Michael McDonald, 72, describes his voice as a “malleable” instrument: “Especially with age, it’s like you’re constantly renegotiating with it.”

Timothy White/Sacks & Co.

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Timothy White/Sacks & Co.

Michael McDonald, 72, describes his voice as a “malleable” instrument: “Especially with age, it’s like you’re constantly renegotiating with it.”

Timothy White/Sacks & Co.

Even Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Michael McDonald says he feels like an imposter sometimes.

“I don’t mean to be self-deprecating when I say this, but I never really understood why people gave me so much credit as a musician,” McDonald says. “I really am just, more or less, a songwriter who plays a little bit of piano.”

It’s an understatement. McDonald’s singular sound that has captivated audiences for generations and has given life to remixes, remakes and thousands of impressions from Tonight Show skits to The Voice.

His new memoir, What A Fool Believes, which he co-wrote with comedian Paul Reiser, chronicles McDonald’s childhood in Ferguson, MO., his early years as a session musician and his decades-long career as a member of Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers and as a solo artist.

Throughout his career, McDonald was known for crossover hits. His 1982 single, “I Keep Forgettin’,” cracked the top 10 of Billboard’s Pop, R&B and Adult Contemporary charts, and was later sampled by hip-hop artists Warren G and Nate Dogg in their 1994 hit, “Regulate.”

McDonald says that earlier in his career, he tended to avoid writing about himself directly in songs. But looking back now, he’s noticed a shift in his music, which he attributes, in part, to becoming sober in the mid 1980s.

“More than anything, I think what people who suffer from addiction share universally is that we’re kind of hiding from ourselves. We’re kind of hiding from our feelings,” he says. “I’ve learned in sobriety to slowly peel back different layers.”

Interview highlights

Jim Shea/Brian Moore/Sacks & Co.

Jim Shea/Brian Moore/Sacks & Co.

On his first band, Mike and the Majestics

It was Mike and the Majestics, and I soon got demoted, and it was just the Majestics. We started when we were all around 12. I think our first gigs happened more like when I was 13. And the other guys were a year and two older than me.

Back then, we were playing basement parties, birthday parties for girls we knew in the eighth grade. And then we graduated to fraternity parties, at a very tender age, which my mother was not happy about. And so she enlisted my father to come on as our manager — not before we were exposed to some of the rites of passage that we were probably too young to witness. … We thought we’d died and gone to heaven. Because the girls were all really cute, and the frat guys were out of their minds and they would pass the hat. … But then we had a curfew because we were all like 12 and 13 years old. And in the course of all this, we learned all the filthy lyrics to “Louie Louie” and songs like that were college staples.

On writing the Doobie Brothers’ song, “Takin’ It To The Streets,” which was inspired by gospel

The intro of the song just kind of popped in my head, and I couldn’t wait to get to the gig and set my piano up and pick the chords out on the piano. … It just felt like an opening to a gospel song and I loved gospel music at the time. … What better motif for that very idea of people falling through the cracks of our society and … and how do we do better by each other than a gospel song. … It took me a minute to come up with “Takin’ to the Streets” because that came from the idea that … we’ve got to do better by each other or this is what it’s going to come to. It’s going to be settled one way or the other. These kinds of progressive ideas and reforms don’t come easily, and they come by necessity. … We’re going to meet on the same plane one way or the other, maybe we can do it out of love for each other and consideration and empathy before we have to do it out of frustration.

On the realization that white artists were covering Black musicians’ songs and being praised for it

I think that was pretty much the experience of a lot of people in my generation growing up. White kids who thought that Pat Boone wrote, “Tutti Frutti.” We didn’t know any better, you know, because radio was so segregated, as was everything, in the United States at the time. It was a sad division in what really was such a strong part of our culture, you know, but it was always kind of isolated away from and giving credit to the people who really brought those art forms to America and, really gave America its own true artistic art form: Jazz and R&B music and gospel. …

For instance, the English invasion bands, we thought that they wrote those songs like, “It’s All Over Now” by The Rolling Stones was Bobby Womack and his brothers and had a group called The Valentinos, and that song was a No. 1 hit on Black radio when the Stones released it. … I never cease to be surprised by the roots of some music that I thought was more of a pop record, but that really has its roots in the blues tradition and was written by American artists who didn’t really enjoy the success of the song that other artists did.

On being big in the Black community

Whenever that was brought to my attention, by friends of mine who liked our music, I was really flattered by that. And I continue to be flattered because, to me, that’s really the test of anything I ever really desired to do was to represent, in my own way, what I truly believe is American music. To have that privilege of being able to do that and have it accepted by the audience who I believe created it, who invented it and brought it to all of us.

On how his voice has aged

The voice is a malleable instrument, at best, and especially with age, it’s like you’re constantly renegotiating with it. I find that at my age now, I’m just trying to figure out what my strengths are and what I can use to put the song across. I wish in some ways I could sing with the range or the sense of pitch or whatever it is I had when I was younger. But unfortunately, those things change over the years. …

I’ve been less reluctant to lower keys and stuff, and especially if it brings a better performance out of me, but I found that a lot of things have changed. … I have to kind of learn what still works for me when I’m singing, because I don’t want to be trying to sound like I used to sound and have that be obvious. I want to just be able to do what I do best now.

