For those that don’t know, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is about a man who is born old and as tine goes by he gets younger, not older.
This is 2nd Thought by OMD. Written when the lads were about 20 years old.
Listening to it again just now, makes me think that it sounds more like a late-period song, a lyric reflecting on the past – the song itself is quietly confident and not busting a gut to be a hit. Just a nice groove established and a bit of reflective ramblin’. If they were in their 50s you might even accuse them of “phoning it in”.
I realise that this may be a little bit niche but there are plenty of songs where the knackered old performers are trying to sound young and vibrant, but I think the opposite is rare. Unless of course you know different.
This is the first thing that comes to mind, apparently he was 16 when he wrote it.
Laura Nyro wrote And When I Die when she was 17. It was a big hit for Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1969. Despite the downbeat title for one so young, the song carries an upbeat message.
See also ….written when he was 25
Falling off your perch being the golden ticket as far as folks of GH’s spiritual persuasion are concerned.
Sandy Denny wrote Who Knows Where The Time Goes when she had just turned 20.
Townes Van Zandt was 24 when Waitin’ Around to Die was first released, probably a lot younger when he wrote it, which was on honeymoon with his first wife….
@Black-Celebration
Was thinking about starting a similar thread about how songs young writers had written about being/growing old gained added poignancy when sang when the writers had grown old themselves.
Never quite managed to get a heading as pithy as your “Benjamin Button Songs” so never upped it.
The songs I was thinking of were
Richard Thompson Meet on The Ledge (as with all bar one of the other songs below, I’ve gone for a recent live version)
Neil Young’s Old Man
Steven Stills 4 and 20
and at a – very liberal – pinch
Fab Macca’s When I’m 64
Odd that there doesn’t seem to be a recent Stills version of 4 and 20 because it’s one of his best songs
He did 4 + 20 at the CSN Unplugged show in about 1995*. great version too
(*that’s recent, isn’t it….?)
Er, 1990.
You’ll probably end up watching all of this. Bloooooody good.
Thanks @jaygee. I liked the Steven Stills one. My fave so far is @nick-duvet one.
I think Thompson’s Old Man Inside a Young Man would also fit here.
Always a very uncomfortable lyric. Especially for the young man, I suspect.
Jacques Brel wrote Le Moribund when he was barely out of his twenties. The English translation was Seasons in the Sun, very much an end-of-life production.
We had joy
We had fun
We had big fat hairy bums….
What a sweet song.
Our school playground version was
“…Picking bogies in the Sun
But the Sun was so hot
That the bogies turned to snot.”
Such innocent times. I imagine today’s version would be about video nasties and mucky magazines.
It was the “hairy” that always tickled me.
Er, so to speak.
Family, looking back on life from the great age of about, er, 22:
Chappo always looked about 70 – not that you would tell him that.
RC would probably be well chuffed if you told him he looked 70 nowadays
Other people’s mileage may vary……
“I find it funny that I ever searched for meaning in lyrics. Musicians typically find fame in their 20s, when they’ve got audacity, drive, and six percent body fat. What they don’t have is any perspective that could fuel insight. If a 23 year-old barista handed you your coffee and said “Hey, by the way: We live in a wheel where everyone steals,” would you think “Whoa, who is this sage beverage purveyor?” You would not. So why the fuck did anyone have similar thoughts for even a second when Gavin Rossdale sang that line in the ‘90s? Why did I pore over Doors lyrics searching for meaning? Why did I listen to “Celebration of the Lizard” and think “What does it mean?” What does it mean? It means that in between doing enough drugs to kill a blue whale and serving as the base of some disgusting, sweaty, hairy hippie sex pile, Jim Morrison realized that he couldn’t just yell “Come on come on come on!” for an entire album and wrote some shit about lizards. That’s what it means, you idiot. “
The rest can be seen here…
https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/its-always-the-adults-fault?r=7wj8c&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR3gLffUHuqGQ93M1teD2DTGQZw2e7KpepXTvtjx1aMI4-xV5CGpdTdeXk8
Oh thanks for that – a very fine piece.
Kate Bush – The Man With The Child In His Eyes.
Apparently written when she was 13 (!) and recorded AGES later when she was 16 (!!), this song has always stunned me with its maturity and wisdom. All men have a child in their eyes… that is, all men are really just children deep down. She had us pegged, guys, right from the start.
That last phrase has a whole new meaning these days…
Both Sides Now?
On reflection, I may have misread the OP…
John Lennon couldn’t have been any more than 25 when he wrote this: