Great Midlife Songs (I of II)

32 songs of mature and universal empathy and love

Jan 23, 2024

I’m splitting midlife music into two lists: one involving mature personal and universal empathy and love (no love songs here — I’ll post a list of my favorite love songs next week) and the second involving songs conveying midlife wisdom.

Each song listed is a link to a YouTube version. Hope you find a couple new ones for your playlist and get a jog to your memory of a couple you haven’t listened to in years. Share your own favorite songs in this “category” in the comments section.

A compelling body of music has been written since the 1960s that deepens our empathy for people beyond our immediate circle of family and close friends. You’ve no doubt got your favorites. These are mine.

These 32 songs bring us in touch the suffering of human beings in our surrounding community and across the world. They make us better people.

These songs can, of course, be appreciated when we are young. I appreciated about half of them in my twenties. (Almost all of them were written by rising adults in their twenties or thirties.) But even if we do tap into songs like these before midlife, their meaning usually deepens for us in our forties and fifties.

More often than not, these songs don’t sink in until our forties and fifties. Midlife, ideally, brings us into awareness that life is not all heroic willpower, as most of tend to think in our twenties. There is suffering that cannot be ended. There are wounds that will not heal. Circumstances shape us as much as we shape circumstances. And death is inevitable and can come to our loved ones — or any of us — any time. In midlife, we accept these humbling realities.

At the same time, our empathy and compassion deepen for those around us and extend to all of humanity. Our circle of care now includes our eight billion neighbors. We embrace the ethos of universal dignity, justice, and care. And songs like these help us get there.

This “soundtrack” starts with simple messages and stories about our neighbors. (Jewel’s song “Hands” has millions of views, but I’ve always loved this version with an orchestra.) Then the songs take us deeper into the suffering around us. (I brought two songs of deep empathy over from a previous list. I’ve included three versions of “Motherless Child” because I love all three.)

The next songs carry us into the experience of victims of torture and other human rights abuses, including the most tragic story I’ve ever heard in a song — the Waterboys’ story-song of a young Soviet soldier in World War II who is sent to a labor camp of the Gulag.

The list closes out with several songs about universal empathy and love, including Stevie Wonder’s extraordinary song “As”.

The last two songs bring things back to the personal. First, a song by Patrick Watson that is one of the greatest-ever ballads of personal empathy. Then the finale, “See You Again” by Charlie Puth and Wiz Khalifa, about how we’ll catch up with our friends in the afterlife and tell them all about what’s happened in our lives since they parted.

Enjoy!

All my best,

Mike