Sam Briger and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.

Many parents share photos and videos of children on social media: birth announcements, their kid making a mess at the dinner table, their milestones like a first step.

But there are potential dangers to constantly posting about your child online, says Leah Plunkett, a faculty member at Harvard Law School who specializes in children, family law and technology. In Plunkett’s 2019 book Sharenthood: Why We Should Think Before We Talk About Our Kids Online, she explains how adults can put children’s privacy and personal data at risk.

This phenomenon is called “sharenting,” says Plunkett. Legal scholars in her field use the term — a portmanteau of “sharing” and “parenting” — to describe “all the ways that parents, aunts, uncles, teachers, coaches and other trusted adults in a kiddo’s life transmit children’s private information digitally.” It can make kids vulnerable to identity theft and harassment. And as they grow older, it may undercut their ability to tell their own story.

Plunkett talks to Life Kit about the different harms of oversharing, how to post information about your kid safely and how to talk to loved ones about your limits. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Parents share a surprising amount of data about their kids online. A birthday photo, for example, can reveal a kid’s name, age and date of birth. What are some of the privacy concerns around that?

There is a thriving black market for personally identifiable information. Kids’ Social Security numbers, when combined with date of birth, name and address, are often good targets for identity theft. Most minors don’t have credit attached to their Social Security numbers, so [someone may be able to use them to] open fraudulent lines of credit.

Creditors don’t verify the age of applicants, so a bad actor could potentially open a credit card without anyone noticing until the kid becomes an adult and wants a card of their own. What are some other security risks?

There are tragic cases of stalking, bullying and harassment. They are rare but they do happen.

So someone could use social media to figure out where your kid lives, goes to school and their patterns and routines. They could also learn about their likes and dislikes and use them in an insidious way.

Other people don’t need to have information about the ins and outs of your child’s emotional and personal life.

You write in your book that children’s data is a form of currency. And there’s the adage that if a product is free, you are the product. What should adults think about when giving a company their child’s data? Or when reading the fine print on a social media platform?

Parents should be aware that they’re not going to know at the moment where a piece of information, photo or video, might go. When we click “I accept,” those agreements give companies and third parties a lot of latitude about what they can do with your data.

After my book came out, The New York Times ran a big investigative piece about the ways in which social media photos of toddlers and young children had been surreptitiously used to train facial recognition software. That’s one of many examples.

Also, at some point down the road, maybe somebody makes a decision about your child based on the stuff you’ve put out about them — how your child is doing at school, how they’re moving through the world. Maybe that is an individual human decision maker. Maybe that is an algorithmically driven data analysis product.

And when you mean decision makers, that could be a university recruiter or a hiring manager. And that may affect your child’s ability to tell their own story.

To themselves or to others in the future. If the world is figuring out significant things about who they are online and making projections about who they’re going to be, it can undercut their ability to figure that out for themselves.

Reading your book, it’s clear you’re not like a Luddite. You have kids, but you haven’t sworn off social media. How do you avoid oversharing the digital realm?

Since I started researching this topic, I adjusted my own personal compass to be very minimalist. I pretty much never post my kids on social media. If I do, you don’t see their faces or anything that would identify them. I don’t use full names. I don’t celebrate their birthday on social media. I don’t show the kids standing in front of where they go to school.

I follow a “holiday card-or-less” rule of thumb when sharing on social media: updates you’d be comfortable with anyone, from your great aunt to your boss, seeing. Information that’s not going to embarrass anybody and isn’t particularly private.

Personally, my wife and I are pretty tight about the pictures we share of our kid. How do we prevent other people, like family and friends, from taking photos of them at, say, a baptism or a birthday party, and posting it online?

For something like a baptism or another rite of passage, it’s probably impossible to get everyone to not celebrate their joy and pride by taking out a phone. But it is OK to make a gentle request. You might say: Thank you so much for being in this moment with us. To really be in the moment, we would request that you refrain from pictures or videos.

Some people will listen, some people won’t. Then make the call about whether or not it matters enough to you to follow up privately with the people who you see taking pictures and videos.

How do you model digital consent with your kids?

The conversation starts with very young kids. Explain what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and where the image or video is going. You might say something like, “Hey, we’re having a really great meal. We’re using a recipe your grandfather sent us. I’m going to take a picture for him. Everybody smile for grandpa.”

You could also ask your kid at a pretty young age, “are you OK with taking a photo? Anyone not feeling up for it?”

What questions should parents ask themselves before they hit post?

Are you posting a picture of your child in any state of undress? If you are, please don’t post it.

Are you sharing your child’s location, full name or date of birth? If you are, think about whether that level of detail is necessary for your post.

If your parents shared a similar post about you at this age, how would you have felt about it? If the answer is that it would have really bothered you, take another minute to think about what you need from this post.

What advice do you have for parents who often share photos and videos of their children and their lives on social media? Is it too late for them?

I had the same reaction when I started researching all of this, and I’m here to tell you, take a deep breath. Don’t panic. If you want to change, go back over your social media posts and take down what you’re not so sure about. Then make your settings private.

Please don’t be hard on yourselves. Since the dawn of time, parents have been making the best choices they can at any given moment, and then later being like, maybe I’ll do that differently going forward.

The digital story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual editor is Beck Harlan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.

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