You Can't Be 20: Old-Person Songs by Young People

A topic that interests me: relatively young people writing songs that make them sound old long before the fact.

That feeling has been a big part of my own life. When I worked in a record store in the mid-'80s, I was 25; most everyone else was five years younger, and at the time--I realize how ridiculous this is now--five years felt like 20. When I started teacher's college a few years later, I was 30 and most everyone else was in their early 20s. After a few years of supply-teaching, I started full-time at the age of 37. Because I was joining an older staff where a number of teachers were close to retirement, I felt young again for a couple of years, but as soon as they left and were replaced by teachers in their mid-late 20s, I was back to feeling old again. That didn't change for the next 15 years. 40 now seems quite young.

There are so many songs like this. Neil Young's been writing them almost from the start. He was 23 or 24 when he wrote "Sugar Mountain," 26 when he wrote "Old Man" and "Heart of Gold." ("On the Way Home" might count too.) Lots more after that.

"Darling Be Home Soon" ("A quarter of my life is almost past"--John Sebastian, 21)
"These Days" ("I seem to think a lot about the things that I forgot to do"--Jackson Browne was 16 when he wrote that)
"Goin' Back" ("I think I'm returning to all those days when I was young enough to know the truth"--Carole King, 24)
"Who Knows Where the Time Goes" (Sandy Denny, 20)
"In My Life" (John Lennon, 25...not a personal favourite, but obviously it fits)
"The Circle Game" ("We're captive on the carousel of time"--Joni Mitchell, 24; "Both Sides Now" kind of fits too)

I thought of a whole bunch one day a few months ago; of course, I'm forgetting them all now. I'll add some more as I remember.

"Landslide"

"Dream On"

"Landslide," yeah: "And I'm getting older too" (Stevie Nicks, not yet 30).

"As Tears Go By" (Jagger-Richards-Oldham, 20-20-20)
"Yesterday" (McCartney, 22)
"Young and Innocent Days" (R. Davies, 25)

R.E.M.'s "These Days" is a bit like this too, in a backhanded way: "We are young, despite the years, we are concern, we are hope, despite the times" -- young people (Stipe is 26) singing in the voice of an old person feeling young

26 when he wrote "Old Man"

i thought he was "24 but so much more"?

Always loved Sinead O'Connor's "How could I possibly know what I wanted when I was only twenty-one?" from "The Emperor's New Clothes"--24 being an age of wisdom and calm reflection.

(xpost) He must have written it a couple of years before it showed up on Harvest.

Ray Davies had this market cornered.

"And When I Die" (Laura Nyro, 17)

"just bundle up my coffin 'cos it's cold down there, crazy cold way down there"

"They Are All In Love," the Who / Pete Townshend, who wrote it when he was 29 or 30 (or is that too old for the purposes of this thread?).
"Goodbye all you punks, stay young and stay high. Hand me my checkbook and I'll crawl off to die."

Many XPs

Steven Tyler was about 25 when he sang these pearls:

Every time when I look in the mirror
All these lines on my face getting clearer
The past is gone
And it went by, like dusk to dawn
Isn't that the way?
Everybody's got their dues in life to pay

...

Half my life's in books, written pages
Live and learn from fools and from sages

Richard Thompson stuff like End or the Rainbow and Young Man in an Old Man.

Also, this example isn't as extreme but it now gives me a little chill to think Frank Sinatra sang "Now the days are short/I'm in the autumn of my years" when he was 49, because I'm older than that.

For Townshend, I think of "You're so alive and I'm nearly dead" from "I Can't Reach You" (he would have been 21 or 22).

True! "It Was a Very Good Year" is the definitive looking-back song, and he was still a lot younger than he sounds.

Lee Hazlewood wrote "My Autumn's Done Come" when he was 37.

Janis Ian's "At Seventeen" may not necessarily be an old person's song but given its wistful quality one would think the singer is older than 24

Alice Cooper was a very old 18.

I know The Corporation wrote it but "I Want You Back" comes to mind given that MJ was only 11 when he was delivering those lines

...or MJ doing "Who's Loving You" on the flip!

xp I do not recall lines forming on my face and hands at 18. That was more of a 26 kind of thing.

Diana Ross singing "Reflections" at 23.

Paul Anka wrote the lyrics to "My Way" at age 27. If you say, well, he wrote it for Sinatra - Sinatra was only 53.

Van Morrison at 22-23 writing Astral Weeks, Slim Slow Slider, and Madame George

Bob Mould - Compositions for the Young and Old (mid-late 20s), These Important Years, Hardly Getting Over It (mid 20s). Probably a bunch more, he was always kind of an old fart.

