How Not to Waste a Good Midlife Crisis
A manifesto for middle-aged creatives
I remember the moment I first felt old. While watching a band that shall remain nameless, I thought the men of a certain age—with their dad bods and hairlines—looked weird playing guitars. Perhaps it was a simple identification—I remember buying their first CD—but the idea persisted. Robert Smith applying lipstick night after night at 60 years old. Bono and The Edge, still without surnames. And Thom Yorke, in his fifties, surely must get sore dancing like that, right?
Then, on the edge of 40, I joined a band.
Three years in, I still feel self-conscious pulling up to a dive bar in my brother’s minivan (he’s in the band, too!). This is on top of those out-of-body moments playing to a crowd consisting entirely of the other bands on the bill—with members often nearly 20 years our junior.
The truth is pop music, no matter the genre, will always be a young person’s game.
We try to stay in our lane. Our blend of angst-ridden post-punk (we call it “riot dad”) sticks to age-appropriate themes. And none of us expect to have the rolling stones in our sixties to play songs we wrote in our twenties about physical acts that, four decades later, would likely require heavy…
