Broken Record · KMIH 889 The Bridge

songs that changed the way we look at music with Dad

May 29, 2024·33 min·2 clips

Ellie's dad reveals how Elton John's 'Benny and the Jets' first made music feel super cool and current to him as an eight-year-old.

Dad gets the focus this time. Ellie opens with Benny and the Jets, then asks Ryan why that Elton John record changed the way he looked at music. He goes straight to childhood. Music was always around in his family, but this one came tied to holidays, mayhem, and his mom's huge family. Thirty-two first cousins gives the memory its proper scale. Ryan remembers the youngest aunt, still in high school, who babysat, seemed impossibly cool, and kept the album in the back bedroom. The story stays loose and warm. Ellie lets him ramble through the family scene, then gently steers him toward the next song without losing the live-radio charm. Def Leppard turns into a project memory. Ryan talks about building his mom a wooden recipe box, adding a tiny pull-up light, taping on a battery, and somehow linking the whole thing to Photograph. It is such an oddly specific detail that it works. He admits he does not really know why it stuck, except that the song belonged to a fun, newly electric stretch of time. Ellie is amused. She had not imagined him as a Def Leppard fan, while he figures everybody probably was once the music took over. Then Beat It arrives big. Ryan places Michael Jackson as huge in the 80s, and Ellie keeps the conversation moving in her quick on-air rhythm. The songs start to feel less like a ranked list and more like little rooms he can still walk into: relatives, homemade objects, back bedrooms, records playing loudly enough to change the air. By the end, respect is the note that lingers. Ellie and Ryan close with thanks, a first-time-caller joke, and the familiar Broken Record signoff for KMIH 88.9 The Bridge.

As heard by us

A warm Broken Record episode where Ellie and her dad trace Elton John, Def Leppard, and Michael Jackson through family memory and first pop awakenings.

Broken Record turns a father-daughter playlist into a modest, affectionate map of first musical shocks. Ellie brings on her dad, Ryan, to talk about songs that changed how he heard music, beginning with Elton John's "Benny and the Jets" as a childhood family memory: a cool young…

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Press play for a dad-led tour through the songs that made music feel bigger.

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