Youth

Last post, I mentioned Joni Mitchell’s long and illustrious career. But in that concert video, it struck me that her songs I knew and loved mostly came from her first few albums— Big Yellow Taxi, Both Sides Now, The Circle Game, Woodstock, Chelsea Morning and all the songs on her album Blue. She went on to record some fifteen  other albums, but I suspect that others besides me don’t know many of those other songs in the same way.

For me, the same can be said for the work of Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, James Taylor, Paul Simon, Neil Young and many others whose creative output never flagged over decades, but seemed to write their most memorable songs in their youth. Am I alone in this observation? 

Perhaps part of it was the zeitgeist of the times. So many of the above were caught up in the extraordinary cultural whirlwind of the 60’s and early 70’s, when the need for these songs was profound and their influence deep. As the movie Almost Famous reveals, things began to change around 1973— coincidentally the year that I stopped listening to much of this music and switched to jazz. Now  commercial success, studio polish, musician’s lust for fame and fortune and the disco beat supplanted the garage band mentality of people gathering simply to sing what needed to be said, both from some place deep within themselves and in the surrounding community.

Some of this is the maddening dynamic of artistic creation, where each successful song, poem, novel throws down a gauntlet and demands, “Nice work. But now what are you going to do?” To keep leaping over the high bar you set is a tall order and I suspect every artist suffers from the sense that the next creation might not hit the mark. There’s a long legacy of one-hit wonders (in some ways, Carl Orff was one— Carmina Burana and then what?) and while we all should be grateful for that hit, I imagine the artist suffering from the pressure to keep creating masterworks. And as mentioned before, some of it is the need and readiness of the audience that determines how any new work will be received.

No problem to solve here, just something that the Joni Mitchell concert made me think about. There is a long, fascinating study of how artists develop and mature and many indeed go through an immature phase before finally finding their authentic voice. Yet others arrive full-blown in their youth and then struggle finding anything else to say with as much potency as their first creations. In my own tiny world of creating musical arrangements for kids in music classes, articulating pedagogical ideas, creating dynamic lesson plans, I’m often surprised that things I created like Step Back Baby, The Earth Day Rap, Intery Mintery, Six Guidelines for Developing Material and more all came from 1984, a prolific moment only 9 years into my 45 year career. I still do these with kids and adults and though I have a long, long list of other fun, musical and effective songs, dances, pieces and activities, these indeed hold up in my work with both kids and adults. So far, no one has confronted me and demanded, “Yeah, that’s fine, but what else do you got?!”

So hooray for the artists in their youth, passionately pursuing their art before mortgages, families, the land mines of fame and fortune and the impossible demands of outdoing themselves sully the pure impulse to create what demands to be brought to birth, to say what so desperately needs to be said. And perhaps I’ll start listening to Joni’s later work and see what moves me. Onward!