If you’re unfamiliar with bands like Nightwish, Epica and The Gathering, I would probably describe them to you as folk metal or maybe progressive rock — that is, if you could get me to admit I listened to them in the first place.
I’m embarrassed to say that I care quite a bit what people think of me. It’s something that my father has always encouraged me to let go of.
He was the one who introduced me to this music in the first place, starting with “Nightwish: End of an Era,” a live recording of a 2005 concert. Over the years, he would play more bands like them for me.
All had dramatic instrumentation, double bass pedals for a hammering rhythm and whole choirs as backing vocals. All were campy to the extreme, with lyrics referencing vast mythologies and several costume changes during performances. And most importantly — all were female-fronted.
Music has always been the way my father and I communicate. It is easy for my mother and I to tell each other what we’re thinking, that we care for each other. But my father is not a sappy person, and trying to draw heartfelt declarations from him is like pulling teeth.
Instead, my father sits with me and plays his favorite bands, or, now that I live away from home, texts me songs he thinks I should hear.
This, of course, means that he loves me.
In the first decade of my love for these groups, I wouldn’t admit to anyone that I listened to them.
They were cheesy, melodramatic and not at all popular. Moreover, they weren’t part of a genre that girls my age were supposed to like, and I was already becoming aware of the way some of the girls in my classes were ostracized for being a bit odd.
