Rock on (and on): why older artists make better music
The new album from the Rolling Stones is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to veterans releasing music.
The Rolling Stones announced their new album this week with The Times’s chief rock critic Will Hodgkinson declaring it their most accomplished for 45 years. “Sweet Sounds is a highlight of an album that is unquestionably the Stones’ best since 1978’s Some Girls,” he wrote, referring to its standout song. “Variously poignant, irreverent, anarchic, and even quite spiritual on that track … it touches on all the aspects we love about the band, glued together by the rambunctious energy they have made their own since the early Sixties.”
It wasn’t just the music that impressed him. At the press conference at the Hackney Empire in East London Hodgkinson noted that, gratifyingly, they still looked like proper rock stars, lizard hips and all. “All of them are black-clad, stick-thin and raven-haired, really not looking like men who were born around the time of the Second World War,” he wrote.
The Times Radio presenter Stig Abell’s response to this Stones love-in was sniffy (well, it is still hay fever season). Oh, we do love a rock-themed duel at dawn. “We want late flowerings like the Stones’ new album to be as good as the masterworks of the past, but they never are,” he tweet-huffed and then, presumably, spun the band’s very first big hit, (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, on his Dansette while staring through rheumy eyes into a nebulous middle distance.
Meanwhile, rock Twitter woke up and scratched its bald spot. Cue a deluge of music nerdery as teams of people who would otherwise be debating the best ways to catalogue prog rock LPs leapt to the defence of music’s free bus pass brigade. It was a case of Stig in the dump. What about Scott Walker, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash – who all made masterpieces in later life? Have you heard Cash’s American Recordings? Fist-bumps! Don’t get me started. OK, do – but can I have a little sit down while I write?
I still love the youthful energy of pure pop – I might put on Doja Cat while I clean out the recycling bin – but when I really want to listen, I want lyrics from people who have lived, loved, watched friends die and possibly cut their chest open on stage with shards of glass and smothered the sores with honey as a response to growing up in industrial Michigan in the 1950s (take a careful bow, Iggy Pop – I know you’ve got back trouble).
If artists remember the after-effects of rationing and bashing their first shrapnel drum on the bombsites left by the Blitz, so much the better. Shakespeare, Bach, Beethoven, Tolstoy – geniuses across the spectrum have consistently made their best works as their knees were going.
First exhibit, your honour? David Bowie, of course, and his final album, Blackstar. I am a Bowie nut – I could even see the traces of gold in his “difficult” Tin Machine period – but not only is it my favourite of his albums, it’s his most musically interesting, mysterious and moving.
I’ll spare you the York Notes on each lyric but let’s at least tap into its title. It’s the name of a cancer lesion but it also refers back to his Starman period and nods to a “hidden planet” that some think will crash into the Earth. It’s also the term for a transitional state between a collapsed star and a state of infinite value in physics.
Is Bowie the collapsed star, and is he referring to the state that he will enter in death? Perhaps he was going back to his musical beginnings when he was Davy Jones and evoking a little-known song by his childhood hero Elvis Presley, with whom he shared a birthday. You don’t get that with Ed Sheeran.
In fact, spoken like a true ex-goth, I have realised all my favourite songs are written by artists in the sunset of their lives – and are, generally, about their impending death. It’s probably not the playlist for your Zumba class, but listen to Leonard Cohen’s You Want it Darker, released in 2016 – the year of his death – and you will smell his fear of mortality.
If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game
If you are the healer, it means I’m broken and lame
If thine is the glory, then mine must be the shame
You want it darker
We kill the flame
Just wow – as Leonard Cohen wouldn’t have said. Likewise, David Crosby’s Here if You Listen, also released just before he died, has the flooring line: “I’ve been thinking about dying and how to do it well.”
Who wants modern musings on Hinge dates, fake nails and whinings about the heaviness of fame when you can hear a former sheet metal worker such as Roger Daltrey with a six-pack at 79 singing about what it means to be a rock star in your eighth decade, as he did on Who, the band’s 2019 studio album. It was described by our critic as “powerful and relevant”. Even more poignant is I’ll Be Back, an acoustic ballad on the same album on which Pete Townshend sings, presumably to his younger wife, Rachel Fuller, that she shouldn’t worry about death taking him away because he will reincarnate (what as? Now that sounds like a subject for a radio show).
Next, Bob Dylan. Hands up, I appreciate Dylan but am not one of those people who bid for the windows of his old house on eBay after its most recent owners replaced them (true story). But I know enough to know that Murder Most Foul, his surprise release in 2020 – about JFK’s assassination, but also a reflection on the entire baby boom generation from the vantage point of age – was up there with his very best. Meditations on grief and decay don’t tend to be the subjects of rock debuts. Those songs need to lie on their side in a dark cellar for decades before they’re worth cracking open.
“Oh, got you there!” I hear you cry. What about Neil Young, who wrote Old Man as a whippersnapper in 1972? (It’s about the old caretaker of his ranch, who asked him how a young hippy had the money to buy it.) Young reflected in those lyrics on how little difference there is between young and old.
All I can think is that the Canadian folk-rock king was unaware of his outlier status – and thank goodness he hadn’t then heard (It Goes Like) Nanana by this year’s young pop favourite Peggy Gou or we might have had a very different song. Gou’s sample lyric:
I guess it goes like na-na-na
Na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na
Na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na
Na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na
Na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na
Sometimes, with the weight of expectation behind them, artists can just get on with the business of doing what they love in later life and the freedom is there for all to hear. Van Morrison released a skiffle album this year – his 44th studio LP – returning to his first love and “coming home”, as our critic put it.
Likewise, Bruce Springsteen’s 21st studio album, released last year, was a collection of beloved soul music gems from Motown, Gamble and Huff, Stax and more. “I wanted an album where I just sang,” Springsteen, 73, has said.
And, well, he does, rather well. Meanwhile, The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte, the recent album from Sparks, who have been playing together for 50 years, managed to sound utterly different to their previous albums, if still identifiably them, and received raves.
Grace Jones, 75, has had fun with a new collaboration this year – letting rip on Janelle Monae’s Ooh La La and bringing in a new audience, as Elton John did with Dua Lipa on Cold Heart. Jones’s gig at Hampton Court in June was greeted with general euphoria, her voice good enough to bring the palace down with her rendition of Amazing Grace.
Older age also allows artists the chance to tie up loose ends left from their early careers, when, perhaps, life got too messy for completion. At 78, Townshend is at last wrapping up his third rock opera, Lifehouse, which predicted the internet.
And don’t let anyone say that old rockers and musicians lack stamina and showmanship. The previously mentioned Mr Pop, 79, won great reviews for his live shows this summer – and the best live show I have ever seen was his Royal Albert Hall gig in 2016 for his sensational late-life album Post Pop Depression.
Elton, 76, and Springsteen are having their health complications of late, but Elton thrilled Glastonbury this summer and Springsteen has been magnificent on his European tour, before news of his peptic ulcer disease led to the postponement of a half-leg of his US tour.
Reviewing the gig in Barcelona this year, our critic declared: “The whole thing blasted with the thing 60,000 Spaniards filled a former Olympic stadium on the edge of Barcelona for: passion.” You don’t get that from George Ezra and Ben Howard. Get well soon, Bruce, our country needs you.
