Old enough to repay... but still afraid to sell

Ispent a lot of last weekend playing a Little Green Cars CD over and over. It was given to me by a young person who doesn’t keep CDs any more with a “Here, you might like this... it will take your mind off Bob Dylan,” remark.

My musical tastes have always been fairly wide ranging and I am as likely to put the Mozart Requiem or Philip Glass on repeat, as Arcade Fire or the Blue Nile or Catatonia.

It gets harder and harder to keep up with new things so I need my network of people who are less than half my age who push books and music my way. I do return the favour. I have created at least one Radiohead fan.

Is there something odd about a man who has done more than his fair share of living on this planet listening to a CD by a bunch of twentysomethings?

I have to remind myself that everyone from Dylan to Lennon and McCartney did a lot of their best work at that age and that Mozart was dead at 35.

At a time when everyone from Rod Stewart to Bryan Ferry to Bob are wading through the Great American Songbook (which I also happen to love) it is time to hear and see what the youth are up to.

I am a bit of a sucker for lyrics, and Little Green Cars seem to have a good gang of wordsmiths and, like everyone that age, fall in and out of love with an intensity that their elders crave.

They sound free. I don’t understand a quarter of what they are singing about but they put lots of images in my head. I don’t understand Dylan a lot of the time either. A song doesn’t need to tell me a story.

The person who gave me the CD is not much older then LGC. She travels light.

In my youth we all quoted Buddhism at each other and how possessions would enslave us. They did. Buying a house is a big decision which immediately makes all sort of lesser decisions like going to Peru for a few months impossible. Her apartment has no shelves. All of her music is on the cloud. If she buys a book she gives it away. If she likes it she puts a copy on her Kindle. She won’t buy a car. She won’t even learn to drive which horrifies me as I think it is a skill as important as reading a writing. I suspect she will rent for ever. She doesn’t whinge about my generation messing things up so her generation can’t buy houses. In her mind Steve Jobs did enough to outweigh the mistakes of others. Possessions, responsibilities, debts, routines and habits all conspire to prevent us living to the full. Neil Young saw it as “being old enough to repay and young enough to sell”.

There is no earthly reason not to sell up and put most of things I love on my Ipad and wander the world. Cowardice maybe.

Buying the new LGC album Ephemera on CD and download is just hedging my bets.