Sometimes and Every Time

This week's objet d'eBay, a near-mint 45 of Dan Hill's mega-hit "Sometimes When We Touch," comes with a reminder that while everyone (male anyway, or female with a slight change) can make the same statement — as Hill does with his new autobiography — that I Am My Father's Son, it means something different for each person.

"Sometimes" is a syrupy, massively popular love song that seems odd when considered in terms of Hill's biography. He was the son of a complex father. Daniel Grafton Hill III was both the driving biography behind IV's music and, upon his passing from diabetes, the source for the ocean of agony that stood between the songwriter and his songwriting. Hill III was a black man in a mixed marriage who took his children to the all-white world of 1950s Canada. He was a father who told his son to stand up outside the home and sit down and be quiet within it.

It is the sort of mixed message that comes naturally from father to child and does spin off in fascinating and often compelling ways.