I'm wondering if this tendency (among boomers) was a sort of second-guessing of "never trust anyone over 30," or an attempt to forestall the criticism? I'm thinking that a later '80s/new wave sensibility can only regard aging with horror (several Cure songs do this, though "In Between Days" is the only example that comes to mind).

The Church's "Almost With You", penned by a 27 year-old:

See the dust that fills your sleep
Does it always feel this chill, near the end?

'But I remember, when we were young..." - 21-year-old Ian Curtis

I'm wondering if this tendency (among boomers) was a sort of second-guessing of "never trust anyone over 30," or an attempt to forestall the criticism?

Could be. Most all of the songs I named date to the mid-late '60s; I'm guessing there was just so much happening so fast, a lot of these people felt prematurely old.

Dylan, as always, goes his own way: "I was so much older then..."

suspect the source of this tendency in the 60s was more to do with the singer/songwriters imitating 20s/30s/40s blues musicians, who also wrote old-person songs when in their twenties.

"Both Sides Now" reads to me as an older person's song, but it was released when Joni Mitchell was 25.

"Lather" by Jefferson Airplane, "Where Did My Spring Go?" by the Kinks, "Pushing Thirty" by Peter Hammill, "Remember a Day" (and maybe "See Saw") by Pink Floyd, all by writers in their 20s; but the Hammill song at least is not nostalgic but defiant about aging, so maybe not thematically in the same area?

Katie Melua's "The Closest Thing to Crazy" used to make me roll my eyes a lot:

"This is the closest thing to crazy
I have ever been
Feeling twenty-two, acting seventeen"

but today I learned it's actually a Mike Batt song lol ffs

kanye: "we wasn't supposed to make it past 25, joke's on you we're still alive"

Jacques Brel wrote “Le Moribond” (source of “Seasons in the Sun”) when he was 31 or 32.

I think he wrote quite a few old geezer songs but they're character songs so I'm not sure they count?

Mostly character songs tbf.

Fair. Hard to draw that line sometimes though.

I mean you’re probably right that Jacques Brel didn’t believe he was dying

this whole thing kinda reminds me of those Twitter threads of people in the 50's and 60's who looked like old men in their early thirties, people just seemed to age faster back then

They did, they were mostly dead before they were 70.

Yeah, I'd count a song where someone's in character as something separate. On a similar note, "Reflections" as a song certainly fits, but having been written by someone other than the singer, that, in my mind, is separate too.

I mentioned "Both Sides Now" too as a possibility: not specifically about feeling old, but it has an old-person's elegiac voice.

All songs are written in character to some degree but that's a whole other discussion

"Memories of a Rock n' Rolla" by Traffic and "Old Wild Men" by 10cc, both from the point of view of aging musicians.

"What's Up" by 4 Non Blondes

25 years and my life is still
Tryin' to get up that great big hill of hope
For a destination

"Hold On" by Alabama Shakes

Bless my heart
Bless my soul
Didn't think I'd make it to 22 years old

Simon & Garfunkel "Old Friends."

Can you imagine us
Years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange
To be seventy

And of course "When I'm Sixty-Four"

John Prine "Hello in There" and "Angel from Montgomery" both from the perspective of explicitly elderly folk.

They're both great songs, but I always found parts of the former a little awkwardly presumptuous in their pity

"Old people just grow lonesome, waiting for someone to say, 'hello in there'"

"So if you're walking down the street sometime
And spot some hollow ancient eyes
Please don't just pass 'em by and stare
As if you didn't care, say, 'Hello in there, hello'"

(he was 25 when the album came out)

Kind of interesting that R.E.M. covered "Hello in There," and also wrote "Try Not to Breathe" (a "character song" from the perspective of an elderly person).

michael stipe definitely an old soul

Also some overlap there w/scene-mates 10,000 Maniacs – Natalie Merchant was obv very interested in older people, personal histories from the early 20th Century, etc. The "Trouble Me" video even features her helping out an elderly lady, IIRC

This one's not about the lyrics, but about the way it's sung: the guy who sings "The Letter" sounds about 30 years older than the guy who sings "September Gurls"

Balcony Beach by Latyrx. Lyrics Born was 25 when rapping about how his hair is falling out and new information can be a challenge for him to comprehend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfX62bK1Ufc

The Cure song "I Want to Be Old" is definitely presented as irony.

Some of these sound like a singer-songwriter trying to inhabit a persona ("Angel from Montgomery"), or empathize with the old (like "Hello in There").

I think the spirit of the original post might be "sounding old before your time."

