A few years back, I read an article somewhere about young adult fiction being the only real American genre of literature. I tried finding a link to the original article, but couldn’t. I don’t even know if it was the main point of it, just something that stood out.
The writer talked about books like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, Kerouac’s On The Road and others as proof. I’m not sure if agree that young adult fiction is a summary of all American Literature (see Old Man and the Sea), but it is a very distinctive American genre.
Maybe it’s the nascent nature of our country, but youth is an obsession. It’s an export, a cottage industry. Youth is what drives people to do terrible things to themselves like diet and exercise and influencing. We all want to be young, stay young, obsess over the young, and then quietly die.
As I slowly become not-young, I think about this idea more and more. So much so that, doggonit, I wrote a song about it.
The song was a combination of that article that rattled in my brain and two different images that crashed into that idea.
The first was an image of the cobble stone streets of Annapolis, Maryland and the paving company trying to cover the cobble stones. This memory must have pre-dated reading the article, because I haven’t been to Annapolis since high school. Even at that age, I loved the cobble stone streets and the quiet downtown of Annapolis. My parents grew up there and I spent most of my summers catching and eating crabs from the Chesapeake Bay and chasing my cousins through the woods.
When I saw the plans to cover up the cobble stones, I felt a deep sense of loss that I was too young to fully understand. Why cover up such beauty and history for the sake of mere efficiency? I still don’t know what happened to the streets, so if anyone does, let me know.
The second image was from the movie Jaws. I loved the scene where Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, and Roy Scheider were in the hull of the boat sharing stories of their scars. As a kid, I felt that this was so masculine and important—reveling in, not obscuring, the scars that make us who we are.
As I got more serious about writing and realized that if I wanted to make money as I writer I should write young adult fiction, I did what I always do with information that could lead to great ‘lucrivaty.’ I wrote a song that made fun of it.
This is a song I wrote and sat on for quite a long time. Really, until I had a band that could actually bring it to life. I’m always in debt to my friends who can put up with my wild song ideas and make them all better than I had intended. My band Danger in the Lakes, which is still technically my band even though we don’t live near each other, don’t practice, and have no plans on playing shows together, killed it on this song.
When we finished it, I had another hair-brained idea for a music video. Since it was COVID and I didn’t think the ROI on a high production music video was quite worth it, I asked my very talented friend Matt Chase to piece together a bunch of old aerobic clips I found on Youtube. I love how it turned out. You can watch the video above.
This is a song about growing old and its beauty. It’s about the rejection of youth and all its folly. And of course, it’s a banger. (Or maybe it’s a bop? I don’t read enough young adult fiction to know.)
Here are the lyrics in full. You can listen to it on itunes, or spotify, or other places.
V1:
The pavement dries on the road
Where the cobble stones fall apart
A smoother drive for the cars
Cleaner lines and a fresh new start
V2:
The demolition business is now thriving
Giving life to a once dead town
The only way to make way for the future
Is to tear all the old shit down
C:
Where did the glory go in growing old?
In sharing scars and stories told?
Cause if the good die young and the young die free
Then this world was never meant for you and me.
V3:
Young adult fiction we’ve been writing
While we try to find a cure for death
The only thing in life no one can run from
Is the race we all run the best
That’s totally a banger.