Pancakes, Bacon, and Sick Licks

I’m eating breakfast in a diner, and a small boy seated next to me is staring at the plate of food in front of him.

I want to whisper to him: It’s good, you should try it.

But instead, I keep my mouth shut – not because it’s weird to whisper to small boys in diners, but because this boy is my five-year-old son, Harrison, and I know that if I say the wrong thing, he might not eat.

A few minutes earlier, Harrison said to our waitress, “Chocolate pancakes, please!”

When she brought them over to our table, his eyes widened. “These are ginormous!”

But then he spotted something unusual…a foreign entity on the very edge of his plate…the wrinkly, bubbly, reddish-brown reason why my boy is now squinting at his food like an old man trying to read a menu in a dimly lit room.

“Ummm…what’s that, Dad?”

“Bacon.” I say in the most neutral tone possible.

If I sound too excited, he might think I have an ulterior motive, like the time I tried to play up broccoli by calling it “dinosaur trees.”

“Do I like bacon?” he asks.

“I don’t know. I don’t think you’ve had it before.”

I turn back to my plate and stuff a forkful of food into my mouth as if everything is fine.

But everything is not fine…

He asked me for a PB&J sandwich the other day. I couldn’t find any regular bread in the pantry, so I made it on one of those Hawaiian sweet rolls.

When I set down his plate on the counter in front of him, he cowered in his chair at the sight of the “weird” bread.

“You’re going to love this!” I said. “It’s practically dessert.”

I ended up eating the sandwich myself.

Harrison is the kind of kid that will scarf down a pepperoni roll at the pizza shop but refuses to eat a regular slice no matter how many times I tell him, “If you roll up a pizza slice, it tastes just like a pizza roll!”

He’s the kind of kid that loves chicken nuggets and would gladly eat them for dinner every night. But any other kind of chicken is, quite literally, off the table.

Meanwhile, his three-year-old sister, Ruby, will go beast-mode on a grilled chicken drumstick slathered in barbecue sauce, which ends up all over her face, of course. It’s a beautiful sight, and my wife and I pray that Harrison’s pickiness does not become a hand-me-down.

But back to the diner…

I take another bite of my food and watch Harrison from the corner of my eye.

He pokes the bacon with his index finger as if to see if it’s alive.

He’s gonna completely freak. I know it. He’s going to make some loud, rude EWWWW sound, and everyone in this place is going to give us the oh-so-you-have-one-of-those-kids look.

I scan our neighboring tables to see if any of these innocent bystanders are aware of the time bomb that’s about to go off.

But Harrison doesn’t freak out.

Not yet, at least.

Instead, he picks up a piece of bacon.

I stop eating.

I stop breathing.

He brings it to his mouth.

He takes a nibble.

I don’t dare turn my head. My gaze is locked on a random stack of plates behind the counter. But my shoulders creep up to my ears. I cringe in anticipation.

“Mmm, salty!” Harrison looks up at me, wide-eyed like before. “I like bacon.”

“Oh yeah?” I say, glancing in his direction.

Inside I’m like this:

Five minutes later, he’s taking pieces of pancake and bacon and making mini pancake-bacon sandwiches.

And he thought the Hawaiian bread was weird?

I look again at the people sitting nearby.

HELLO?!?! Did you see what just happened??

Okay, so no one seemed to notice.

But it’s still a big deal...not just because Harrison now eats a new food, albeit not the most nutritious of delicacies...it’s a big deal because I learned an important lesson, and it applies to music, too.

(That’s right, this email is not just about pancakes and bacon.)

The lesson is that you can’t force someone to like something, especially when it comes to expanding their palate, both with music and with food.

I know it sounds obvious when I write it out like that.

But it's an easy lesson to forget as a parent and as a teacher.

So, I will try to remember that the best I can do is put different kinds of music in front of you and give you the time and space to poke, nibble, and maybe even take a full-on bite.

It's the exact approach I took with my Sick Licks collection. Instead of just focusing on one genre of music, I created a classic jazz edition, a modern jazz edition, and a blues edition.

My hope for you is that you check out the examples from each category on the website linked below.

Maybe you hear something that’s different from the way you usually play. Maybe you get an idea for how to combine some of these genres to create a new pancake-bacon sandwich concoction of your own.

And for those of you who’ve read this far, I’ll give you a little extra incentive to broaden your horizons…

If you decide to purchase Sick Licks this week, you can use code TRYSOMETHINGNEW at check out and save 20% on any individual lick pack or bundle:

https://go.jeffschneidermusic.com/sick-licks

Enjoy!

Jeff