I read something this morning by Bob Lefsetz about aging.
It was funny and sharp and sprawling and furious, as his writing often is. But underneath it I felt… sadness.
“The truth is we’ve lost the passion,” he wrote.
Have we though?
I’m 62, and I work in music. Much of my working life is spent with people who have been making music for decades. People who have toured, recorded, been reviewed, ignored, celebrated, dropped, rediscovered, underpaid and well paid. We know how the machinery works.
And I don’t see a loss of passion. I see something more interesting: people losing their willingness to manufacture passion for things they no longer believe in.
THIS, I believe, is one of the gifts of getting older…
You have seen the hype cycle before. Watched the next big thing become last year’s thing. Watched money mistaken for value, reach mistaken for connection…
Eventually, something in you says: “no”… and maybe “no” clears the ground for passion.
I work with musicians across generations, some in their 60s and 70s, making some of the most searching, strange and fearless work of their lives. Always listening, learning and still capable of being completely knocked sideways by a sound, a feeling or an observation.
What has changed, perhaps, is the appetite for noise… and there is a lot of noise!
The music business is so good at generating it. New release. New campaign. New content. New platform. New reason to panic because everybody else appears to be doing something you are not.
I feel it!
I can spend an entire day moving between Instagram, spreadsheets, funding applications, radio contacts, ticket reports and streaming statistics and reach the end wondering whether I have been anywhere near music.
Then someone sends me something: a violin phrase lifting me above the treetops; a voice cracking slightly on a word and my heart breaks; a flute finding its way completely naturally within the sound of birds.
And there it is! Goosebumps… passion.
Perhaps ageing is not about losing passion, but becoming increasingly intolerant of the things that impersonate it.
I don’t want to be young again.
I don’t want to pretend every new thing is revolutionary. I don’t want my excitement to depend on an algorithm being adjusted or another crazy way for musicians to promote themselves!
I DO want to remain porous and I want to be surprised.
I want to hear a twenty-year-old make something I don’t understand and resist telling them why the music I grew up with was better.
I want to hear a seventy-year-old make the most radical work of their life.
I want generations in rooms together (yes!) and for curiosity to outlive certainty.
I want the passion to go deeper and deeper. Not away.
Maybe I’m wrong. Ask me again when I’m 70 😜
But perhaps, as the old noise begins to fall away, we become better at hearing what remains.
And, I hope, with age might come courage.
How about you?