Calamity

In the world of American music it’s best to be young. Then critics can say things like “at age 24, he, or she already has the soul of an old troubadour.” If you are an old troubadour, nobody cares. Your life experience does not count as much as a marketable look. I know dozens of folk and Americana musicians laboring in obscurity mostly because they are in their fifties, or sixties, or older. Add the ones I know only by reputation or by listening to them, it is well into the hundreds.

Talented as the crop of youngsters are (and they truly are), they don’t have “old souls.” That’s a load of new age claptrap, which is a harsh statement coming from me, a product of the new age sixties. I still have my well-worn copy of Be Here Now. 

You get an old soul by living with your young soul until it grows old along with you.

It takes a long time to make enough mistakes and do enough damage to become a calamity.