Jamie Dean [demo drop no. 6]
On the mythos of youth
For a few years now, I’ve found myself practicing a strange omission: I don’t talk about my age.
Ideally, this would be because I just don’t think about it that much. But you already know, reading this, that that can’t be the case.
Except when legally necessary, or around my birthday (which is, in fact, in a week and change), I try not to mention the number. I’ve especially avoided disclosing it on the internet—for privacy, I told myself for a long time, knowing it was a weak cover. A curtain hiding an Ozian maestro: dread. Shame.
We live—this isn’t news by any standard—under the radiant (radioactive?) glow of economies and cultures that idolize youth. A massive slice of the beauty industry is devoted to beating back the effects of aging. In sports, players start in their teens or sooner, knowing their peak physical condition only lasts so long and that injuries are always a risk. In the arts and entertainment, youth is currency, cachet, popularity—a sign of worth in the public eye.
If I tried for optimism, youth can be the beginning of all things: a root point from which possibility tendrils outward. At my most cynical, I’d call it the price tag around your neck, measuring potential output—and decline.
The year I turned 25, I thought my life was over.
The quarter-life crisis came for me, and not gently—a hook to the jaw, knocking me flat. I’d been working at that point for several years in a bookstore; I loved the work, but it was part-time, covering not much more than rent and my four-times-a-week dinner of black beans and broccoli. I’d taken the job specifically to work on music in my off time, releasing new songs and playing shows—which, as it turns out, costs money. I found myself continually looping through a figure eight: pouring my paychecks and waking hours into recording and gigs, then having to take months to recoup missed meals, sleep, and savings.
As my birthday loomed that summer, dread grew in my chest, insidious vine. I couldn’t see the point of what I was doing. Music felt like a grind, the joy vacuumed out by sheer exhaustion. My relatives seemed disappointed when they learned I was still at the bookstore. Meanwhile, friends and classmates were busy building lives that felt solid, real—complete with salaries, exciting announcements, and finished projects.
To soothe myself, I embarked on a steady diet of classic films—old favorites that my father, a onetime film student, had raised us on. But the comfort only stretched so far. I found myself compulsively searching up the actors’ ages as I watched. Predictably, my guts lurched anytime I found one who had played a role while under the age of 25.
If I disappeared tomorrow, I thought, what would I have to show?
Prodigy is easy to love. It has a tractor beam of its own, shining, riveting. So young. So talented. It’s why the mythology of the “27 Club,” whose famous members all died at 27, endures; why we’re more likely to call someone’s death tragic if they were young. Potential, that brilliant intoxicant, is never more attractive than when it seems lost forever.
In a season of worrying my own potential like a massive hangnail, I wrote a song, of course. I nicknamed it after one of Hollywood’s best-known eidolons, whose films kept me afloat, but whose ghostly youth terrorized me: “Jamie Dean.”