Tom Dunne: Many artists do some of their most interesting work late in life 

Losing a youthful edge wasn't necessarily a bad thing for the output of the likes of Bob Dylan, Bowie and Johnny Cash 

Johnny Cash's work on American Recordings with Rick Rubin has been among his most enduring. Picture: Scott Gries/ImageDirect

Could longevity be a new musical genre? Could albums recorded in the twilight years of life be a new thing? I can point to albums by Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Willie Nelson, Ringo, Tucker Zimmerman, Johnny Cash, Warren Zevon and John Prine as evidence. I suspect there are many more.

Of course, it wasn’t supposed to be like that. When, in 1965, in the song My Generation, The Who’s Roger Daltry wrote “Hope I die before I get old”, people knew what he meant. It wasn’t really a death wish. But it was hard to see how everything that was brilliant about youth could survive the journey into maturity, responsibility, and adulthood.

As the old music joke goes a man asks his son “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The boy thinks about it for a while and says, “When I grow up I want to be a musician.” The dad laughs to himself before saying to the boy, “Come on son, you can’t do both.” 

But what if you can? Daltry was really rejecting the idea of becoming like your parents, settling down, losing your edge, accepting compromise. Nobody expected those 1960s' rock stars to reach old age, and absolutely no one suspected they’d find old age was worth writing about.

Yet writers like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen are making great art writing songs about mortality, memory, aging and the harsh experience of outliving your contemporaries. Bob’s Rough and Rowdy Ways reads like a dispatch from a man walking in the ruins of the 20th century.

Johnny Cash was frail when he made the American Recordings albums. The music industry at the time had written him off. The album Songwriter that was released two years ago had been sitting unreleased and unwanted since the early 1970s. It took producer Rick Rubin’s vision in 1992 to still see something in him.

And it took some convincing. Only when Rick assured him he could record the way he used to, very sparsely, did Cash agree to take part. The spareness highlighted the frailty in his voice, but it was this frailty, this weakness that became the key to power of the performance.

When he sang Hurt, it was the sound of a man taking stock of his whole life. It wouldn’t have worked as well without that frail tone. The songs took on a new perspective, a new life. As Rick Rubin said: “He was quiet, but a wise, wise, old man.”

Leonard Cohen was in too much pain to leave his house as he recorded his final album You Want it Darker. The vocals were recorded in his living room and emailed to the musicians. He said his condition “eliminated distraction”. Even in such extremis he said the recordings at times brought him “bouts of teenage joy”.

Warren Zevon recorded The Wind, his last album, after a terminal cancer diagnosis. He has relapsed into alcoholism after the diagnosis, asking others, not unreasonably, “What? Am I supposed to die with my boots on?” Keep Me in Your Heart is one of his most beautiful ever songs.

Willie Nelson recorded that song on one the 45 studio albums he has released since passing retirement age in 1999. He has written so many songs in which he contemplates the arrival of the Grim Reaper that he seems to have given that up and is writing about other things now. Willie and death wait for no man.

Tucker Zimmerman, a man you may not be that familiar with, recorded his first album in 1968 — produced by future Bowie collaborator Tony Visconti — and his next in 2024. That album, Dance of Love, produced by and starring Big Thief, was a love letter to his wife, Marie Claire, who he married in 1970. Both died tragically at a fire in their home in January of this year.

Rock’s first generation have created something we didn’t see coming: a body of work about growing old. Delving into what Yeats once called “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”, the likes of Dylan, Springsteen, Cohen et al have produced some of their most profound work long after youth has left the building.

And I haven’t even mentioned Bowie. Ten years on and still too raw. I know Black Star is a masterpiece — I just wish it was someone else’s masterpiece. “If I never see the English evergreens I’m running to” is just too much, even now. Great, great writing though.