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

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"

Not that hearing aids are necessarily an olds thing, but Morrissey was sporting one from the early Smiths days, for many reasons I am sure but none to do with actual hearing loss.

The reason was Johnny Ray.

xp I see what you mean about those those John Prine lines, but I'm ok with them because they're written from the pov of a specific person who's lonely in old age.

I think Springsteen's Thunder Road also belongs here, for "you're scared and you're thinking that maybe we ain't that young anymore" and also "I know it's late, we can make it if we run."

Springsteen feels a little different to me because so many of the songs have the message/tone that even if you are 18, 20, 25 or whatever, your best days and youthful optimism are already behind you for circumstantial reasons related to your environment, class, means, etc. But Lily Dale you are more of a Springsteen scholar than I!

I think Springsteen is really good at time-stamping and age-stamping all his songs; you can often tell exactly what age everyone is. But I think Thunder Road captures that feeling of having turned 25 or 26 and suddenly realizing that your youth has an expiration date and starting to feel older than you are.

but yeah I agree that Springsteen often has this feeling of "I shouldn't feel this old at this age" which is a little different

Feel like John Fogerty must have written one of these.

xp agree with those thoughts Lily Dale. Another way to put the distinction is that Springsteen is actually convincing about it where some of the examples upthread end up sounding naïve and ironically childish. Like with the Neil Young examples, it's kind of an endearing quirk of Neil's that he always feels like his best days are behind him. Whereas Bruce sells it that for these song characters, their best days actually are behind them

or yeah that it's a deeper more existential feeling anyway

Not sure if the Incredible String Band's "Way Back in the 1960s" qualifies. Robin Williamson was 23 when he wrote it but it's set in the future - in fact he says he's 91 in it, which places it around 2034!

shook ones

Bob Dylan is an interesting one; he's sort of ageless when he's in his twenties, but then when he hits his mid-fifties, with Time Out of Mind, he seems to fast-forward to old age and stay there.

Different thing, but I've always loved that Bob Seger released an album called Back in '72 in January 1973.

Feel like John Fogerty must have written one of these.

I feel like “Lodi” fits, even though there’s no mention of age or aging.

adele "when we were young"

First thing I remember
Was asking Papa, "Why?"
For there were many things I didn't know
And Daddy always smiled
Took me by the hand
Saying, "Someday you'll understand"

Well, I'm here to tell you now
each and every mother's son
You better learn it fast, you better learn it young
'Cause someday never comes

John Fogerty, age 28

I missed a better thread title, also from "Sugar Mountain": Leavin' There Too Soon.

Rod Stewart's "Gasoline Alley"--Stewart was 25--may belong. And "Help" is another obvious Beatles example ("When I was younger, so much younger than today").

MGMT: "Kids" (written in college, IIRC)

Pulp: "Help The Aged" (although Cocker was in his mid-30s when he wrote it)

The Cure fits this thread. Robert Smith was 22 when "Primary" came out. "Further we go / And older we grow / The more we know / The less we show"

I've also read that much of the <i>Disintegration</i> album was written in response to turning 30.

Would Taylor Swift's "Fifteen" fit in here, in that she's writing (at 18) in the voice of someone old enough to look back on 15 as the distant past?

i feel like songs in this category must get quoted a lot in high school yearbooks.

^^Speaking of..."Truckin'"!

(xpost) I quoted "Cortez the Killer" in mine, and that kind of fits.

Kate Bush wrote “wuthering heights” when she was 18. Overall lyrics, music style and the fact that it’s based on a book from 1847 would have made me think Kate Bush was an old lady if I didn’t know better.

Jackson C Frank wrote the album “blues run the game” when he was 22 and they don’t sound like the edgy musings of a young adult, he sounds and sings like he’s sincerely as burned out and depressed as idk Johnny Cash in his later years.

I always thought he was at least in his 50’s

I’m not sure what timeframe Morrissey had in mind when we wrote, aged 25 or so, about fans moving on from the songs that made them them laugh and cry, but Rubber Ring always struck me as far-sighted.

Lukas Graham "7 Years"

The Beach Boys "'Til I Die", by 27 year old Brian Wilson

The Cure fits this thread. Robert Smith was 22...

Pretty sure he was 18 when he wrote "I want to be old":

I want false teeth
And not be able to chew
I want to be senile
A centenarian fool

I want to have lots of wrinkles
Want my hearing to go

(xpost) Wilson was 24 when he wrote "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times"--I don't think he mentions age specifically, but definitely fits the old-before-your-time mood spiritually/emotionally.

maybe gram parsons, "return of the grievous angel"? i guess it depends on how you interpret "Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down", but he was still in his early 20s when he wrote that. need factchecking on how many roads GP went down down down before dying

While you're at it, we want to know precisely how many faces were seen, and subsequently rocked by, Jon Bon Jovi.

Another one Robert Smith wrote when he was 24 or 25 is "Sinking".

I am slowing down
As the years go by
I am sinking

maybe gram parsons, "return of the grievous angel"? i guess it depends on how you interpret "Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down", but he was still in his early 20s when he wrote that. need factchecking on how many roads GP went down down down before dying

Not sure he wrote the lyrics for that song?

oh shoot, is that right? i really don't much at all about his songwriting practices, partners/collaborators, etc, so i'm sure you're right

don't ^know^ much at all

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.