My daughter does not have to love the songs that raised me

I played my favorite album in the car and told my thirteen-year-old she was about to hear something important.

That was probably where I lost her.

By the third song, she asked whether we could switch. I said she hadn't given it a chance. She said she had listened to three songs.

I explained how different the music had been when it came out. She watched the traffic lights.

I was trying to share a piece of my life. I had delivered it as required reading with a moving vehicle attached.

The album mattered to me before she was born. It still matters. Hearing it brings back a bedroom, a bus route and friends whose phone numbers I once knew without looking them up.

None of that is inside the recording for her.

When she says the singer sounds dramatic, I hear a dismissal of the afternoon I first bought it. She hears a dramatic singer. We are reviewing different things.

I have been equally careless about her music. I ask whether every song needs that much bass. I comment on lyrics before she has finished showing me the track she wanted me to hear. Then I become offended when she doesn't approach my preferences with historical reverence.

At home, she played me one song. I listened to the whole thing before talking. She told me which part she liked. It wasn't the part I would have picked.

That was a more interesting conversation than the one where I explained why my album had shaped a generation.

I still choose music in the car sometimes. A shared space doesn't mean the youngest person selects every track. But choosing a song and requiring someone to admire it are different privileges.

I want to tell her why a song matters to me without insisting that it must matter to her too.

She knows the chorus of my favorite now. She sings it in a deliberately terrible voice when I start getting nostalgic.

I can decide whether to laugh. I don't think I need to open a cultural education file.