Like many 14-year-old girls these days, my daughter, Sadie, loves the singing star Taylor Swift. When Sadie’s in my car, she plays Taylor’s entire song list and we are in serious concert mode. When she’s singing, her hands are flinging and her head is swinging.

And I’m just driving.

After she played a Taylor song that I had never heard before, she looked at me and said, “Dad, isn’t Taylor Swift great?”

“She’s OK,” I said, “but play me some Karen Carpenter if you want to hear great.”

“You’re lucky I love you,” my daughter snapped with that typical teenage face that every parent has seen before.

I was going to ask her to play some Elvis Presley, but Sadie already thinks I was born in the Stone Age and she’s almost right about that. Once I tried to tell her about my eight-track tape collection and I think she believed it was something that had been invented back in the day when dinosaurs had roamed the earth.

We were going to a basketball game recently and she caught me tapping my fingers on the steering wheel to a Taylor Swift song. “See, you really do like her!” She shouted. I looked at her and made my best impression of a soured teenage girl’s face and left it at that.

The other day I was thinking about how Sadie must feel when she’s totally locked in to every word of every song of her favorite singer. She’ll crank up the volume so loud I could feel my driver’s side door vibrating against my leg. She is in the zone, right down to the bone. To describe the way she looks, I think of the title of a song by Alicia Keys.

“This girl is on fire!”

To be honest, I love putting up with Taylor Swift singing in my car because I see how her music makes my daughter so happy. In this crazy world we live in, what else can be a healthy escape from reality for teenagers than listening to their favorite music?

Back in my day, when I wanted to feel the energy of what’s now called classic rock, I kicked up some Creedence Clearwater Revival, Grand Funk Railroad and Steppenwolf. When my mood changed, I played Tommy James and the Shondells or Lionel Richie. Now I like listening to country music and I go to concerts to hear tribute bands play AC/DC, Foreigner and Bob Seger. For a couple of wonderful hours, I lose myself into a world of ear-piercing electric guitars, heart-pounding drums and full-throttle vocals. Sometimes, I’ll listen to soft love songs depending upon my mood.

I had the good fortune to write a preview for this newspaper about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band Styx. I interviewed keyboardist Lawrence Gowan and I asked him if he ever gets tired of performing the same songs for the past 50 years.

“Although the words and the melodies are the same,” he said, “we have new experiences each day that bring these songs into another meaningful understanding.” Gowan’s explanation made me think of American poet Walt Whitman and a poem he had written over 150 years ago.

In “Song of Myself,” Whitman wrote, “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, … Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.”

The words of old poems and the overplayed lyrics of songs can be dismissed as meaningless to us today, but tomorrow they can bring significant relevance to what we might be feeling at a certain moment. Whitman explained that his poetry might be untranslatable when we first read it, but somewhere and someday, we’ll be able to understand his words as we relate them to what’s going on in our lives.

When she sings the words to Taylor’s tunes, Sadie’s someday is today for her. For me, someone like John Denver is both my yesterday and my today.

A week or so ago, my daughter and I were coming back from watching another high school basketball game. She surprised me by playing the song “Perfect” by Ed Sheeran that, in my opinion, is the best love song ever written and recorded. Together we began to sing the song as loud as we could, and as we got to the end, I felt myself wiping a tear off the corner of my eye. I realized right then and there that I was having a “perfect” moment with my daughter.

To Sadie, we were just doing a singalong together, but to me, I was traveling back to a time when I called her my Little Guppy and every night I would take Biscuit, her favorite stuffed animal, and make him dance across her bed and sing silly songs I made up that left both of us laughing until I turned the lights out in her room.

I stayed on Memory Lane with her a little longer. I recalled the day the training wheels came off her bike and I cheered as she pedaled down the driveway all by herself. I remembered the time she auditioned for the lead role in the play “Annie” and she had to sing a solo. Her nerves got the best of her and I could barely hear her voice.

“I was pretty bad,” she said to me after she returned to her seat. I took her hand and squeezed it. To this day, I don’t know if I have ever been any prouder of her than at that moment. She was learning that effort doesn’t always result in desired success; nevertheless, the willingness to try something that is a test of courage is a personal victory regardless of the outcome.

I look forward to the next time this dad and his daughter are traveling down the road to anywhere because I’ll be perfectly happy listening to songs I don’t like very much.

I’ll blame that on Taylor Swift.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.