I listen to Alice’s Restaurant Massacree (Revisited) every Thanksgiving morning.
I used to hear it on the radio when I was younger, one of those regional, seasonal things that felt inevitable rather than intentional. Later, when radio stopped being part of my life, I kept the ritual anyway, but now with Spotify instead of a DJ on an oldies station. Eventually, I started making my boyfriend, now my husband, listen to it too. Not as a discussion or a lesson. Just as this is what happens on Thanksgiving morning.
To this day, it plays in our house while Thanksgiving morning is still quiet. Some people watch a parade before the food, before the guests, before the chaos. We have this weird little tradition that was never formally declared, it just became.
A Thanksgiving tradition that was never declared
For a long time, the song was present but unnoticed by my kiddo.
In previous years, Lucas didn’t really clock it. He was too little. His personal music awareness, let alone taste, hadn’t come online yet in any meaningful way. Songs were just noise adults put on in the background. He didn’t stop to listen, and he didn’t carry anything away with him. (Except Frozen… naturally.)
The year music taste came online
Six has been the year his music taste really switched on. Suddenly there are opinions. Favorites. Requests. (And if you know six-year-olds, requests aren’t really sweet, or gentle yet.) Music is no longer just sound. It’s something to notice, sort, and repeat.
For a while after this past Thanksgiving, Alice’s Restaurant lived in his head right alongside Rihanna and Elsa, which is a playlist I didn’t see coming but genuinely enjoy.
For weeks we’d hear from somewhere in the house a sweet little voice singing “you can get anything you want, at Alice’s Restaurant.” He only remembered that one line, but it was enough for him to belt out, and to ask me to replay the song every time we got in the car, when all I wanted was to put on Sia’s Christmas album. Something about Arlo, and the story he was winding his way through, stuck with my kid this year.
What Alice’s Restaurant is actually doing
If you’ve never listened to Alice’s Restaurant Massacree (Revisited), by American folk singer Arlo Guthrie, it’s worth explaining what’s going on.
On the surface, it’s a long, rambling monologue about a minor, absurd crime, littering, that spirals into an encounter with bureaucracy, authority, and the draft. The story keeps looping back on itself, growing more exaggerated and more repetitive as it goes.
That repetition isn’t accidental. The joke only works because it refuses to end. By the time it finally does, the systems being mocked have exposed themselves simply by insisting on being taken seriously for far too long.
It’s the Revisited version, a version that adds 4 minutes of storytelling and fast forwards 30 years into the future, that really brings the joke home. This is the version where the repetition stops being funny and starts being the point.
Right now, none of that is what the song is to Lucas. To him, it’s our Thanksgiving song. A familiar rhythm. The sound of adults laughing in the kitchen. A thing that belongs to that morning, which means it belongs to us.
One day, it won’t be just that.
Exposure before explanation
One day he’ll hear it again and realize that the absurdity sharpens into critique. That the joke keeps going because that’s the argument. That the humor is carrying anger, and the anger is carrying refusal. Refusal to comply with something simply because it presents itself as official, orderly, unquestionable.
He’ll understand why the ending lands the way it does. And he’ll realize he’s been carrying that story around for years.
I spend a lot of my time thinking and writing about language, AI, and how easily thinking gets outsourced. About how often fluency stands in for understanding, and how readily confidence gets mistaken for judgment.
So noticing when this song first landed mattered to me.
I do want to teach my kid critical thinking. I just don’t think it starts where we pretend it does. Watching this play out made something feel obvious in a way I trust. Familiarity came first. Meaning lagged behind. Interpretation will arrive later.
Critical thinking didn’t begin with explanation. It began with exposure. With letting a story exist in the house long enough to feel normal. With repetition before critique. With meaning waiting until the listener is ready for it.
Why this matters more in the AI era
Today, critical thinking isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the only thing that keeps you from confusing confidence with truth.
Alice’s Restaurant worked in 1967. The Massacree Revisited update was recorded for its 30th anniversary in 1996. It still works in 2026, another 30 years later, because it never tells you what to think. It doesn’t announce itself as Important. It just keeps talking. It circles. It exaggerates. It treats unquestioned authority with exactly the level of seriousness it deserves.
I don’t think one song turns into a worldview. I don’t think this guarantees anything. But hearing my kid wander around the house singing it, unprompted and mixed in with the rest of his emerging musical world, feels like one small thing arrived in the right order.
A story.
A question.
A reminder that rules are allowed to be ridiculous, and truth is rarely found in the loudest message you hear.
I don’t know what he’ll do with it later. I just like knowing it arrived when he was finally ready to hear it.
That feels like a decent place for critical thinking to begin.
If you have a spare 22 minutes and 26 seconds, it’s worth listening to Alice’s Restaurant Massacree (Revisited) on Spotify.