Every hard rocker needs at least one tender ballad in their repertoire.

To some extent, parents, throughout all the children wrangling and raising, often must cast away their own rebellious sides and adopt a more straight-laced approach to life. For example, upon having children I had to put my carefree days of dining on whiskey and wasps behind me.

But that’s not always the case, as shown in this viral video of an unassuming 61-year-old father singing at his daughter’s wedding reception.

The father of the bride, Susumu Takahashi, begins by telling the guests that he performs vocals for a hard rock band. Everyone of course laughs looking at his current clean-cut paternal image. Then, he announces that he will perform “Ito,” originally sung by Miyuki Nakashima.

The laughs quickly turned to applause as his dulcet tones professionally navigated this difficult ballad.

The wedding took place back in 2014 and this video was posted to YouTube by the father in late 2016. However, a recent tweet of it put the performance back in the spotlight, garnering hundreds of thousands of likes and over 60,000 comments, mostly of praise such as:

“I love the part where he goes, ‘Taaaa’ in ‘Dokoni itaaaaano.'”
“He’s a great singer.”
“Pretty high voice. Metal singer?”
“Cool! I could hear elements of hard rock but he did the song well.”
“I’d go see him live.”
“That’s so cool I cried!”
“Lovely voice! What a romantic elderly man!”
“He kind of stole the spotlight from his daughter, didn’t he?”

Looking at the video with cynical eyes, you could possibly build a narrative that Takahashi, presented with a mic and captive audience, decided to steal his daughter’s thunder for his own personal glory. It’s also understandably easy to jump to that conclusion when looking at the video and how the bride is completely obscured by the camera angle the entire time.

▼ “Enjoy the most special day of your life! Now, go sit behind that guy with the big head.”

However, I think that’s an unlikely scenario given the song choice, which strongly appears to have been at the request of his daughter.

▼ Here is the original version by Miyuki Nakashima, a pretty far cry from “hard rock”

For comparison, here’s Takahashi and his band Bibsel performing something more in his own wheelhouse: Deep Purple’s “Highway Star.”

So its probably safe to assume this was a labor of love from father to daughter, and it once again shows that you can never judge a book by its cover, whether it’s a greying hard rocker or partially collapsed hot spring.

If you’d like to see Susumu Takahashi and Bibsel live, they seem to play at venues around Tokyo, and subscribing to Takahashi’s YouTube channel linked below would be a good way to keep up to date.

Source: Twitter/@JPS_luna_sgz, YouTube/Takahashi Susumu, Hachima Kiko
Top image: YouTube/Takahashi Susumu