Another category ("Darling Be Home Soon") might be "people who think they're old but really aren't."

"Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" was recorded by Blind Willie Johnson at the age of 30, but he sounds at least 130

Snail Mail has this vibe, but strong.

Balcony Beach by Latyrx. Lyrics Born was 25 when rapping about how his hair is falling out and new information can be a challenge for him to comprehend.

This just came up on a playlist and I immediately thought of this thread. Came here to post this. Great song.

"The Circle Game" ("We're captive on the carousel of time"--Joni Mitchell, 24

came here to post this one, and it's in clemenza's OP! one tiny amendment: although her version came out on 1970's Ladies of the Canyon, she was performing it as early as 1966, at age 22. the 1970 recording is lovely, and a great capper to the album, but it almost makes more sense as a wistful mid-60s folkie meditation on childhood and growing up, than as a statement on countercultural coming-of-age. that is, as far as micro-genres of this type of lyric are concerned, i'd slot it alongside "Puff, the Magic Dragon," which Peter Yarrow seems to have written/adapted while a college student in the late 50s.

she was performing it as early as 1966

...and she wrote it as a reply to "Sugar Mountain" (which gave this thread its title) before either had been recorded.
I wonder if she saw a certain extra nostalgia in recording the song four years after it was written; I've read interviews where she has been dismissive of the lyrics compared to what she saw as more sophisticated later work.

Joni OTM. Paul Simon also tends to dismiss early work as juvenilia. I love both artists inordinately but am not eager to hear "Circle Game" or "Dangling Conversation" again any time soon.

Paul Simon did that early on the sleeve notes of his "Songbook" album

I see Richard Thompson has been mentioned upthread - excellent choice. Meet on the Ledge also fits, and was written when he was just 19. Interesting how a fair few artists mentioned in this thread are folk singers - maybe knoweldge of all those centuries-old songs put their own mortality in perspective.

Recently discovered this one on an Oldies show: "The Old Crowd" sung by the then-17 year-old Lesley Gore (not sure who wrote it)

[Intro]
Sometimes I get to thinkin' 'bout days gone by
And I start cryin' every time
What I wouldn't give if I could just relive
One day with those old friends of mine

[Verse 1]
No one ever planned it, but every day at four
We would get together at the corner candy store
We would just ignore the sign, "No dancing allowed"
Oh wo yeah, how I miss the old crowd

[Verse 2]
Sally was the funny one, Sue wore the hippest clothes
Eddie was the wise guy, was always one of those
Johnny used to sing off-key, but boy he was loud
Oh woah yeah, how I miss the old crowd

[Bridge]
Well now, it is funny when high school are through
Friendships always come to an end
Everybody tells you they'll keep in touch, yeah
But you don't see them again

[Verse 3]
Oh no, It's not that I'm unhappy; I know I still have you
But I still think about those good times we knew
We were so carefree, our hearts were on cloud
Oh woah yeah, I miss the old crowd

[Outro]
Oh, how I miss the old crowd
Yeah, how I miss the old crowd

I'm 26 and would greatly enjoy more songs by youngsters about how their lives have been relatively, disappointingly static for about fifteen years or so

Self-XP Wiki says "The Old Crowd" was written by Goffin/King! Which totally makes sense because it really feels like the musings of a married with children couple in their early 20s.

The Carpenters were 26 and 23 when they released the super-nostalgic "Yesterday Once More"

"The Class of '57" by the Statler Bros. (Released in 1972)

Tommy's selling used cars
Nancy's fixing hair
Harvey runs a grocery store
And Margaret doesn't care

Jerry drives a truck for Sears
And Charlotte's on the make
And Paul sells life insurance
And part-time real estate

Helen is a hostess
Frank works at the mill
Jenett teaches grade school
And probably always will

Bob works for the city
And Jack's in lab research
And Peggy plays organ at the Presbyterian Church

And the class of '57 had its dreams
We all thought we'd change the world with our great works and deeds
Or maybe we just thought the world would change to fit our needs
The class of '57 had its dreams

Betty runs a trailer park
Jan sells Tupperware
Randy's on an insane war
And Mary's on welfare

Charlie took a job with Ford
And Joe took Freddie's wife
Charlotte took a millionaire
And Freddie took his life

John is big in cattle
Ray is deep in debt
Where Mavis finally wound up is anybody's bet

Linda married Sonny
Brenda married me
And the class of all of us is just part of history

And the class of '57 had its dreams
But living life, day and day, is never like it seems
Things get complicated when you get past eighteen
But the class of '57 had its dreams

Oh, the class of '57 had its dreams

I'd say the Carpenters one is the American Graffiti-type situation in which in 1973 America, ten years ago seemed liked ages ago.

