I Turned 50, Drove 1,564 Miles, and Saw a Life in Music Flash Before My Eyes

This week, as we near the end of 2025, the writers and editors of KQED Arts & Culture are reflecting on One Beautiful Thing from the year.

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oday, you read the words of a man who’s turned 50. More time behind me than ahead. More music behind me than ahead. And less time to listen to it all.

Is that the goal? To listen to every bit of music ever made? When I survey my life, as one does when they turn 50, it resembles the hopeless quest of a quixotic imbecile. Shows, record stores, clubs, arenas, thrift stores, warehouses, concert halls. What can I hear that I haven’t yet heard?

In October of this year, right before I turned 50, that question inspired a road trip. From Seattle to Los Angeles, I followed the British electronic duo Autechre on tour, alone. Seven shows in five days. A present to myself.

I’d never followed anyone on tour before. Autechre is aggressively exploratory, though, and improvises their sets each night, so I knew it’d be an adventure on multiple levels. Certainly, I’d hear something I hadn’t yet heard.

I was a little overwhelmed at their first Seattle show, but five nights later, I had become so accustomed to Autchre’s abstract musical language that my entire psyche locked in step with their frenetic rhythms. There I was, at a theater in downtown L.A., soaring above it all, understanding, anticipating, reacting, and dancing and dancing and dancing.

In other words, I came out of it a changed person. When you’re a teenager, you can be changed by music on a weekly basis, in your room, with just a pair of headphones. I had to take a two-hour flight and drive solo for 1,564 miles to get the same sensation. But at 50, I’ll take what I can get.

As I wrote when I turned 40, music has been the single most constant presence in my life, with the possible exception of air. I’m still not sure which is more important. And while I relentlessly pursue new sounds, I do occasionally allow myself the comfort of nostalgia.

I don’t like to do this, you know. As a rule, I don’t listen to the music I liked when I was young. I don’t like using streaming. But driving alone down the West Coast, with hundreds of miles ahead of me and 50 years behind, it felt right.

I listened to the Deele’s “Two Occasions,” which I slow-danced to at Comstock Junior High dances. Eric B. and Rakim’s “Paid in Full,” which my cousin and I memorized from a tape full of hiss. “Dark Ages” by Nomeansno, which vaporized my brain when they played in Guerneville. “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” which my homecoming date sang to me, cementing a lifelong relationship with Frank Sinatra and the Great American Songbook. Merle Haggard’s paean to the open road, “Silver Wings,” which I first heard on tour from a truck stop cassette in Texas.

Some people have to wait a lifetime to see their life flash before their eyes. Here I was in Olympia, and Medford, and Buttonwillow, having the same experience. I played “All My Trials,” and traveled back to singing in the choir at Piner High. Mac Dre’s “Stupid Doo Doo Dumb,” from seeing him in Petaluma before he left us and became a deity. “A Rainy Night in Soho,” the Pogues song my wife and I danced to at our wedding reception.

And on and on and on. UGK, the Clark Sisters, Grouper, Smokey Robinson. Every song a marker of time, of memory, of place. Others share this experience with books, or movies. Some of us, the really lucky ones, have it with friends.

After returning from my road trip, I got a call that one of those friends had died.

I first met Jack Springs when he was 24 and lived in a group home. He’d been born with intellectual disabilities, “but more high-functional,” as he put it. He also had ADHD. Growing up in a special ed program in Lake County, his schoolmates often played cruel practical jokes on him, shoved his head in the toilet and beat him up after school.

I’d wanted to meet Jack because I’d heard a CD-R he recorded to release that pain. Christening himself Jack Attack, and over a death metal backing track, he screamed in song after song about rising above and reclaiming his rights from his tormentors. “You are face to face with me! You will pay for everything that you have done to me!” one of them went. “And the wicked life you live will not set you free! And that is it! For the violated nights!”

I found Jack at the supermarket where he worked rounding up shopping carts, and we talked about his life, and how he channeled it into his untrained, unaffected music. After I wrote about him in the local paper, he gained a small but fervent cult following. He recorded a dozen more albums, each an honest, bold assertion of self. He even once convinced me to play in his band.

Jack’s music was among the most alive, urgent, pure and present music I’d ever heard. Listening back now that he’s gone, I have to accept that it’s joined all those other songs I listened to on my road trip. It is now music of the past.

And yet. Because he made music, because he dared to enter a recording studio and heave his trauma back at the world, Jack Springs from Santa Rosa, California will live forever. There’s no possible way our paths would have ever crossed, let alone led us to make music together, go on drives and talk about life, if he hadn’t picked up a microphone to express himself artistically. His fans would say the same thing.

He did it for himself, but we all benefitted.

It’s a hollow cliché at this point that music brings people together, but sorry, it’s true. The older I get, the more I’m convinced that despite technology’s insidious efforts to separate us, we’re actually inching toward an eventual state of togetherness.

As made clear on my road trip, the more music becomes brushstrokes in the portrait of my life, the more Neil Young’s proclamation that it’s all one song starts to make sense. All of us are painting our own lives by singing and hearing and playing and listening, driven by impulse, but take a step back and you’ll notice something: We’re also inadvertently creating a communal mural together of what it is to be alive.

And so Jack Attack blends into Gustav Mahler blends into Bob Dylan blends into Liz Phair blends into Drexciya blends into the Avengers blends into Scarface blends into Peggy Lee blends into Gregory Isaacs and on and on and on.

The thing is, I don’t want to stop painting that mural. As Tony Bennett once sang, how do you keep the music playing? Now, with the perspective of being 50, I never want it to end.