Pop should be anything but a young man’s game
Is creative decline inevitable in pop music? Once associated with youth culture, the art form has long since entered the era of the veteran. Concert halls resound to the sound of 60, 70 and even 80-something stars still belting their hearts out. Yet, for the most part, they sing songs composed in more callow years, for audiences nostalgic for their own lost youth. There lingers a prevalent notion that your 20s represent peak pop creativity presaging a gradual descent into irrelevance. And not without reason, given the many great artists who have taken this trajectory.
It is something that has been on my mind d this week, contemplating the return rn of a personal musical hero. The e great singer-songwriter ongwriter Don McLean Lean has a new album bum out, entitled Botanical Gardens. This is the first original material in 23 years from m the man who brought us American Pie, that enduring, uring, singalong epic of a generation’s loss of innocence. ce. The album of the same name me was the first LP that I ever bought, aged 10, in 1972. It was an early indication of my taste for deep, poetic song rich in melody and meaning. Its wonderful track list includes Vincent, McLean’s starry, starry elegy for Van Gogh, and The Grave, an intense anti-war ballad later recorded by George Michael. McLean was 25 when he made his mark. He is 72 now, recently divorced, and dating Paris Dylan, an Instagram model nearly five decades his junior. It has been a turbulent time for the old troubadour and you might expect that to be reflected in his art. But Botanical Gardens is crushingly banal, a collection of jaunty, country ditties about new love, offset by ballads of past regret. Titles are prosaic ( The Th Lucky Guy, Ain’t She a Honey, You’ve You Got Such Beautiful Eyes), rhymes are trite (maybe / baby, walking / talking, talk chance / romance), chord changes predictable. Occasionally he stretches stre towards profundity but b you can almost hear the songwriting gears gear grinding with selfconscious referen references to Ulysses being tempted by Sirens S in The King of Fools. The Th title track tra is literally litera about a septuagenarian walking around a park ogling “pretty young girls”, which might not play so well in the current climate.
McLean is not the first great talent to lose his lustre. Bands are often the worst offenders, legendary outfits whose quality control seems to wobble with each new release, perhaps sabotaged by the complex inter-personal dynamics of sustained lifelong relationships. Is anyone honestly looking forward to longthreatened original material from the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac, all-time greats whose last truly great works came in the Seventies?
Even some of the most acclaimed songwriters of all time have not been immune to sliding standards. When was the last time that we heard an album approaching the transcendence of their early work from Carole King, Brian Wilson, Ray Davies, James Taylor, Cat Stevens (aka Yusuf Islam), all of Crosby, Stills and Nash (and, arguably even Neil Young, although at least you get the sense that he is trying).
Would musicians be better off retiring from the studio when they have nothing new to say, as Joni Mitchell did, taking up her paintbrushes instead?
Well, no. Pop is way too important to be left to the young folks. While it may be a received wisdom that inspiration can run dry in old age, there is equal evidence to demonstrate the opposite. For every fading star, there is a veteran singer-songwriter such as Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Randy Newman and Jackson Browne, who continue to create vivid new work. Leonard Cohen and David Bowie ended their careers with extraordinary late flourishes. The punk generation of Patti Smith, Elvis Costello and Chrissie Hynde are rising to the challenge of mortality with bold, adventurous music.
What sets these writers apart is a sense of mission as they venture into what Paul Simon described to me as “the new frontier” of old age. “My desire is just to see how far I can go. Really old age is such a foreign country. Hopefully, I’ll be able to speak from that point and bring pleasure to people with what I observe.”
That is surely the key. Pop is growing old and therein lies an opportunity to take it places that it has never gone before. “I went down to the sacred store/ Where I’d heard the music years before/ But the man there said the music wouldn’t play,” a great songwriter once sang, in a vision of a world struck silent, “the day the music died”. We need our greatest old artists to keep trying, and risk failing.
That’s why I am not ready to say bye-bye to the man who wrote American Pie. I just hope that he can find his way back to the sacred store.