Rock n’ roll is a young person’s game. As much as us middle-aged folk would hate to admit it, most rock artists (and pop and hip hop artists as well) peak in their late 20s. Curiously, musicians seem to share a similar aging pattern with professional athletes. They typically come on the scene in their early 20s, enjoy a five-to-ten-year peak in their late 20s and early 30s, and if they’re lucky, will stick around well past their prime, but never achieving the same greatness they did in their younger years.
Take any musical artist and you can identify a short period of time that represents that artist’s commercial and artistic peak, and almost invariably these peak years take place when the artist is young. None of the Beatles had reached their 30th birthday when they dissolved the band in 1970. The Stones’ four-album stretch from 1968’s Beggar’s Banquet to 1972’s Exile on Main St. is universally acknowledged as their peak, and neither Keith nor Mick had turned 30 by the time that stretch had come to an end. Michael Jackson would never capture the same magic he did with his first three albums, Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad, and the last of these was released two days after his 29th birthday.
Perform this exercise with just about any artist and you’ll see a similar pattern. Sure, you’ll see the occasional late-career brilliance, but nobody’s confusing Time Out of Mind with Blonde on Blonde or Ray of Light with Like a Virgin or Blackstar with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. Older artists may be wiser, able to address more weighty topics in their lyrics, and have had decades to hone their musical chops, but there’s something about rock and pop music that allows young people to best capture its immediacy and energy.
The reason I bring all of this up is because last week Stephen Malkmus, the 51-year-old former lead singer of Pavement and current frontman for the Jicks, released his most recent album, Sparkle Hard. A favorable review in Pitchfork described the use of Auto-Tune on this record as “a tantalizing taste of the kind of music Malkmus might be making if he were a quarter-century younger.” A friend of mine pointed out how ageist this comment seemed to her, and I suppose she’s right. What does Malkmus’ age have to do with this album, and how dare Pitchfork suggest that age is keeping him from being more experimental and current? But at the same time, this particular reviewer at Pitchfork has a point. As good as Sparkle Hard is, there is no way Malkmus will ever produce anything as groundbreaking or influential as the music he made with Pavement in the 90s. It’s a sad truism, one that has been tested repeatedly over the course of over sixty years of rock history, that 51 year-olds just can’t rock the same as 25 year-olds.
However, this is not to say that old people can’t make good rock records. Indeed, Malkmus has eased into a very respectable middle age as an artist, with Sparkle Hard the latest in a long string of solid albums. The edges of his sound have been softened and he’s abandoned some of the aggressive irony of his early years, but the same wit and off-kilter melodies that he first introduced to us in the early 90s are still there. Malkmus has proven himself repeatedly to be one of the rare artists who is able to successfully weather the transition to middle age.
Being an effective middle-aged artist requires navigating a middle ground between two extremes, both of which will doom the artist to appearing embarrassingly out-of-touch and old. The first of these extremes is the artist who refuses to evolve and change his sound. There are few things more pathetic than a 45 year-old trying to act young, and aging rock stars have fallen victim to this repeatedly. The prime example of this extreme is Steven Tyler. There’s something terribly embarrassing about a married, 40-something man singing about elevator sex or prancing in an open-chested spandex suit pretending to be a sex symbol for teenage fans younger than his daughter. It’s cute he’s trying, but his failure to acknowledge his age is a little unbecoming. Other artists in this category include the Rolling Stones, the Beastie Boys, Madonna, and Kiss.
On the other extreme are artists who so embrace their middle age that they abandon everything that made them great in the first place. The prime example of this is Sting. As soon as he left the Police he apparently decided he was comfortable being the godfather of adult contemporary radio. He’s like if John Coltrane had suddenly turned into Kenny G once he hit 30. Other artists in this category include Chicago and Peter Cetera, Steve Winwood, Elton John, and Phil Collins.
