“Dad, can I play you a song I wrote?” said my son Lucas this afternoon.

Here he is above doing it a second time, for the camera. He wrote down the lyrics to his song, “It Was Love,” on the notepad on the counter. It’s an amazingly good song for an 11-year-old who just picked up the guitar this summer.

Notice how faded that Avett Brothers concert tee is. Here’s a post from November 2013, when it was brand-new because I bought it for him at the concert they held in our town. Excerpt:

So we were standing in the darkness under the moon and the pine trees tonight, with the band about half an hour into their set, and Lucas was in front of me, and then he turns and plants his head into my chest, sobbing, saying, “I didn’t think I would love it like this.”

The power of music. I had tears too, thinking about how those chords, those harmonies, that power on the stage moved a little boy to tears. He couldn’t talk about it. All throughout the show, he was so moved he couldn’t speak, or even look at me. We’ve been home for an hour, and he still can’t talk about it. He’s going to be a musician one day, I know it. I liked music a lot when I was a kid, but what the music did to that little boy tonight was something that was beyond me at that age. It’s a beautiful thing to see. I bought him an Avett Brothers concert t-shirt, and gave it to him on the walk back to the car. You’d have thought it was a golden fleece.

I hear him in his bedroom these days practicing the opening bass and guitar parts (all on his guitar) to the Meters’ “Cissy Strut,” and think that that’s one funky little white boy. I’m so proud of him, and excited to see him finally discover his thing. He has labored in his older brother’s shadow for so long, and now he’s coming into his own. What a pleasure it is to think back to that night under the stars where the Avett Brothers’ music plowed the ground of his heart and planted a seed.