"In My Life" (John Lennon, 25...not a personal favourite, but obviously it fits)

there are a lot of 80s Madness songs that have this melancholy ruminative focus on childhood memories from the perspective of early-mid 20 somethings, but possibly this is a distinct thing from the old before your time type songs, ruminating on your childhood is maybe a typical early 20 something thing to do?

Madness were only young when they started having hits, late teens to early 20s, only a few years older than the kids buying their records, and this was obviously part of their appeal, that they were peers of their young fans, but even from the start there's this sense of people looking back at the youth they've just left behind, even if only recently

Their last album before they broke up (Mad Not Mad from 1985) has lots of lyrics about ageing and weariness, I think that's to do with the band coming to an end and tiredness of being on the record/promote/tour carousel non stop for several years, which is maybe why a lot of young pop stars end up writing these kind of songs.

Mood-wise, not even remotely the same thing, but Ian MacKaye was 23 when Minor Threat put out "Salad Days" (their last single, I think). In his world, 23 actually was old.

I think people in their mid-20s are often more nostalgic for childhood/teen years than older folks

Miley Cyrus had a god awful single last year called Used To Be Young. She was 30 at the time on release. Absolute pensioner.

I don't know if this counts but I think Leonard Cohen wrote "Tonight Will Be Fine" (my favorite Leonard Cohen song) in about 1968. When he was maybe 32 or 34?

It begins "sometimes I find I get to thinking of the past."

in 1973 America, ten years ago seemed liked ages ago

The Beach Boys reminisced about the days of rock and roll in "Do You Remember", released in 1964!

Ray Davies had this market cornered.

― Are You Still in Love With Me, Klas-Göran? (Tom D.), Monday, 27 September 2021 15:16 (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Bears repeating. Just one example, "Where Have All the Good Times Gone" was written when he was 21.

As the man himself said:

"We'd been rehearsing 'Where Have All the Good Times Gone' and our tour manager at the time, who was a lot older than us, said, 'That's a song a 40-year-old would write'."

Apparently, once a single left the charts it was impossible to find it. So when the Oldies But Goodies LPs came out in the early 1960s they were recapturing something that had been very ephemeral, if only two or three years old. Pop culture moved so fast in part because stuff disappeared from radio and theaters and shops quickly. No matter how poptimist we’d like to be I don’t think we can internalize that sentimentalism. Play it again Sam, etc.

True story: On New Year's Eve of maybe 1990 I was on the roof of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts with some friends.

Someone started singing "Still Crazy After All These Years." Most of us were twenty or so.

The oldest person among us (who may have been, yikes, and 22) said to stop it, because "all these years" should be reserved for older persons with longer shared histories.

Okay, point taken, but Paul Simon was probably or 32 when he wrote that line

Yeah, but I bet those people are a lot crazier today

idk y'all, everyone has a past. does a 30 year old former child star get to feel old? i'd say yeah, myself.

absolute king of the young old men has to be orson welles though, right? not a song per se, but him doing "hearts of age" at 19...

i read a lot of the songs upthread about being "old" as just depression. or trauma. like, having a friend die, that'll make you feel old.

i think sometimes about dylan's "so much older than" and mitchell's "both sides now" - there aren't in fact two sides, but it's easy for me to fall into thinking that way.

this whole thing kinda reminds me of those Twitter threads of people in the 50's and 60's who looked like old men in their early thirties, people just seemed to age faster back then

― frogbs

i got a picture of me at age 22 where i look twice that age. i look like i'm about to yell at some kids to tell them to get off my lawn. then i got a picture of me actually _at_ about twice that age, and i look, god, i look at least 60 in that one.

i got no idea how old i look now. i got no idea how old i _am_ now. i mean, i can give you a number. i can give you a couple of numbers. i went to a friend's birthday party a couple months ago. she was turning five. she's looking forward to retiring - she's eligible this year.

Most all of the songs I named date to the mid-late '60s; I'm guessing there was just so much happening so fast, a lot of these people felt prematurely old.

― clemenza

that's the thing, right? it gets graded on a curve. if i hang out with people my age, they don't see me as old, but mostly i don't hang out with people my age. the people i hang out with are younger than me _and getting younger_. transfem HRT will knock ten years off your age over the course of two years or so. do things change fast around me? fuck yes, things change fast. when it comes to transition, two years is a generation. i'm more than four years in and i've started aging forward again. candy darling was 29 when she died, "bored by everything. You might say bored to death." how old does she look in that famous picture?

