It’s easy to take something for granted when you grow up in close proximity to it. Every now and then I wonder how weird it is for kids of celebrities to see their parents, or their parents’ work, talked about by so many people who don’t even really know them. Truth is, even though my parents are far from famous, they are known in certain remote circles. So I have had a taste of that. And from time to time it really hits home to me the sort of honor it is to be a daughter of Michael & Sally O’Connor.

The most recent example came when I was transferring their lyrics to an iPad. This project is to give Mom better visibility on the words when she’s sharing in concert.

Hopefully it will encourage her to retire the old lyric binder, with pages so creased and worn that the edges look more like aged felt than paper.

In the process of digitizing the lyrics, I retyped everything, double checked for my own typos, then played around with formatting a good bit. The project only took me a few days, but in the process I rediscovered my parents’ music.

Yeah, rediscovered. If you grew up with Hey God and Come Meet The Author of Life playing on loop for a decade while you’re going to sleep, you might want to get a few years’ distance from the albums, too. So by the time I began digitizing, over a dozen years later later, the lyrics struck me like it was my first time hearing them.

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