Artists whose peak period was middle-age

I consider "The Visitors" to have been ABBA's peak, by which time three of the group members were in their mid 30s.

personally i'm planning to peak around 43

― adult music person (Jordan), Tuesday, March 29, 2011 5:27 PM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah this is a good inspiring thread for any musician who hasn't done anything of particular note yet in their youth

Joseph Haydn composed many of his most famous and acclaimed works after he turned 60s,

Bach's "Die Kunst der Fuge" is by many considered to be the definitive culmination of his fugue work. He started work on it at 65 and worked on it until his death at 75.

Ella Fitzgerald did the first of her famous Songbook series of LPs at about age 39 and all the other great stuff she did on the Verve label post-dated that

Peggy Lee did "Fever" at age 38 and her second phase on Capitol Records, which was full of interesting work, stretched from her late '30s to her early '50s... though whether that was her peak period is highly debatable

Tina Turner certainly belongs on this thread...

jandek

the besnard lakes' latest album is an artistic triumph and the two main members are both (well) over 40

outrageous cherry are old as fuck and still putting out awesome recs

Scott Walker already been mentioned, but he comes to mind as someone who may well have peaked in old age - he's 68 now and as relevant to the modern music scene as he's ever been.

Outrageous Cherry

In two bands...Matthew Smith is great in the Volebeats too.

I'd say Aerial is the only album Kate Bush has produced in middle age so far.

― The Louvin Spoonful (WmC), Tuesday, March 29, 2011 2:51 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

Yeah, once again it my own failure to read the first post of the thread.... I was thinking in terms of middle of career age versus actual age.

like when somebody said Radiohead upthread I thought it was blasphemous that King of Limbs (they're pretty much middle-age NOW) could be their career high-light, but then summing their entire discog together, found that OKC & Kid A fit right into the middle of their career. anyways.

i've never put a hyphen inside "highlight" in my life until now

--Scott Walker already been mentioned, but he comes to mind as someone who may well have peaked in old age - he's 68 now and as relevant to the modern music scene as he's ever been.--

man, fuck that guy. wisconsin was bad enough before.

I have this half-baked idea that most artists lose their melodic gifts as they age; there are exceptions but I feel like it's true in most cases.

really? I feel like if anything artist decline at that age typically has more to do with creative fatigue or ego or ambition or pretentious experimentation or running out of things to say lyrically than losing the ability to write melodies.

well, I did say it was half-baked. But I'm thinking of Springsteen, Townshend, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, Petty, McCartney, Elton John, Brian Wilson, Prince, Bowie.

yeah...it's possible some of those guys simply don't write tunes like they used to but i feel like in most cases there are distinct other issues. if i had a better understanding of melody i wish i could really break it down and examine that theory, though, it's interesting.

if only there was an ilxor who was an expert on melody

Songwriters growing older and losing the ability to write engaging melodies

sonic youth?

^ their discog is so damn extensive.... elaborate? imo i consider their peak period to be murray st/sonic nurse, and at that point they were p much middle-age then as well. but i can't seem to find an ilxor that doesn't think daydream nation is their holy grail, and they recorded that... what, when they were in their 30's?

well, I did say it was half-baked. But I'm thinking of Springsteen, Townshend, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, Petty, McCartney, Elton John, Brian Wilson, Prince, Bowie.

Prince never really lost his melodic gift! Just listen to Emancipation, for example, it has some brilliant melodies. If he lost something, it was his gift as a cutting-edge producer.

Ian Hunter (if not quite at the peak w/Mott)
Paul Simon
Captain Beefheart (post-punk resurgence anyway, if not exactly peaking)

Isn't the Simon & Garfunkel era generally considered to be Paul Simon's peak period?

Did anyone say Jarvis Cocker yet?

Mark's waning-melody theory chimes with my thoughts listening to the King of Limbs that Thom Yorke couldn't write another Karma Police or Fake Plastic Trees with a gun to his head - his trick is to convince the world that he just doesn't want to but could totally pull it out of the bag if he felt like it. His other examples (except maybe Waits) all chime with me.

Isn't the Simon & Garfunkel era generally considered to be Paul Simon's peak period?

His 70s albums get a whole lotta love among people I know, and then Graceland was a pretty big deal at the time. Anything after that is generally only loved by Simon devotees, though (and imo it isn't as good as what had come before it).

I have this half-baked idea that most artists lose their melodic gifts as they age; there are exceptions but I feel like it's true in most cases.

I think more a matter of running out of ideas at a certain point. If they don't start until they are close to middle age, they may do great stuff then.

Mark's waning-melody theory chimes with my thoughts listening to the King of Limbs that Thom Yorke couldn't write another Karma Police or Fake Plastic Trees with a gun to his head - his trick is to convince the world that he just doesn't want to but could totally pull it out of the bag if he felt like it.

Still seems a bit weird considering "Kid A" arrived just three years after "OK Computer", and was basically just as devoid of good tunes as "King Of Limbs" is, even though it may have been considered groundbreaking and creative in a lot of other ways.

Isn't the Simon & Garfunkel era generally considered to be Paul Simon's peak period?

