Elvis Ate Dynamite

Bruce Springsteen sings “I’ll See You in My Dreams” in Dublin

Most of the artists I listen to are a good 10 to 15 years older than I am. Joe Strummer, for example, was born in 1952, 10 years before I was, and had he not met an untimely end at age 50, he’d still be making records and I would still be buying them. 

That age gap makes sense, because musicians usually start playing in bands and writing songs when they’re in their teens, and they continue to write for a teenage audience as they progress through the early stages of their careers. An artist might be 25 years old when they sign their first record contract, but they don’t make that debut album for their fellow 25 year olds.

Of course, as artists get older, so does their core audience, and so does their subject matter. They start writing songs about having kids and paying bills and worrying about the future. And a funny thing happens to the age gap between artists and their audiences: it begins to collapse. When you’re 10 and an artist is 20, you’re half their age. By the time you hit 20 and they’re 30, you’re two-thirds their age, and when you’re 40 and they’re 50, you’re 80% of their age.

And so it goes. 

Eventually, you start losing family and friends, and, sure enough, they start writing songs about losing family and friends. And songs about facing their own mortality. 

I mentioned Garland Jeffreys the other day. In 2011, he wrote a song called “Till John Lee Hooker Calls Me” where he contemplates mortality but is still not ready to put down the microphone. But on that same album, The King of In Between, he also wrote a song called “In God’s Waiting Room.”

Then there’s Bruce Springsteen with the trifecta of death-contemplating songs: “Last Man Standing,” “Ghosts,” and “I’ll See You in My Dreams” — all of which he regularly performs in concert these days. He knows nothing lasts forever and he’s trying to teach us how to cope.

The next phase is when the artists you’ve listened to for a half century or more start to pass on. A lot of musicians die young, of course, either from their own self-destructive tendencies or as a result of unknown health risks, like Joe Strummer’s undiagnosed heart condition. (Granted, Strummer was 50, but that’s still way too young.)

So here we are, watching the great ones go. Prince. Tom Petty. Aretha Franklin. Tina Turner. Sinead O’Connor. Ozzie. Jimmy Cliff. And one of my all-time favorites: Shane MacGowan of the Pogues.

When we saw Bruce Springsteen at Croke Park in Dublin in 2024, I braced myself for the final number. This was his third show in Ireland, so I already knew what to expect. Not “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” though he played that too, but a rousing, tearful cover of “A Rainy Night in Soho.” It was cathartic even though we all knew it was coming:

We watched our friends grow up together

And we saw them as they fell

Some of them fell into Heaven

Some of them fell into Hell 

There’s plenty more to say about growing older with your favorite musicians, but I’ll leave you with this. Though I have a pretty good idea what the future holds, I’m not ready to let some of them go.