40 Great Songs of Wisdom and Maturity

Midlife Music (II of II)

Jan 26, 2024

Each song title links to a YouTube video. Hope you find a few gems to add to your playlist.

None of us draws most of our wisdom from songs, but we listen to our favorite songs so often that we soak up whatever wisdom is in them. So our songs should help us get there, especially in our forties and fifties.

It’s subjective, of course: a song that makes us feel wiser and more mature.

However, I did set some criteria:

It should share some wisdom about the universal human experience.

It should be open to everyone. So none of these are religious or even spiritual. I’ll get to that in my next post.

It should take us into a psychologically mature space.

It should be about personal wisdom, not about relationships or society. (I let Sting’s “Fortress” slide cuz it’s also about our internal psychological dynamics.

And it should be mature wisdom for those of us in midlife, not a song of advice to younger people. (Although I kinda let Christina Aguilera’s songs slide by on this cuz they are also wisdom for midlifers.)

What I’ve discovered is that the wisdom in the lyrics is the key, but we have to enjoy listening to the music. (These calls were even more subjective.) And I discovered that some songs make me feel wiser and more mature without me quite knowing why — and even when the lyrics are a bit of a mystery to me.

Almost all of these songs were written by people in their twenties and thirties. Which is a surprise, at least to me. We don’t expect a 20-year-old to be wise, but we do expect a 60-year-old to be. However, most songs are written by rising adults, and some of their songs have wisdom that works for us midlifers.

Here are my 40 songs of wisdom and psychological maturity.