His 70s albums get a whole lotta love among people I know, and then Graceland was a pretty big deal at the time.

No doubt, but if you'd ask random people what was Paul Simon's peak period, I'm sure 95% of them would say the Simon & Garfunkel years. And it was his most commercially successful period as well.

Random people will probably consider Celine Dion to be more important than Radiohead. I am not sure if asking random people is always the right thing to do though...

Random people may also tend to prefer Elton John's middle age works such as "Sacrifice" and the new version of "Candle In The Wind" over his 70s work.

Yeah, for the purposes of this discussion, let's just consider us and not random people.

Huey Lewis always seemed like a really old guy when I was a kid, kind of surprised that Sports came out when he was in his early thirties.

Debby Harry was 32 when the first Blondie record came out.

She's a pretty good example. My best friend in high school kinda freaked out one day when he realized she was one year younger than his mother.

esp. with "sex symbol" status through at least the break of the 80s ... she'd be 40 starring in Videodrome

Those (i.e. not myself) who consider Peter Gabriel's solo work to be superior to his Genesis work may also go for him.

Gabriel as Genesis's frontman was interesting. Gabriel as an autonomous artist is ALL-TIME great. I guess he was about 30 when the 1980 record came out, which would make him 36 for So (which is probably his greatest commercial success). He seemed like an old guy to me in 1986, and now I'm one year older than he was then.

I would have thought Annie Lennox would count but she only turned 30 after "Be Yourself Tonight" so peak-era all 20s. She seems older.

Gabriel as Genesis's frontman was interesting. Gabriel as an autonomous artist is ALL-TIME great. I guess he was about 30 when the 1980 record came out, which would make him 36 for So (which is probably his greatest commercial success). He seemed like an old guy to me in 1986, and now I'm one year older than he was then.

I'd argue even "Up" is a great record, and when that one was released, Gabriel looked like a 500 year-old gnome.

Has there been a better example of a musician visably having aged so extremely between albums?

(of course, he did leave it 10 years between 'proper' albums, but some casual fans may still have been a bit shocked)

Robert Fripp aged about 20 years in the 10 years between 1984 Crimson and 1994 Crimson.

my theory regarding the melody thing has something to do with artists not wanting to repeat themselves. if you write something really hooky, it's probably going to be at least somewhat reminiscent of another melody, and maybe after a while writing less catchy lines is preferable to falling into your usual melodic traps?

Here's a theory: most artists' melodic sense is actually fairly limited. Melody writing in pop/rock music usually comes down to a bag of tricks that come naturally to the artist, and you hear plenty of artists essentially rip themselves off over and over again as their careers go on. Usually listeners don't object to it too much because the successful ones are able to change the environment enough to mask what is essentially a fairly limited compositional scope.

Does melodic decline come from an artist's attempt to break their own mold, with the result that they grasp beyond their innate melodic reach and come up empty?

― southern lights, Wednesday, 27 April 2005 23:01 (5 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
Southern lights OTM. It's seems almost like an idiot savant effect with many pop musicians, just doing it pretty effortlessly through their own unique set of comfortable patterns of neurological activity. But exhausting the possibilities of one's god-given bag of tricks spells the end. This also predicts the better longevity with trained composers, as they more often understand how each compositional trick in the book actually works, and can extend or reject them in almost endless permutations...

I say this as someone who loves garage-band simplicity, at least "for the initial singles and the debut LP before they lost it". Hell, many bands are at their most distinctive early on, precisely because they can hardly play.

― Nag! Nag! Nag! (Nag! Nag! Nag!), Thursday, 28 April 2005 00:37 (5 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Two great posts closing that other thread started by Mark.

PJ Harvey's newest album has, for me, her strongest set of melodies in over a decade, if not since 1993; notably, she said in interviews that she doesn't play guitar AT ALL except when writing songs (or performing / gigging) in an effort to keep her skill level just slightly above 'rudimentary' and thus maintain her ability to 'feel' melodies coming out of it. Danny from Embrace (yes, yes, I know) said something very similar to me about having a dry-spell for songwriting with acoustic guitar and then having a rush of inspiration when he started learning piano. So I think there's definitely something in this, and that musicians who can keep to a child-like level of skill re; actual playing-technique when it comes to songwriting props can potentially sustain or recapture that early melodic skill.

my theory regarding the melody thing has something to do with artists not wanting to repeat themselves. if you write something really hooky, it's probably going to be at least somewhat reminiscent of another melody, and maybe after a while writing less catchy lines is preferable to falling into your usual melodic traps?

I do reckon this is pretty much OTM.

One odd thing here is Neil Finn. His songs, to me at least, are still great, although he basically keeps on using the same ideas and formulas he has done ever since the early 80s.

Richard Thompson, maybe? You can argue over what's his peak (solo) period but Rumor and Sigh and You? Me? Us? are up there with his best stuff and he came out with those in his forties. and for sure he's never written a better song than "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" (1991).

i think there's a lot to be said for trying a new instrument or a new approach in order to inspire new ideas and to shake off your usual routines, but to actually equate a lack of instrumental ability w/good ideas is some bullshit

oh wow, geir otm'ed me on the topic of melody. my morning is made.