A few weeks ago, an American singer/songwriter named Jesse Winchesterdied of cancer. A folkie of the early 70s, he was raised in Memphis but moved to Canada in his twenties to avoid the draft. His songs are light and effortless—the perfect music for a generation who wanted to leave behind their prim, stifled upbringings. I can imgaine Winchester's contemporaries putting his records on in dorm rooms, soaking in their relaxed, rootsy vibes and plainly affecting lyrics. It's easy music to like, maybe even to love.
I recently took a trip to Florida with my dad. He was there to see his college friends, who were gathering at one of their houses in Delray Beach. He went to Cornell in the early 70s, and his friends, many of whom went on to live at a commune in Northern California together, are still very close. One night we sat on the terrace of the condo, sipping drinks in the warm air, and someone put on one of Jesse Winchester's albums. I'd never heard of him before. We spent the next hour listening to his songs, my father's friends reminiscing about listening to him back on the commune, recalling the specific moments his music had affected their lives. None of them had thought about him in a long time, so it was a shock to everyone when we found out the next day that Jesse Winchester was about to die.
There's an ache in Winchester's earlier work, his odes to his home in the American South as he lived for decades in Quebec as a draft evader. Like many of his peers, he lost a bit of his edge as he got older. He gained respect when people like Jimmy Buffet and Emmylou Harris covered his songs, but his earlier music taps into something that feels more universal—the way that young people's intense feelings clash with their own lack of perspective. As my father pointed out to me, it's funny how old these recordings feel. Winchester was younger than me (I'm 24) when he wrote songs like “Mississippi, You're On My Mind” and “Yankee Lady”, but to me these songs happen in the past tense. Young people have always been derided for their exaggerated sense of nostalgia, but with enough time, even these immature feelings of significance end up becoming reality. As my dad's friends sat around and listened to these songs, this music had become as old as it felt, and so had their songwriter.
As a teen, I always wished I'd grown up in the 60s. I would have taken great drugs, seen now long-dead legendary artists, witnessed people walk on the moon and the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement. The music of that era surrounded me as I grew. My parents sang me the Beach Boys and James Taylor as I fell sleep and covered Crosby Stills & Nash, Bob Dylan and the Band around the house. That music will always sound like home to me.
As I became interested in underground art and music, my interest in the 60s grew stronger. I read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and the novel Drop City. I watched the Woodstock documentary and envied the lack of corporate sponsorship and the no-rules atmosphere. When I moved to New York, I sought out experiences which seemed to compare, volunteering at DIY venues and attending shows in lofts and basements. Mostly, I wished I lived in a time when real social change seemed possible, when idealism didn't just seem like delusion.
Eventually, I was forced to reckon with today's reality, and my romanticism of my parents' experiences sometimes turned into resentfulness. The recession hit and I was forced to drop out of college. My feminist collective broke up due to infighting. Big corporations kept getting bigger, the wars never ended, the Obama campaign turned into the Obama presidency, and hope, once again, seemed like mutual illusion we'd all been seduced by. I became aware of the hatred that my parents' generation inspired in Gen Xers as I met people older than me, and I began to see their point. The albums from that era I'd loved as a kid suddenly seemed questionable. All you need is love? Tell that to the people collecting my student loans from my uncompleted degree.
During my teen years, the music I loved shared a lot with the music of my parents' generation: modern folkies like Iron & Wine and Sufjan Stevens, and pop that could easily have time travelled from their youth, like the Olivia Tremor Control. Begrudgingly accepting my life as a disillusioned millennial, while “living the dream” in New York, my musical tastes changed and rebelled against their origins. My new favorites were artists I doubt I'd ever be able to take my parents to see—weird electronic, hip-hop and punk acts. I still love the music my parents introduced me to, and the modern artists who they recall, but I feel betrayed and confused by the world that their generation helped to create. I share values of the hippies, like compassion and open-mindedness, but am unsure of their efficacy in enacting real change. Like many people my age, a lot of the time I just feel lost.
There was a brief lull in a conversation about Medicare one night on my trip, and one of my father's friends suddenly said, “Did you ever think we'd be talking about this?” It felt like she'd broken the fourth wall—I could suddenly extract myself from the present moment and see them as the people they must have been when they were first listening to these songs. It seemed that overall, not much had changed. Barring some kind of apocalypse, and with luck, I'll one day sit around with my close friends in our late middle age, remembering those artists and experiences that shaped our lives. And maybe one of our children will look up from whatever the future's equivalent of checking their phone is, and listen.