Just a handful of thoughts as someone who spent basically all of my teens and 20’s playing music in bands, and basically none of my 30’s or (so far) 40’s.

Is it embarrassing for a 40-something person to “play shows”, in a way basically contiguous with how I did in 1998?

Is “playing shows” still a youthful pursuit? I have heard, at least, of great venues back in San Francisco closing, at least in part because contemporary 20-somethings are neither attending nor drinking nearly as often as past generations.

Are genre (y’know, punk, indie, etc) shows now firmly a Niche Interest Performing Art? Mostly devoted enthusiasts, sometimes people in it for a community, occasionally civilians drift in? Does “Dad in a punk band” already sound basically the same way that “Dad in a bluegrass band” would have sounded to me thirty years ago?

Can older people make good music like that? M.O.T.O. were basically my age when The Sixty-Eights played with them in Chicago, and I thought they were great! But.

Apologies for the brief tangent, but I was a little disappointed that Season 2 of Adventure Time‘s post-pandemic spinoff Fiona and Cake seemed to end up at, “be yourself” and “hard feelings are OK”. Now, I’ve found plenty to be baffled by in our tumultuous time, in a way that definitely feels connected to aging. But I’ve also felt the burgeoning of wisdom accompanying my increase in years; and, “it’s true,” I might well intone to my children, “hard feelings are OK.”

I’m not sure to what extent this is wisdom and to what extent it’s just a decidedly non-teenage hormonal balance. But either way, I think that this sense of world-knowledge—which comes in both “peaceful” and “fatalistic” flavors—is not really translatable to anyone not experiencing it.

Is something like this true? The young and/or naive make fun or at least visceral music of varying novelty, and teeth-gnashing obsessives can make technically impressive music that has, at least, a kind of forced exploration of boundaries. Is there a satisfying creative path available to someone middle aged and somewhere on a spectrum between “content” and “resigned”?