Some artists, such as Malkmus, are able to negotiate these two extremes, acknowledging their age while at the same time maintaining much of the edginess and vitality they had as younger artists. They are able to make good music without being sappy and without seeming creepy or awkward, and perhaps most importantly, they provide hope to fellow middle-agers that once you hit 40 you can still both be cool and act your age. In honor of these middle-aged heroes, I’ve selected the five greatest1 middle aged albums of all time. These are the albums that best exemplify an artist embracing middle age while still maintaining a youthful energy, providing us with glimpses of their past greatness at the same time they reveal a more mature and evolved sound.2
McCartney, Paul McCartney, 1970, Apple
Paul was only 28 when this album was released so you might consider it a bit of a stretch to call this a middle-aged album. However, 1) Paul was always mature beyond his years, 2) he had just spent the previous 8 years doing more, seeing more, and going more places than most of us will ever do in a lifetime, had just fathered his first child, and was helping to raise his wife’s seven-year-old daughter, and 3) 30 years old in 1970 is roughly equivalent to 40 today. People get married later, enjoy an extended adolescence into their 20s, are living longer, and are much less likely to stop working at age 65. 30 ain’t what it used to be.
After the Beatles’ breakup, Paul retreated with his family to his farm in Scotland and recorded this album on a four track. Paul was apparently taking the breakup of the Beatles pretty hard, suffering from crippling depression and self-doubt, but as he had done before and would continue to do whenever faced with personal hardships, he turned to his music for therapy. This is the sound of a man coming to grips with a new phase in life, taking comfort in his wife and kids while doing his best to free himself from his past.
Critics and fans have dismissed this album over the years, but I’ve always considered it one of his best. It includes arguably his two best post-Beatles songs, “Maybe I’m Amazed” and “Junk,” and has a simple DIY aesthetic that presages lo-fi acts from the 90s.
Double Fantasy, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 1980, Geffen
While Paul was spending the early 70s in a bucolic, albeit depressed, existence surrounded by his wife and kids, John’s life was spiraling out of control. After releasing a legendary album and a near-legendary album, his artistic output and mental health began to decline. His low point came during an 18-month separation from Yoko in which he drank ceaselessly, shacked up with Yoko’s 23 year-old former personal assistant, was enjoying a mutually destructive friendship with Harry Nillson, and was kicked out of several LA establishments for basically being a drunk asshole. John and Yoko eventually repaired their relationship and welcomed the birth of their first child together, Sean, in 1975, after which John decided to put his music career on hold to become a stay-at-home dad.
Double Fantasy was John’s return to music after a five-year parenting sabbatical. (As a stay-at-home dad of five years with an itch to get back to work, this album resonates personally with me.) Unlike Lennon’s previous solo albums, this one would feature his wife’s songs on alternating tracks. From the start of their relationship, John had always been upfront that he and Yoko were a team, often to the dismay of his fans and his fellow Beatles, but this was perhaps their greatest statement of unity, with the two receiving equal billing and the same number of songs. Never before or since has an album so captured the equal partnership of marriage.
This isn’t a popular opinion, but I think Yoko’s songs are actually stronger than John’s here. While John’s songs veer awfully close to middle-of-the-road soft rock, Yoko’s songs provide an avant edge, and her use of disco and new wave tropes gave the album a current sound in 1980 that John no doubt would have been unable to provide by himself. Despite the strength of Yoko’s songs, the song that cements Double Fantasy as a great middle aged album is John’s “Beautiful Boy,” the 2nd-greatest song ever written about fatherhood.3 Rock songs don’t usually turn middle aged men into blubbering messes, but this one does.
Trans, 1982, Neil Young, Geffen
This is one of the two albums that caused David Geffen to sue Neil Young for not sounding enough like Neil Young. In early 1982 Young left Reprise, the label he’d recorded for since 1968, in favor of a lucrative multi-album contract with Geffen, thus beginning the most experimental stage of his career. For the previous decade-and-a-half Young had produced a consistent output of great records, establishing himself as one of rock’s elites. His sound would alternate throughout the 70s, depending on whether he was playing with the harder edged Crazy Horse or with the more acoustic Stray Gators, and the commercial and critical response would certainly vary from album to album as well, but for the most part a Neil Young record sounded like a Neil Young record. You can’t blame David Geffen for thinking he knew what he was getting when he signed Young to a long-term record deal.
