Disappeared Dad / Music

• In Ayreon: The Human Equation the protagonist's father is a womanizing jerk who left his mother long ago. He appears in his comatose hallucination to mock him ("Day sixteen: Loser"), the grudge the protagonist held on him was essential in igniting his rage and letting him wake up four days later.
• A Disappeared Dad is among the Wangst (Played for Laughs) of The Offspring's "She's Got Issues":
  You told me a hundred times how your father left and he's gone
  But I wish you wouldn't call me daddy
  When we're gettin' it on
• Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue", in which the abandoned son hunts down his father for giving him that name.
• Conway Twitty: His 1976 No. 1 hit, "The Games That Daddies Play," which touches on the important roles of fatherhood and the void a 7-year-old boy and his mother feel after the boy asks the mother for permission to go on a chaperoned camping trip with his friend and his father. The "games that daddies play" in the first sense is the boy wanting to participate in traditional "man" activities, such as hiking, fishing and having a man-to-man talk with his friend's father. The mother breaks down in tears, the trope kicking in – the boy's father had left her and the boy six years earlier and has since had no contact (nor attempted any) with either of them – realizing her son needs a positive father figure in his life. Whether the boy's request to go on the campout is left to the imagination of the listener; the song simply ends that the boy is "a victim of another kind of games that daddies play."
• Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Someday Never Comes" begins about the narrator reminiscing when he was a young boy watching his father leaving him and his mother for an unknown reason, only leaving with the false reassurance that "Someday, you'll understand." The song then transitions to the narrator having all grown up and in the process of leaving his own family, still just as lost and confused as he too tells his son that "Someday, you'll understand."
• "Hey Jude" was specially written by Paul McCartney for Julian Lennon, the oldest son of fellow Beatle John Lennon, to comfort him over his parents' messy divorce and his father's constant absence and emotional neglect.
• "Cat's In The Cradle" by Harry Chapin is this trope told from the dad's perspective. It's also a bit of a Tear Jerker. Although this one is less about a truly disappeared dad, but rather about one who was emotionally distant.
• Jason Meadows's 18 Video Tapes concerns a man who dies from an unspecified illness before his son is born. Before he dies, he makes a set of tapes-the titular 18 video tapes-to impart wisdom to his son from beyond the grave.
• In Pink Floyd's The Wall, Pink, the protagonist, grew up without a father because of his death overseas during World War II (just as lead singer Roger Waters's father did), leaving him with an overbearing mother and providing him with the very first brick in his emotional wall as mentioned in the song "Another Brick in the Wall Part 1".
  Daddy's flown across the ocean,
  Leaving just a memory;
  A snapshot in the family album.
  Daddy, what else did you leave for me?
  Daddy, what'd you leave behind for me?
• The Mexican group Mana, in the song "Relojito cucu" ("Cuckoo little clock") it's about the last moments of a kid with its father and how the family grew-up without him after the father death. By the way, lead singer Fher lost his own father as a kid, maybe the song its about his own story...
• Marie Claire D'Ubaldo's song "My father's eyes" ("Los ojos de mi padre", in Spanish) is from the POV of a girl who misses her father and angsts quite a bit about it.
• Part of the persona of Unknown Hinson is that he is named after his disappeared father: "Says right there on my birth certificate. Momma: Mrs. Hinson, Daddy, Unknown."
• Country music singer Red Sovine, whose specialty was recitations about truck drivers, recorded at least two songs about disappeared dads:
  • "Giddyup Go," which actually is told through the eyes of a "disappeared dad." A No. 1 country hit in 1966, the main protagonist is a truck driver whose wife and son had left him about 20 years earlier (and provided no contact information); to the son, who was very young when his parents' marriage ended, he was a "disappeared dad" ... until the day they had a chance meeting at a truckstop, the happy reunion told in the song's climax.
