been a wonderful year for us, as her parents. It means a lot that she is developing her own tastes and interests and has decided that she wants to share those interests with us. Having our littlest girl get to the stage in her life where she can bring us in to her world and have us actually enjoy what we find there, is really something that touches our hearts.
However, there is a reason that I have opted to make Daniel Caesar the focus of this music post. I enjoy the way my daughter’s mind works. For a number of years she has been hoisting up trial balloons by singing us snippets of songs that she is listening to. Over time, she has developed a much keener sense of how we will react, individually or as a couple, to what she presents. Consequently, our daughter is now able to employ tactics that, in some ways, can control our behaviour and, in particular, that of my wife. Here is an example. In 2025, Canadian singer Daniel Caesar released an album entitled Son of Spergy. Spergy is a nickname given to his father, who is a church minister in Oshawa, Ontario. Of the many songs recorded for this album, there is one called “Have a Baby With Me”. One of the many qualities I love about my wife is that she adored motherhood and has always had an affinity for babies. If we are ever at a gathering where a newborn is present, it is only a matter of time before my wife is holding that baby and feeling the warm glow of nostalgia for when she was holding our own daughters when they were young. As a family, we have noticed this behaviour play out over and over again. My youngest daughter had filed that information away. So when Daniel Caesar’s new album came out and my daughter discovered that there was a baby-themed song on it, an idea sparked in her mind. She introduced his song “Have a Baby With Me” to us one day but, in her mind, she was targeting her mother and planting the seed of a hopeful quest at the same time. You see, my daughter wanted us to take her to see Daniel Caesar in concert but, because she had seen so many concerts already in that calendar year, she knew that asking to go to one more may have been pressing her luck. So instead, she simply started singing the lyric, “Have a Baby With Me” knowing full well that my wife’s maternal instincts would kick in. Sure enough, in no time at all, my wife was going around the house singing that one line, “Have a Baby With Me”. The seed was planted.
Stage Two of my daughter’s plan, after getting that one line to become common language in our home, was to start gradually introducing us to who Daniel Caesar really was as a person and as a performer. She did this in the same manner as she did with Noah Kahan and Tate McRae, which was to start playing more of his music for us and filling us in on some aspects of his life. What we learned was that Daniel Caesar was born in Scarborough (which is just east of Toronto) but grew up in Oshawa (about an hour east of the big city). That he spent his youth in Oshawa, the home of General Motors in Canada, is significant because I lived in Oshawa myself in my mid-twenties until my late thirties. So I am fairly dialled in to the type of community Daniel Caesar spent his formative years a part of. Daniel’s father, the afore-mentioned “Spergy”, is an accomplished singer in his own right. Gospel, Soul and R&B music formed the soundtrack to Daniel Caesar’s youth. Thus, when my daughter started talking about his music, she started by saying that he often was backed by choirs and that his music was very mellow. She compared him to Frank Ocean who, now that I am more familiar with Daniel Caesar, I can attest is an apt comparable. Caesar left Oshawa for Toronto as his high school days were ending and, like my daughter is now, he set out to discover who he really was and how the world really worked. One thing I can say for certain about Daniel Caesar is that he has a strong, soulful singing voice. It was that voice that allowed him to survive when he first arrived unannounced in Toronto. He auditioned for anyone who would listen and quickly found work in local clubs. Two EPs followed. These EPs were the first steps in building the brand that becomes known as Daniel Caesar today. Through shrewd use of social media, Caesar amassed quite a following. He also was smart enough to market himself by way of musical collaborations that, not only solidified his own fan base but also allowed him to tap into the fan bases of those he chose to sing with. In 2017, he released his first official album called Freudian. From this album, he released a duet called “Best Part” with an American singer named H.E.R. “Best Part” won the Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance. He was also a featured artist on Justin Berber’s No. 1 hit “Peaches“. In total, Daniel Caesar has won a Grammy Award, has been nominated for seven other times and has already won five Juno Awards here in Canada.
The Son of Spergy Tour came to Toronto in August of 2026 and, just as she had carefully planned, we found ourselves taking our youngest to see him at the ScotiaBank Arena downtown in the city. I have to say that Daniel Caesar’s concert was quite enjoyable and certainly very interesting in ways that extended beyond his own musical performance. For one thing, while Caesar’s song catalogue is heavily skewed toward slower, more soulful fare, there were just as many young men in attendance as there were women. These men looked like the kind of guys you would typically see in a “Bro-herd” but they stood up and belted out Daniel Caesar’s songs with as much passion and emotion as any of the young women in attendance did. I don’t mean anything weird by stating that. I have witnessed males at rock concerts and punk shows and even country and western events and, let me tell you, the young men at the Daniel Caesar concert were different. My daughter mentioned that if we wanted to know what type of “cute boy” she was hoping to meet one day, we could do worse than to look around at the young men at this concert that night. Secondly, I noted a distinct absence of alcohol consumption throughout the concert. At the vast majority of concerts that I have ever been to, seeing people double-fisting fifteen-dollar beers is standard fare. But at the Daniel Caesar concert, most people seemed to be drinking water or soda pop, even though they were in their mid-twenties. This could be a reflection of the Gospel-influenced background which is woven into his music and his performance style, I don’t know but, the lack of marijuana smoke and alcohol consumption was duly noted. Daniel Caesar performed in front of a full Gospel choir for the most part. The audience knew his song catalogue very well and joyfully sang along, word for word, for most of the evening. “Have a Baby With Me” was the third song he performed that night and, true to form, my wife happily sang along, word for word, with a heartfelt smile upon her face. My daughter captured it all of video which, to her, made the whole experience of attending this concert worthwhile.
Growing up isn’t the easiest feat in the world. At times, it is quite daunting to be an adult in this world of ours. Sometimes we know instinctively what we should do and how we should act but sometimes, the only way we learn and grow is by failing. For Daniel Caesar, the path forward has been littered with learning opportunities, some of which have gone well and some of which have blown up in his face. But, like my youngest daughter, Daniel Caesar is building a life and a career for himself from a foundation of family love. At one point during the concert, Daniel Caesar announced that his own father was going to join him on stage to sing a song or two. As Reverend Norwill Simmonds strode to the stage and proceeded to sing, he did so with all the Gospel fervour he could muster. The audience erupted in applause. It was a wonderful full-circle moment for this family. Caesar honoured his father and his past while, at the same time, involving his father in his own special musical world of the present. While we didn’t get to go on stage with our daughter and sing anything, we did sing aloud from our seats. Those words to songs such as “Have a Baby With Me” and his other hits such as “Japanese Demin”, “Best Part”, Who Knows” and so on are all lyrics that we would never have discovered on our own if not for our daughter sharing her own world with us. We are blessed to have her care enough to want to share the things she values and that help define who she is as a person. As parents, we are definitely entering the stage in our relationships with our children where we are learning as much from them as they are from us. And we are the better for it.
The video for the song “Have a Baby With Me” by Daniel Caesar can be found here. The lyrics version is here.
The link to the official website for Daniel Caesar can be found here.
The link to the official website for the city of Oshawa, where both Daniel Caesar and I once called home, can be found here.
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