Harry Chapin’s ‘Tangled Up Puppet’: the ballad for a lost daughter
Tackling the subject of parenthood in your music is a rocky road for any musician to go down. Sure, it’s fertile territory, a universal subject that affects all of us. At its best, music about it can hit like a train; just look at the likes of ‘She’s Leaving Home’, ‘Father & Son’, and, comprehensively dwarfing all of them, ‘When She Loved Me’ from Toy Story 2. However. It’s probably best to treat music about your kids like photos of your kids. Sure, a few of them are cute, but it gets old very quickly. I mean, Stevie Wonder couldn’t make a palatable album about his kids, and if he can’t, then I’m not holding out much hope for 1970s folk-rock also-ran Harry Chapin.
Yes, his song ‘Tangled Up Puppet’ is affecting. It’s the story of watching your daughter grow up and go from a child who needed and adored you to a teenager who very much does not. You wonder what went wrong and where that little girl who you used to read stories to went and yadda-yadda-yadda. Sure, you might shed an errant tear if it catches you unawares, but so can charity adverts and Strictly Come Dancing. If a piece of art hammers an almost universal experience hard enough, it can wring a response from anyone.
That may be the point of it, but in all forms of art, the line between being affected and being manipulative is vanishingly small. What matters is where you draw that line. Is the movie Marley & Me a famous tear-jerker because it tells a story that resonates with people, or (spoilers) because it shows a cute dog dying? I think it’s the latter reason, and I can’t help but draw the comparison because I feel the same way about this song.
I don’t think it was written in bad faith, at least. It was written by Chapin and his wife, the poet Sandy Chapin, about their real-life daughter Jaime. It was a real-life experience that all of them went through. However, I don’t believe the song was written because they needed to tell that story. I think it was written because it would make people cry, and I have two reasons for this. The first is that they’d danced exactly this dance before. Literally the year before, in fact.
In 1974, Chapin had the biggest hit of his career, topping the Billboard Hot 100 with ‘Cat’s In The Cradle’. This is a song about a parent lamenting how their child is growing up too fast and how they wish they could have those innocent times of childhood back. Sound familiar? In the case of ‘…Cradle’, it’s a son they’re talking about. That’s basically the only difference.
The second is the fact that six years later, Abba would knock exactly this kind of song out of the park with ‘Slipping Through My Fingers’. One of Benny and Bjorn’s countless masterpieces, ‘Slipping Through My Fingers’ cuts out the treacly sentimentality that bogs down ‘Tangled…’, focusing on the small, telling details with a novelistic eye for detail. A school bag swung over the shoulder, a distant smile, sleep in the eyes. Its power comes from its relatability and not the wailing melodrama of Chapin’s “princess paradise on the wings of a dove”, whatever that means.
Again, the line between being moved by art and being manipulated by art is a thin one. There are far worse examples of the latter than this one, and if you hear it and hear parents genuinely lamenting a lost connection between them and their daughter, more power to you. Based on their career and the example set a few years later by another parent doing the same thing, I don’t hear a genuine lament. I hear two very savvy songwriters doing their damndest to expand their established brand by going after parents’ heartstrings. I wish I didn’t.