I did not know the song "Class of '57" but I am picturing Charlotte as Charlotte from Sex and the City.

Sort of reminds me of my favorite Dylan line, "some are mathematicians, some are carpenters' wives," though I think it works better as a single line than as an entire song.

Probably why the Statlers haven’t won a Nobel

Marmalade’s “Reflections Of My Life” seems to fit, though like “Heart of Gold” and several other examples, it definitely feels like it swings between old man POV (“all my sorrows/sad tomorrows/take me back/to my old home”) and young man perspective (all the “changing” and “rearranging” the singer is doing of his life). It actually has two singers, with one sounding older than the other. Anyway, neither band member who wrote it was older than 25 at the time.

the class of what, '09? did the class of '09 have dreams? come to think of it '09 was my 15 year reunion.

i don't know. i don't think i can look at '94 and see a bunch of young people who had big dreams. i mean i had 'em. they were pissant dreams, though.

I wonder if any of the class of 57 had dreams of being Country Music artists, cause that seemed to work out for a few of them

Libba Cotten - "Freight Train" age 11

When I'm dead and in my grave
No more good times here I crave
Place the stones at my head and feet
And tell them all I've gone to sleep

When I die, Lord bury me deep
Down at the end of old Chestnut Street
So I can hear old Number Nine
As she comes rolling by

Great revive…

I think people in their mid-20s are often more nostalgic for childhood/teen years than older folks

R.E.M.’s “Catapult” to thread

some are mathematicians, some are carpenters' wives

When I first heard Tangled up in Blue around age 16 it struck me as very much what it might feel like to look back at your life at 35, and by 35 I’d realized it was pretty accurate. A song about aging that is pitched very precisely! It captures a twisting path of memories where you can only see so far back and so far ahead.

Confession: For at least 30 years, I have harbored a secret curiosity about how many mathematicians are also carpenter's wives.

Like, it's perfectly plausible to be a mathematician who happens to be married to a carpenter. Even if one or the other are DIY hobbyists, as opposed to professional practitioners. I would be totally cool with an amateur mathematician married to a professional carpenter, or vice versa.

Many are confused about how such a life path got started.

they're an illusion anyway

"I think people in their mid-20s are often more nostalgic for childhood/teen years than older folks"

interesting topic and thread. I wonder if Simon Reynolds dealt with this phenomenon in Retromania (which I read when it came out but that was some time ago).

agreed, great revive.

Tangled Up In Blue seemed vaguely Deep to me as a younger person, never one of my faves but I dug it. at 42, i find it a lovely mix of goofy Dylan shaggy-dog stuff and a near-magic encapsulation of this sense of having a personal Past. i bet it works whether you've moved around a lot, stayed in one place, become a carpenter's wife, whatever.

Still Crazy has less incident and it's not nearly the same kind of a Rorschach blot, but is so beautifully polished, especially the first verse. it gets at something.

Not quite the same thing, but I had always assumed Jimmy Buffett's "A Pirate Looks at Forty" was at least semi-autobiographical, but it turns out he recorded it age 27.

Billy Stayhorn was 21 when he wrote Lush Life. It was a self fulfilling prophecy because he did become an alcoholic. It has the most depressing, world weary lyrics of any jazz standard i can think of and it shocked me when i learned how old he was when writing it.

Tangled Up In Blue seemed vaguely Deep to me as a younger person, never one of my faves but I dug it. at 42, i find it a lovely mix of goofy Dylan shaggy-dog stuff and a near-magic encapsulation of this sense of having a personal Past. i bet it works whether you've moved around a lot, stayed in one place, become a carpenter's wife, whatever.

otm

I love "Tangled Up in Blue," and in the regular world, Dylan being in his early 30s at the time would still count as young; in a pop music context, less so. Like another song I thought of and decided it was something different: Madonna's "This Used to Be My Playground" (she was 34).

I'm going to posit that Madonna had been through a few things by the time she was 34.

She was tangled up in true blue.

Lol clemenza

I was just listening to Dion and the Belmonts singing “September Song” from 1960’s Wish Upon a Star album and thinking they sound much too young to sing those lyrics. But my benchmark of an appropriately grizzled performance is Willie Nelson’s 1978 recording and he was only 45 when that came out, which now seems a bit young for that death-haunted song.

Willie Nelson is an interesting case. He was already old when most us were born, and he is apparently immortal.

When he was relatively young, and wrote "Crazy," dinosaurs still roamed the plains. It's a bit weird to see pictures of young Willie, because his brand and image have solidified so much into the one we know.