Ask your parents to play the album they loved at your age. It’s a window into who they were before you showed up.

Your parents had a whole life before you and most of the evidence is gone. Music is the exception, because it still plays, and it carries what they were like at your age in a way their stories usually do not: who they were trying to be, what they thought was cool, what they felt misunderstood about. Playing it is less a history lesson than a door.

Ask for the album rather than the song, and listen to the whole thing with them in the car. Ask what was happening the year it came out. The stories tend to come out sideways once the music is going.