  • "Teddy Bear", about a young paraplegic boy who lost his father in a road accident a few months earlier. The boy, who uses his citizens-band radio to keep in contact with his father's former truck driving friends, says his dream of spending the summer on the road with his folks also died in the accident ... until the teary-eyed truckers decide to make his dream come true. The resulting song, recorded and released at the height of the CB-radio craze, was a No. 1 country smash (and minor pop hit) in the summer of 1976.
• Lupe Fiasco's He Say, She Say.
• AJ McLean's "Sincerely Yours," a case of Calling the Old Man Out.
• A recurring motif in the works of Tom Waits, whose dad ran out on the family.
• "Tiberius Rising", by Ookla The Mok, is from the perspective of a father who misses his now-grown son, Jimmy, and is almost an inversion of this trope, since it's the son who was always the distant one. If you pay attention to the subtext, you'll realize that Jimmy is James Tiberius Kirk.
• Belgian artist Stromae sings of an absent father and the excuses his mother makes up in Papaoutai (a phonetic spelling of papa, où t'es?, meaning daddy, where are you?), while the video shows a young boy singing to his present but silent dad. This is Stromae's own story, he saw his father only a very few times in his life, and he is quoted as saying his father was already gone for him before his death.
• "Biological Didn't Bother", by NBA star and part-time rapper Shaquille O'Neal, is a simplified version of Shaq's real-life abandonment by his biological father. The track ends with the words "Phil is my father", referring to his stepfather Phillip Harrison.^Postscript After Harrison's death in 2013, Shaq's feelings toward his biological father greatly mellowed, and the two have had cordial meetings since.
• "No Man's Land" by John Michael Montgomery. The father is out of the picture for unexplained reasons, and the song is mainly focused on the single mother trying to raise the family by herself.
• "Sk8er Boi" by Avril Lavigne has the line "Five years from now she sits at home, feeding the baby; she's all alone", which describes the unnamed girl who passed up the titular skater boy.
• In the ballad, "Waltz For My Father", the titular father impregnates the singer's mother and leaves: "And not a thing he left behind/Except for my sad blue eyes."
• Adele's Hello is one possible interpretation of this. Her father was known to have walked out on her when she was a toddler.
• "Rockabye" by Clean Bandit is about a single mother trying to raise her son by herself. The father is specifically stated to have run off somewhere.
• Everclear's "Father Of Mine" is about the singer wondering how his absentee father is doing. At the very end of the song, he mentions that he's now a father himself, and that he'll never let his daughter go through what he himself did.
• Karina's "16 @ War" begins with the line "Ain't no daddy's where I'm from, there's just mad mother's".
• Eminem's father left when he was just a baby, and several songs, most notably "My Name is," "Cleanin' Out My Closet," and "Headlights," address this and express a lot of anger towards his father.
• Billy Gilman's "Oklahoma" has a young child discovering his biological father in Oklahoma after having been separated from him early on.
• The Notorious B.I.G.'s father left Biggie's family at a young age. He addressed this occasionally, notably on "The What."
• Sum 41's song "Dear Father" is an open letter from Deryck Whibley to the father he never met.
  You're out there somewhere, I don't know if you
  Care at all, it seems that you don't
  It's as if the day will never
  Come, so you remain a complete unknown
• In Chad Brock's "Ordinary Life," a married man and father blindsides his wife by abandoning his family because he feels trapped by their banal routine. In the end, he calls from the airport at midnight, lonely and wanting to come home.
• "Girls" by Tricky is about Tricky's estranged father, Roy Thaws, who abandoned the family before he was born.
  You've never seen your dad, boy?
  I've never seen my dad, boy
  Without the Roy
• Little Simz' "I Love You, I Hate You", is all about her complicated relationship with her absent father. The circumstances surrounding his abandonment aren't delved into; the song is much more about how it affected her even into adulthood, and as the title implies, Simz rallies quite a lot. On one hand, she resents him for his absence and how he deeply hurt her and her family, being frustrated by her inability to ever confront him and say anything reconciliatory or otherwise. On the other hand, she still loves her father because he is still family, and ultimately wants to let go from the trauma and move on, not just because it's exhausting, but because she's finding new strength from the rest of her adult life.

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