"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.
This song has the best damn rock 'n roll kazoo solo in the whole fucking world. I will die on this hill.
As I come to write about it, I realize that The Terrordactyl's 2007 EP Mike Bowers was all covers - all from the band The Pharmacy, who I don't know at all. (I know very little about The Terrordactyls to begin with - I got this EP, the record just before it, and a handful of random songs of the same era, and that's it.)
But it doesn't matter who wrote Growing Old. I love this version of it, and, if I now run off to see what the original sounded like, that's not going to change anything.
(Along the same lines, Hallelujah the Hills' massive Deck project, and their two-cover-songs-a-month output on their associated Patreon, introduced me to a bunch of songs I like now, at least in their versions, most weirdly Lana Del Rey's There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard.)
Growing Old is a weird manifesto, a bizarre declaration, a goofy jaunt:
Every step is one towards death
Every word and every breath
One thing to keep in your mind:
The more you live the less that you die
It's got a odd rhythm, a unique soundscape - did I mention that kazoo? - and a singer high in the mix, singing just a bit higher than his normal voice, insistent and urgent.
And there's something magnificently optimistic about it, with a line that will live rent free in my head as long as I'm still growing old:
Spent the first hundred years of my life
Growing old, growing old
I love that "first." I'm inspired by it. It makes me wonder: how will I spend the second hundred years of my life?
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