Even stacked against the modest standards of his previous album,
Lollipops and Roses,
My Dad is a marginal early-'60s teen idol LP, despite -- or, for some listeners, because -- of the presence of the gushingly sentimental Top Ten hit title track. Much of the material could have been sung by pre-rock pop singers, the only difference being arrangements that are influenced, sometimes just very slightly, by the most tepid variety of early-'60s pop/rock. In fact, some of the songs were sung by pre-rock singers, with much of the program devoted to mildly rocked-up arrangements of standards like "Heart and Soul," "Linda," "I Only Have Eyes for You," "Goody Goody," "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby," "Try a Little Tenderness," "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah," and "Making Whoopee." In this respect,
Paul Petersen was something of a male vocalist in the pre-rock mold whose arrangements were modernized just enough to be marketed to early-'60s teenagers, resulting in an extremely dated sound fated to irrelevancy after the British Invasion.