But Neil Young has never been an artist tethered to his past. For his first album on Geffen, the label no doubt would have loved to see him submit a rehash of Harvest or Rust Never Sleeps, but Young instead offered them perhaps his most inscrutable album ever. Trans kicks things off with “Little Thing Called Love,” a pleasant enough song you’d expect from Neil Young at this stage in his career. Nothing great, but nothing terrible, an inoffensive toe-tapper aiming for the middle of the road. But by the second track it’s clear Young has tricked us, that any sense we may have had that this was going to be a typical Neil Young record was misguided. For six of the remaining eight songs, Young’s vocals are heard through a vocoder, that device that makes your voice sound like a robot, pioneered by German electronic rockers Kraftwerk and most famously used by Styx in Mr. Roboto. In many of the songs on Trans you can’t even understand Young’s lyrics, an unusual move for a singer/songwriter whose songs had always maintained an intimate connection with his listeners.
What listeners didn’t realize at the time was that Young had a special reason for his use of vocoder on this album. He certainly was influenced by Kraftwerk and was experimenting with new electronic sounds that had to that point never made their way into his music, but there was a deeper, more personal reason. Young’s son, Ben, was born in 1978 with cerebral palsy. A life previously centered around music became centered around his quadriplegic and nonverbal son, including an 18-month long program that involved 14-18 hour days of therapy. As Young would explain later, Trans was a reflection of these therapy sessions and was a concept album about the inability to communicate. Sure, the vocoder made most of the lyrics incomprehensible, but you weren’t supposed to understand the lyrics. That was the entire point. In a 1995 interview, Young would state, “You see, my son is severely handicapped, and at that time was simply trying to find a way to talk, to communicate with other people. That’s what Trans is all about. And that’s why, on that record, you know I’m saying something but you can’t understand what it is. Well, that’s the exact same feeling I was getting from my son.”
The Neil Young on Trans is an example of a dad who’s found his life consumed by his child, who finds fatherhood has upended all his priorities and sapped much of his time and emotional reservoirs. Even parents with typically developing children can relate to this, but his is an extreme case only parents of special needs children can fully understand. Yet Neil Young didn’t let this stop him from rocking, and instead used his art to help him process what he was going through with his son. And perhaps most inspiringly, Trans showcases a middle-aged man refusing to let his past define him. He reminds us that you’re never too old to experiment and what you did in your younger years shouldn’t confine what you want to do with your future.
Graceland, Paul Simon, 1986, Warner Brothers
Paul Simon has described 1985 as a low point in his life. His marriage to Princess Leia had just fallen apart, his last few albums had been flops, and he was adjusting to the realization that he may never again find the commercial and artistic success that had come so easily to him in his younger years. Paul Simon was what all middle-aged men fear becoming, a washed-up has-been.
Whether it’s the songwriter who can no longer come up with a hit, the former high school football star waxing about past glories between shifts at his dead-end job, or the former prom king who’s now fat and balding, we all know washed-up has-beens. Nobody likes a has been. Sure, sometimes these has-beens fill us with joyful schadenfreude, especially if they were jerks when they were younger (“You may have shoved my head in a toilet in the 10th grade but look who’s laughing now, you fat fuck!”), but most often these people scare us. They remind us that we too aren’t nearly as good at certain things as we used to be, that we too are no longer cool and are steadily growing less cool as each year moves us closer to our death. It’s this fear that pushes men to drive SUVs instead of minivans, or to trade in the Camry for a sports car, or, in the most extreme cases, cheat on their wives. Extended exposure to these has-beens increases dread and self-loathing, making these rash, mid-life crisis decisions more likely.
Graceland would of course save Paul Simon from being a has-been. Mired in depression, Simon listened to a tape of South African dance music. So inspired was he by what he heard, Simon booked a flight to South Africa and began playing with, and eventually recording with, local musicians. The resulting album, released just before his 45th birthday, would become his most successful album ever. Graceland would go on to sell 16 million copies, rack up countless accolades, including the 1987 Grammy for Album of the Year, and to this day retains a place near the top of most lists of the best albums of all time.
Many of the songs on Graceland provide a uniquely middle-aged perspective that is rare on multiplatinum albums. You’ve got a song about taking a road trip with your nine-year-old son and another about a man who wonders why he’s become so “soft in the middle” and simply wants a shot at redemption. These songs could not be written by a young man, but Simon avoids the pitfall of making a boring, out-of-touch old guy record by coupling his lyrics with some of the most adventurous music of his career. Experimenting with new sounds and new musicians, Paul Simon took a bold risk and it paid off, proving to middle-aged men forever that you’re never truly washed up unless you believe it.
