Results for “aging out of youth”

Songs

Teen Age Riot

Sonic Youth

A near-instrumental, chant-based intro gives way to one of Sonic Youth's most anthemic songs, a shambling ode to youth…

youth rebellion underground music culture hero worship and its limits

Every Age

José González

A quiet folk hymn to collective effort across generations, built on gardening and building metaphors. González treats human…

generational continuity collective responsibility impermanence and change

The Modern Age

The Strokes

A loose, sun-bleached travelogue of restlessness, where the narrator drifts between attraction and avoidance without ever…

restlessness evasion of commitment performance vs. authenticity

Age of Consent

New Order

A song about a relationship curdling under the weight of unspoken resentment, built on the tension between wanting release and…

emotional withholding breakup and loss communication breakdown

Dirty Boots

Sonic Youth

A hazy, half-narrated scene of teenage nightlife and adolescent desire, rendered in fragments rather than a coherent story.…

adolescent restlessness sexual awakening ritual and superstition

Schizophrenia

Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia" builds a fractured character sketch around a woman whose mental illness is treated with unsettling…

mental illness and stigma unreliable perception family cruelty

100%

Sonic Youth

A tribute song built from fragments of grief, aggression, and dark humor, written in memory of a scene figure lost to violence.…

violent death and its aftermath rock scene mythology and idolization gender and predation within a music subculture

Incinerate

Sonic Youth

A love-as-arson song that turns romantic devastation into a fire-and-rescue scenario, with the narrator both perpetrator and…

romantic destruction self-annihilation violence as intimacy

Superstar

Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth's cover of the Carpenters' "Superstar" strips the original's lush orchestration down to a slow, droning haze,…

one-sided obsession loneliness the falseness of mediated intimacy

Sugar Kane

Sonic Youth

A hazy, repetition-driven love song built on a nickname (borrowed from Marilyn Monroe's character in 'Some Like It Hot') that…

idealized desire surface glamour vs. hidden unease repetition as devotion

Bull In the Heather

Sonic Youth

A slippery, almost mantra-like track built from a numeric countdown and a cycling list of demands, where desire and commerce…

desire vs. commodification repetition and ritual unpredictability/chance

Kool Thing

Sonic Youth

A satirical dialogue between a rock star's ego and a skeptical female voice, "Kool Thing" stages a flirtation that curdles into…

gender and power celebrity worship racial politics

Shadow of a Doubt

Sonic Youth

A chance meeting on a train dissolves into a hazy, possibly murderous conspiracy between the narrator and a stranger, with the…

complicity and denial desire as danger dream logic

Stoned at the Nail Salon

Lorde

A meditation on aging out of youthful restlessness, sung from inside a comfortable domestic life that still itches with doubt.…

aging and impermanence domestic contentment vs. restlessness nostalgia for youth

Jersey Shore

The Promise Ring

A brief, offhand travelogue of restlessness set against a fading summer, where the speaker's physical drift along the Jersey…

transience aging out of youth seasonal decline

Angel From Montgomery

John Prine

A young man's ventriloquized portrait of an aging woman worn down by a marriage and a life that never became what she imagined.…

aging and disillusionment domestic entrapment lost youth

The One I Loved Back Then (The Corvette Song)

George Jones

A novelty-tinged story song built on a bait-and-switch: an old man's admiring description of a car turns out to be a description…

nostalgia lost youth double meaning/wordplay

Giving Up the Gun

Vampire Weekend

A meditation on retired warriors and burned-out rebels, using the image of a decommissioned weapon to talk about aging out of…

aging and obsolescence nostalgia for youthful intensity loss of purpose

Unknown Legend

Neil Young

A middle-aged narrator recalls a woman he once admired for her restlessness and beauty, now settled into domestic life but still…

nostalgia freedom versus domesticity female mythology/idealization

Drive

R.E.M.

Drive opens Automatic for the People as a stark, semi-acoustic address to an unnamed younger generation, built almost entirely…

generational drift autonomy and its risks rock and roll as inheritance and myth

Leaves That Are Green

Simon Jäger

A young songwriter watches a single year of his life pass and turns that small span of time into a meditation on mortality and…

impermanence aging and time lost love

Art School

The Jam

A blast of punk-era sloganeering that treats the art school as a metaphor for total creative and social permission. The Jam…

youthful self-assertion anti-authoritarianism media distrust

April Come She Will

Simon & Garfunkel

A miniature calendar poem that compresses an entire love affair into six months, each given a single verb of arrival, settling,…

transience of love nature as metaphor for emotion inevitability and cyclical time

Veronica

Elvis Costello

A deceptively bouncy pop song about an elderly woman disappearing into dementia, told partly through the eyes of a younger…

dementia and memory loss identity and naming youth versus old age

I Can't Forget

Leonard Cohen

A wry, half-comic meditation on aging and memory dressed up as a road song. The narrator sets out to reclaim some lost person or…

memory and forgetting aging exodus/departure

All My Friends

LCD Soundsystem

A song about a night out that becomes a meditation on an entire adult life, as the narrator watches youth-culture rituals repeat…

aging friendship and its erosion nightlife and nostalgia

When We Were Young

Adele

A chance reunion at a party becomes the occasion for Adele to measure the distance between who she was and who she's become. The…

nostalgia aging and mortality lost love

Middle Of The Road

The Pretenders

A restless, mid-career reckoning song in which Chrissie Hynde's narrator refuses both the comfort of settled domesticity and the…

compromise and aging class and global inequality celebrity exhaustion

Closing Time

Fairport Convention

This is a bar-room parable about the last hour before closing, where drink, desire, and religious longing all blur into one…

desire and its exhaustion time running out sacred and profane collapsing together

You and Me

Neil Young

A quiet meditation on long partnership and aging, built almost entirely from repeated phrases that mimic the drift of memory.…

enduring love aging and mortality memory and reflection

I Don't Need Your Rockin' Chair

George Jones

A defiant novelty-tinged honky-tonk anthem in which an aging performer refuses the trappings of old age, insisting his body may…

aging and mortality defiance of retirement identity tied to performance

From Hank to Hendrix

Neil Young

A meditation on a long marriage under strain, framed through decades of American musical and cultural touchstones. Neil Young…

marital erosion time and cultural change fidelity and belief

Martha

Tom Waits

An old man places a long-distance phone call to a woman he loved decades earlier, and the polite small talk of the conversation…

lost love nostalgia regret

Run That Body Down

Paul Simon

A wry domestic vignette about physical burnout, built from a doctor's warning that Simon repeats first to his wife and then to…

bodily limits self-deception aging

Montezuma

Fleet Foxes

An opening-track meditation on aging and mortality, framed as a young man surprised to find himself already past the age at…

mortality aging and belated adulthood self-doubt

Can't Stop Running

Todd Rundgren

A meditation on ambition and mortality framed as a lifelong sprint, tracing a single motion from infancy to old age. Rundgren…

ambition and drive fear of failure mortality and aging

Diane Young

Vampire Weekend

A frantic, pitch-shifted pop song about young mortality dressed up as car-crash Americana. Beneath its manic energy and title…

dying young recklessness fatalism

We Used to Know

Jethro Tull

A wistful meditation on aging and the passage of time, framed as an address to old companions whose paths are diverging. The…

nostalgia aging and mortality disillusionment

Place to Be

Nick Drake

An opening-track confession that traces a single life arc—innocence, vitality, and eventual depletion—in four spare stanzas. The…

decline and aging loss of innocence spiritual exhaustion

Changes

David Bowie

A restless self-portrait of an artist who treats identity as provisional, staged against a generational standoff between an…

self-reinvention generational conflict impermanence