I turned forty-six last month, so I’m likely now in the right place for a midlife crisis.

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The OED tells me that this is “a loss of self-confidence and feeling of anxiety or disappointment that can occur in early middle age“, although in some respects, isn’t that all of us as we get older?

Needless to say, we all change – physically, psychologically, politically at least – as we age, and unsurprisingly, this is something that has been covered in song a fair bit. Some are from the point of view of younger people watching others age, some are from the point of view of someone ageing.

But, as I enter the age bracket myself, I thought it might be interesting to look at such songs. Thanks, as ever, to everyone who contributed suggestions: there were a lot of really good songs suggested this around, and it took a while to whittle it down to the final ten.

A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Faith No More
/Midlife Crisis
/Angel Dust

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One of my favourite songs of all, I’ve perhaps held off on using this song in the /Tuesday Ten series until I had a subject that would do justice to it, and here it is. The song itself – long a live favourite – is one full of drama: a bass-heavy, thundering rhythm is topped by Roddy Bottum’s droning synths, and Jim Martin’s slashed guitar hooks. Then there is Mike Patton: seething at the idea of entering mid-life, and facing up to the mistakes made by his own father, and musing that such adult mistakes seem to get passed on through the generations.

Oh, boy. My dad had a tough upbringing in two countries, with an abusive father, and suffered from mental health issues later in life, and while I avoided the former, I certainly ended up with mental health issues of my own that I never quite eradicated (more, pushed into a box and I try to keep the lid on them).

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/Blur
/Tracy Jacks
/Parklife

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Unlike their “rivals” in Britpop Oasis, Blur are already on their second reformation, and also went to considerable lengths to evolve their sound – to the point that the older, wiser Blur bear almost no relation to the Blur that had such commercial success and ubiquity with the evergreen Parklife (and, lest we forget, turned thirty earlier this year).

One of Damon Albarn’s songwriting motifs were character studies – there are usually at least two or three on each album, and Tracy Jacks remains one of the greatest of all (behind the mighty For Tomorrow, of course). Buried amid the singalong verses, the off-kilter chorus and bouncy rhythms, is a surprisingly bleak tale of mid-life collapse, as the titular character shrugs off his mundane office life, panics about his life coming to an end as he passes forty (!), and races off the beach and runs around naked on the beach, before bulldozing his house…

I turned sixteen the year this was released, and the idea of turning forty seemed like something not even visible on the horizon. Huh.

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/The Beautiful South
/Don’t Marry Her (Fuck Me)
/Blue Is The Colour

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Proud Northerners the Beautiful South had to make considerable edits to this song for a radio-friendly version – which paid off as the song sold over half-a-million copies, and the – rather bleak – album it came from sold three times more. Here, Paul Heaton’s co-vocalist Jacqui Abbott plays the part of the other woman, trying to coax Heaton away from dull married mid-life and a future without much opportunity, under the guise of the (presumably) short-term fling being far more fun. Of course, what happens in the long-term in this song is never mentioned…

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/Talking Heads
/Once In A Lifetime
/Remain in Light

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Not for the first time, Talking Heads are going through something of a critical renaissance at the moment (at least in part thanks to the 40th anniversary of Stop Making Sense, the single greatest concert film ever made), and that’s fine by me: I adore this band.

Once In A Lifetime is one of the best-known songs by the band – helped by it’s iconic video that benefitted from the launch of MTV just a year after release – and it’s taut, funk-influenced pop-rock only adds to the strangeness. David Byrne posits different possible future scenarios for your life, exclamations that this is not what you wanted, and reminds too that the fast passage of time leaves you wondering what you could have done, rather than celebrating one’s achievements.

“Same As It Ever Was“. A sign that you need to change things yourself.

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/Leonard Cohen
/Tower of Song
/I’m Your Man

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One of life’s great chroniclers – both of the good and bad, but let’s be honest, he was best at singing about the bad – was Leonard Cohen, and Tower of Song is an anthem to such pursuits. He blackly compares himself to at least one other great songwriter, pokes fun at his baritone voice, muses on the failings of his ageing body, and despairs at the distances growing between him and old friends (and presumably old lovers).

I’ve long since embraced getting old(er). My hair is long since grey – looking at old photos, that’s happened since I was about thirty – and I’m less bothered about many aspects of getting old now. I am, I can’t stop it, so I may as well enjoy the life that I have: nothing is mapped out, and we have to take the rough with the smooth.

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/The Young Gods
/September Song
/Play Kurt Weill

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The Young Gods were never like other industrial bands, that’s for sure – and they made that abundantly clear with their third album, where they took on an intriguing mix of songs by Kurt Weill. A remarkable album in it’s own right, some of the songs are reworked into noisy epics (particularly the thunderous take on Mackie Messer that is quite unlike any version I’ve ever heard), the others into tender ballads: and September Song closes the album as one of the latter.

It comes from the barely-concealed take on the rise of fascism – and seething comment on FDR’s New Deal – that was Knickerbocker Holiday (by Weill and Maxwell Anderson, and which opened and then closed on Broadway relatively quickly in 1939, a period where few theatregoers wanted to be reminded of fascism, I suspect), based itself on a Washington Irving literary work.

The gorgeous September Song, though, is sung by the villain of the piece, Peter Stuyvesant, who realises he is already heading toward the twilight years of his life, and wants to marry quickly and get on with his new job of running things. Once again, a warning against not letting time pass you by as you grow older…

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/Kingmaker
/Ten Years Asleep
/Sleepwalking

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Kingmaker were one of the great victims of the rapid change of the guard that happened in British alternative music in the early nineties. As Britpop began to sweep all before it, the likes of Kingmaker, an angry, cynical band who had no interest in pop trends were suddenly persona non grata – although a planned, seething lead single called Armchair Anarchist and another clearly about the then-ailing Royal Family really didn’t help.

But then, the rippling other single Ten Years Asleep was hardly sunshine and roses either. Loz Hardy rails against the previous generations (the punks, the young dudes, etc) who’ve settled down and accepted the status quo, without actually pushing through for the change that they apparently wanted. Plus ça change, eh? Some of the Britpop bands that Hardy clearly hated have done exactly the same (although, interestingly, Radiohead and Suede, who both supported Kingmaker in their early days, escaped such a fate).

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/Frank Turner
/Once We Were Anarchists
/Sleep Is For the Week

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Moving on a generation on, not for the first time, Frank Turner provides a song that pretty much articulates where I am politically, even if my political views in the past weren’t quite the same. This song is seventeen (SEVENTEEN!) years old already, and back when this was released, I wasn’t even in my thirties yet. Back when we were younger, we were idealistic, we hoped and agitated for change that we could see a route too. But now, in my mid-forties? I’m not quite so sure. Change doesn’t happen quickly, certainly not in a capitalist system such as in the UK or US, and there are too many entrenched interests for much to do so anyway. So we’re older, we’re more cynical, and frankly I’ve got enough going on to survive than to push for change as well.

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/Richard Thompson
/Beeswing
/Mirror Blue

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Some people – indeed a good number of friends of mine, too – have different ideas about how they will live their lives, and what route they will take. Richard Thompson’s glorious, bittersweet Beeswing is a song about making such choices. The protagonist meets “the one”, someone they met while doing menial, manual work in a laundry, and while they escape such drudgery and travel and work, any suggestion of settling down is rebutted. Thus they go their separate ways, and all we hear of her fate is hearsay, but that later life sounds tough.

Obviously, for our and future generations, things are going to be different to the past. Jobs aren’t for life, housing is so much more expensive, even having children is something many choose not to do now. And sometimes, following the herd isn’t for everyone.

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/Dead When I Found Her
/Midlife Eclipse
/Eyes on Backwards

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Michael Holloway has long had a fascination in his songs with the idea of ageing, and how we mentally deal with that – Rag Doll Blues was mostly preoccupied with childhood and memory, while the majestic All The Way Down dealt with older life and death. So it was perhaps no surprise to see the subject at least briefly revisited on what turned out to be the final album from the project before it went dormant (with no apparent desire to reactivate, at least for now).

Midlife Eclipse is dominated by two things – massive-sounding, propulsive drums, and Holloway’s vocals treated and buried in the mix much like oghr’s vocals often were in Skinny Puppy – and to my ears, this is a song reflecting life flashing past you as you realise too late that you are ageing, and that you cannot change was has happened, and what is happening. Instead, you adapt, and your life begins to change: we cannot always do what we did in our youth.

I’m not quite sure that life began at forty, as the old adage goes, but life has changed, and will continue to change. I say embrace it, rather than mourn what has gone.