Workbook, Bob Mould, 1989, Virgin
Bob Mould’s solo debut, Workbook was released two years after the breakup of Hüsker Dü, the Minneapolis trio that Mould fronted for the better part of a decade. Largely acoustic, the album bears nary a trace of the thrash sounds of Husker Du’s early years, nor the power pop of their later years. The guitar noise has been replaced by cellos, and his vocal cord shredding has been replaced by a more constrained delivery, but Mould’s indelible gift for melody, impressive guitar chops, and contemplative lyrics are still here. My older brother, from whom I took most of my musical cues back then, hated this album and thought Mould was selling out. Of course I adopted this view of the album as well; I was 15 and wanted another Hüsker Dü album and this was clearly not it. But with the gift of age I can now see this album for what it was, an outstanding collection of songs from a man settling into a new phase in life. With this album Mould was putting his wild years behind him and adopting a softer sound more suitable to his advanced age.
Honorable Mention: No More Tears by Ozzie Osbourne, Into the Wild by Eddie Vedder, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams. A completely different list could be made of excellent albums by middle-aged artists having just gone through a divorce. Topping this list would be Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, followed by Beck’s Sea Change, Liz Phair’s self-titled album, and Thurston Moore’s Demolished Thoughts.
Footnotes
1. These obviously aren’t the 5 greatest middle aged albums ever. For me to claim that would presume that I have listened to every album ever made and have a working knowledge of the bios of every artist who’s ever recorded. That simply isn’t true. For instance, I imagine a good case could be made for the inclusion of Bonnie Raitt’s 1989 album, Nick of Time. But I have to admit that I know nothing about Bonnie Raitt. I know the one single from that album and I know I don’t particularly like it. I know a lot of people think she’s great but I’ve never put the effort into exploring her discography so I can’t in good faith include her here. A more accurate title for this article would therefore be, “An Idiosyncratic List of Five Albums Ian Irwin Thinks are Extremely Good Exemplars of Middle Aged Rockers Producing Solid Work.” But let’s face it, “The Five Best Middle Aged Albums” is a much catchier title.
I also am a little embarrassed that all five albums are from white male artists and none were released in the past 25 years. I was very much weened on the classic rock and indie rock traditions. These genres are very much dominated by white male artists, and my record collection reflects that as well (Although both rock and indie rock have had the occasional female artist make waves they’ve been traditionally dominated by white males, but of late indie rock in particular seems to be experiencing something of a golden age of female artists.) The executives at the record companies who produced this music, the radio programmers who played it, and the rock critics who created the canon of great rock artists and thereby influenced the listening habits of a generation of fans, were all predominantly white males. As am I.
Recently I had a discussion with my friend Adam about the subtle forms of racism and sexism that can be found in art criticism. He made an excellent point, which I will paraphrase and most likely butcher here: Most critics have been white and male and from a particular educational and cultural background, so what they like is typically art that speaks to their specific experience. But instead of stating, “I really enjoyed this particular film/album/book because it resonated with my experience,” they write, “This is good.” The implication is that if you don’t like this film/album/book, then you are wrong. There is no acknowledgement that their socio-cultural background may have informed their opinion or that others with different life experiences may view the art differently, and their opinion then becomes accepted by the larger community of art consumers. A canon is then developed of the great films/albums/books, and women, racial minorities, and the working class are often excluded. This is all, I guess, a way of me saying, “I realize I’m perpetuation the white-male-centric view of rock history by writing this post and titling it as I did, but screw it.”↩
2. What I’m defining as “middle aged” albums is similar to but slightly different than Dad Rock. Dad Rock is a term used to describe inoffensive rock in the classic rock tradition that appeals to middle aged dads. What I’m defining as “middle aged” albums refers to the artist making the music. Dad Rock is defined by the people who enjoy the music. A middle aged album could certainly be dad rock and vice versa, but they’re slightly different things. You therefore will see no Wilco or War on Drugs on this list.↩
3. The best song ever written about fatherhood is of course “Isn’t She Lovely” by Stevie Wonder.↩
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