So Much Older Then

I don’t recall the exact age when my children had their first pangs of nostalgia—when they started saying things like, “Remember that time when…?” But it did come sooner than I’d thought, I would guess as early as 4 or 5 years old, and it’s not something I was really prepared for. (It was a kind of faint but distinct mirror image of another unexpected but mostly welcome result of having kids: revisiting forgotten feelings, even sense memories, from my own childhood.)

It got me thinking about my own old-soul tendencies when I was younger: the way I often seemed to relate to older people more than my own age cohort; my love for old movies and music; my attempts to imitate my grandfather’s sartorial style (i.e., cardigans, guayaberas, thrift-store slacks). It was not so much a precociously mature “I can’t wait to grow up” feeling as it was a quasi-morbid fascination with aging, with feelings of regret and roads not taken—an awakening not only to the fact that time is passing but that this passage has great, unimagined costs that my young mind tried to imagine.

I think this strain of advanced-age imagination must be an affinity I share with some of my favorite songwriters, because I recently realized that I’ve been collecting what I would call “young person’s old-people songs” for years. There are enough of them, in fact, that I can offer a taxonomy of types of young-person-writes-about-aging songs.

The first category encompasses entirely normal youthful nostalgia, like Brecht’s “Remembering Marie A.,” a pointedly unsentimental yet cosmically moving look back at a lover he barely remembers which he wrote when was 31, or “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” in which at the ripe age of 21 he was already looking back wistfully at all the friends with whom he spent carefree hours in his youth and whom he resolutely expects never, ever to see again. That last one hit me especially hard when I first heard it in high school on Peter, Paul & Mary’s Album 1700, precisely because that’s an age when you start to think (or I did, anyway) about the impending scattering of your friend group. They’re both great songs, but they introduce one key aspect of the youthful-old-person genre: They are bleak to a fault. They imagine, in the case of Brecht, total oblivion, or in the case of Dylan, total disconnection. I would argue that these are not songs older songwriters would write, even if they wished they could.

The second category is in character songs in which the writers sing from the point of view of the aging/aged person. Leaving aside countless examples from musical theatre (“Paciencia y Fe,” “More I Cannot Wish You,” “Liaisons),” my favorite in this slot is probably Tom Waits’s “Martha,” a brilliant bit of old-timey hokum which imagines two retirement-age folks’ belated reunion, written when he was all of 23 but already sounded like a broken-down carny. (The hanging cadence of the final outro, “I remember quiet evenings trembling close to you,” is an apt, ripe detail that perhaps only a young writer would include.) I would also include Paul Stookey’s exquisite jazz would-be standard “Whatshername,” written when he was 30 but already contemplating middle-aged compromise; or Harry Chapin’s deathless “Cat’s in the Cradle,” written when he was 32 but prophetically sketching his son’s future estrangement from his mostly absent father; and, to cite at least one musical theatre touchstone that was huge for me, Stephen Sondheim’s “The Road You Didn’t Take.” Though Sondheim was 40 when he wrote it for Ben Stone, a 50-something character in Follies, I’ve always heard the bitterly sparkling “Road” as an entry in the imagined-aging sweepstakes, perhaps because it’s not just a contrast in age but in success; Sondheim was at the top of his game, writing a song about a failure who was ironically celebrating the closing-off of options as the years passed:

You take your road
The decades fly
The yearnings fade, the longings die
You learn to bid them all goodbye
And oh, the peace
The blessed peace
At last you come to know

That all seems too harsh by half, but like a bracing aftershave, it stings in the best way. I have wondered, ever since I first fell for this song in my 20s: Is that how it’s going to go? I don’t think Sondheim knew when he wrote it either—and I don’t think, given the kind of valedictory stuff he actually did write in his dotage, that he would have seen Ben Stone in the same light if he'd revisited him from that vantage point.   

Then there are the songs that project forward—in which young writers write from their youthful vantage point about what old age might be like. The obvious king of this genre is Paul McCartney’s “When I’m 64,” which he allegedly began writing when was 14. I would also include Simon & Garfunkel’s sweet, Gymnopedie-like “Old Friends” (written by Paul when he and Artie were all of 24), Harry Nilsson’s plaintive “Don’t Forget Me” (he was 33, which, at the pace he lived, was already middle age), Jacques Brel's tender/brutal "Old Folks" (written when he was 34), and Randy Newman’s bitter “Old Man”—arguably a slightly different case, as it’s the song of a young man to his dying father. I include it here because I feel it’s typical of the pointedly unsentimental, precociously jaded attitude I feel in many these songs, as the young atheist who sings the song seems to be rubbing the absence of a comforting faith in his father’s face:

There won’t be no God to comfort you
You taught me not to believe that lie
You don’t need anybody
Nobody needs you
Don’t cry, old man, don’t cry
Everybody dies

Precocity is also the key to songs I would characterize as prematurely over it, of which the most striking examples are Faye Webster’s “Run and Tell,” a rueful song in a Gillian Welch mode in which the 16-year-old singer sang, “Run and tell my father/Run and and tell him I’m giving up/It’s a part of getting old and I’m halfway there/Just one more step and I’ll regret how much I care.” The Mt. Everest of this genre, though, has to be Jackson Browne’s oft-covered “These Days,” also written at age 16, in which he is already sounding world-weary as a Melville sailor, with couplets like, “I stopped my rambling/I don’t do too much gambling these days,” and, “I’ve stopped my dreaming/I won’t do too much scheming these days.” What kind of high schooler feels “I’ve been losing so long,” or, “I wonder if I’d see another highway”?

One I can heartily identify with, if I’m honest. I now look back at my own similar teenage self-dramatization in much the way that (a 23-year-old) Dylan obviously did when he wrote the memorable line from “My Back Pages”: “But I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now.”

In 2009, not long before my first son was born, I wrote a song about the preciousness and passing of time, which reflected both backward and forward. I was 41, so neither young nor especially old. I leave it here as a sort of closing thought.

Hush your crying, dry your eyes
Let the moment go where
All of the moments before it went
Where the past is sent

 

Crack a window, kill the light

Let the evening lull us
Into a sleep where we breathe as one
A hard day, now it’s done 

There’s no reason to hurry, for what it’s worth
We’ve got all the time in the world

Every step means one less step
Every breath gets taken
None of us thinks of our life that way
Though we may one day

Learned indifference, willful joy
None of these will save us
We cling to as much as our arms will bear
That’s why arms are there

There’ll be nothing to worry us on this earth
We’ve got all the time in the world

Father Time should be old by now
He still outruns us all somehow

Sit for supper, say your prayers
Remember those whose raised you
High as they figured a child should grow
The rest is yours to show

All the sound and the fury that start at birth
Give us all the time in the world
There’ll be nothing to hurry us on this earth
We’ve got all the time in the world