Old people music
On being creative for a long time
For the past few weeks, my writing time was taken up by a translation job, so I’m writing something short.
There’s this idea, especially in rock music but also more generally, that younger people are more creative. You can easily come up with examples of old rockers who keep playing what they played 50 years ago, and it may even be true on average that younger people are more creative. But that doesn’t mean old people can’t make great, creative music (or do other creative things).
I’ve thought that there’s a clear trait that’s common to people who continue making great music, and it’s probably sort of obvious but I’ll talk about it now.
David Byrne
The best example I have in mind is David Byrne. He was 60 when he released Love This Giant with St. Vincent, and 65 when American Utopia came out. Most people would still agree that his best work was with Talking Heads in the 70s and 80s, but these are both very good albums.
One thing that’s obvious from his career is how much music Byrne listens to. As an early example, Talking Heads’s Remain in Light (1980) wouldn’t sound so African if not for him and Brian Eno.
I’ve had 3 separate instances where I was checking out someone else’s music, and Byrne’s name came up.
First one is Juana Molina1, an electronic musician from Argentina. Here’s a quote from her Wikipedia page:
American musician David Byrne bought Segundo — intrigued by its artwork — and quickly became an admirer of the record.[25] He contacted Molina, and she became the opening act of his American tour.[25]
Second one is Brazilian artist Tom Zé. Again from Wikipedia:
In the early 1990s, Zé's work experienced a revival when American musician David Byrne discovered one of his albums, Estudando o Samba (1975), on a visit to Rio de Janeiro. Zé was the first artist signed to the Luaka Bop label and has so far released a compilation and two albums, all of which received positive reviews from critics in the United States.[1]
And the third is Natalia Lafourcade, whom I talked about here. Quoting from the piece on Rolling Stone from when she played Carnegie Hall last year:
Shortly after the show began, David Byrne, dressed in a dapper black suit, joined her and recited an English translation of “Muerte,” a key track from De Todas Las Flores — Lafourcade’s first album of original music in seven years.
(…)
At Carnegie Hall, Lafourcade ended the first half of her concert by performing the slow-burning “Muerte” in full for the first time. Byrne joined her onstage once more, dancing as the track ended on a cacophonous storm of trumpets and piano and bass, an unraveling wall of sound. He played the psychopomp, guiding Lafourcade by the hand as she exited stage right through an ominous open door. It was clear that the evening for Lafourcade was a ritual of death — and, more importantly, rebirth.
At this point, I was like “Of course David Byrne did this”.
Haruomi Hosono
Haruomi Hosono might be most famous outside Japan for being the leader of the early synthpop band Yellow Magic Orchestra (aka YMO) in the 70s and 80s2. But before that he was making music that inspired city pop3, and before that he was part of a straight-up rock band Happy End, one of the most influential Japanese bands ever4. And he’s still making good music at age 75. He’s also a big time producer, so obviously he listens to a lot of music.
I’ll post Happy End’s great album Kazemachi Roman (1971) here. When I first heard this without knowing when it was recorded, I thought this might be a somewhat recent album by some Japanese guys who listened to a LOT of late 60s rock.
My thoughts
It’s really hard to come up with ideas (musical or otherwise) that are genuinely totally new. So the real game is coming up with ways to combine existing ideas in new and interesting ways. And it matters how many ideas you have in your mental catalog. People who continue creating new things are people who haven’t stopped listening to new things.
What I’m listening to now
This post was built backwards from here.
John Cale, of the Velvet Underground fame, is making good music at age 80.
who is also much older than you think, based on the music
And this is a good time to honor YMO member Yukihiro Takahashi, who passed away on January 11. This song is from his solo album just before the founding of YMO, but all the YMO members are involved.
I have to correct the article and say it’s his other band Tin Pan Alley that’s more relevant to city pop than Happy End.
And he inspired Harry Styles’s 2022 album Harry’s House (which is very good!). The title is a reference to Hosono’s 1973 album Hosono House, and Hosono is sometimes credited as Harry Hosono.
I want to pat myself on the back for figuring this out on my own while listening to Harry’s House, before Googling to confirm.