Twenty Years Too Soon, Twenty Years Too Late is the first new song in ten years by my old band Swimmer One. Hamish was sceptical about the title at first, because he knows what I’m like and assumed it was some sort of arch joke about our lack of commercial success as we prepared to mark the 20th anniversary of our first single. I reassured him that it wasn’t and that the lyrics were actually about parenthood. This was mostly true.
Two significant things happened in my life in the summer of 2002. The first was We Just Make Music For Ourselves and the brief flurry of industry, radio and media attention that followed. A song on daytime Radio One was something I’d wanted since I was a teenager, and getting that kind of attention with the first music I’d ever released was momentous.
The other thing that happened was that I became a father for the first time. Any parent will tell you that the birth of your first child is the moment when you immediately cease to become the most important thing in your future. Your child’s health and happiness is everything and you would do anything for them. This is how I felt too. It was instantaneous and shocking. As soon as I saw my daughter I knew that my life had changed permanently.
I don’t think I appreciated at the time how emotionally unprepared I was for both of these things happening at once, and how much each one impacted on the other. The presence of a small child in your life is a daily reminder of how frivolous it is to crave musical ‘success’, but that doesn’t mean the desire instantly goes away, especially when the possibility of it has just been dangled in front of you for the first time.
From that point on I felt guilty about every moment I spent chasing my musical ambitions, convinced I was neglecting my child while also, if I’m honest, struggling to adapt to parenthood. That same summer I also turned 29, and was already feeling like I was running out of time to pursue being a musician. I remember that Louise Wener of the band Sleeper had just published her first novel, Goodnight Steve McQueen, the story of a 29-year-old who has wanted and failed to become a successful musician since his early teens and is finally set an ultimatum by his exasperated girlfriend: find a record deal by the age of 30 or end up single. It’s a funny book but I found it genuinely stressful to read.
While reflecting on all this, I looked up the famous old Cyril Connolly quote “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” The first thing that comes up in a Google search is an article in the Paris Review by Shane Jones, written 16 months after the birth of his first child. He makes this observation:
“What’s been most difficult, really, is balancing the weird mix of father and writer online, where the community I know is mostly childless. This online world, which I love and cherish, is also detached and ironic and so image-based that being a dad doesn’t seem to fit. To age out, a writer must pass through three stages: First, you turn thirty, thus becoming “online old.” Second, you get married. Third, you have a child. I’ve done all three, and now I’m having to define myself online: Am I a writer or a dad or a husband? Can I be all three? Shortly after my wife gave birth, I commented on a friend’s Facebook status; my friend’s response was, ‘Hey, look at this Dad on here.’ It wasn’t meant to slight me, but there was something there, something that said I was now more dad than writer. In our culture, fatherhood means baggy khakis and cars with side-impact airbags—it’s something of a joke. Accordingly, the few writer-fathers I know online either make self-deprecating quips about their fatherhood or simply never post about being a father. I’m not comfortable with either approach.”
I recognise some of this from being at gigs full of childless people and feeling slightly apart from it all, the nagging sense that none of this being on stage business was very important really, the hesitancy about drinking after a show because I knew I’d need to be up at 7am, and the simultaneous sense, when I was at home with my young daughter, that I didn’t quite belong there either, that I was too wrapped up in music, song ideas constantly swirling around my head, to be a properly devoted dad.
I’ve been quite hard on myself about this over the years. On balance, though, I probably did about as well as most people would in that situation, and I suspect it’s character-forming to have to juggle parenthood and creative ambition in this way. It certainly made me more focused on the days when I did get to make music. And, bit by bit, I figured out how to be a good parent too. Ultimately, it forces you to think through your priorities on a daily basis, and to make the most of whatever time you have, all of which is a good thing.
I wrote the lyrics for Twenty Years Too Soon, Twenty Years Too Late shortly before my oldest daughter’s 20th birthday. The title, typically of me, is a little obscure in its meaning. For a long time I felt I’d become a father too soon and started releasing music too late and, more broadly, that doing some things too soon and others too late was a recurring pattern in my life. Something that parenthood teaches you, though, is that there’s never an ideal time for anything in life. Much of the time you’re just muddling your way through chaos and interruption and mess and if you get more things right in the course of a day than you get things wrong then that’s a victory. Another thing you learn is that children live in the moment so much that every day allows you a fresh start.
The conclusion the song reaches, then, is that nothing I could do in life is either twenty years too soon or twenty years too late. Hence the final lines: ‘Twenty years, love, yeah yeah, twenty years yeah yeah.’ at which point it hopefully becomes clear that it’s about surviving and doing your best. The fact is that if you make it through 20 years of your life with your relationships mostly intact, then you’re doing ok. And if you haven’t, it’s never too late to fix it as long as you’re still alive.
Title aside, it’s one of my simplest, most direct lyrics and a few years ago I might have rejected it because of that. As a songwriter I’ve often tended to overcomplicate things, to try and force more layers, nuance and meaning into a three or four minute pop song than it could comfortably accommodate. Looking back, I think this might have been partly because I was trying to justify the time I was spending away from my child. I felt that my time in the studio had to mean something; it needed to be art. I don’t know why I couldn’t see that genuine emotion, simply and clearly expressed, is the thing that makes the vast majority of songs connect with an audience.
In this case, it was perhaps easier to write something quickly and simply because the music was mostly Hamish’s work and was largely finished before Laura or I heard a note of it. Oddly enough, that’s one of my favourite things about Twenty Years Too Soon, Twenty Years Too Late. I used to obsess over Swimmer One songs, worrying about every minor detail, dwelling for months on minor things I thought we hadn’t got quite right. Choosing to make one that I had so little creative involvement in, musically at least, turned out to be a form of catharsis. I was able to let that period in my life go, to feel proud of what we achieved rather than frustrated with what we didn’t.
I have a hunch that the songs I’ve written about parenthood might actually be my best songs. On the whole, they’re the ones where I stop trying to be clever and just say what I feel, songs like The Dark Ages, Dead Orchestras, A Port in the Storm, Islands of the North Atlantic, This Road Won’t Build Itself, and Pulling Ragwort on the Sabbath. There’s also A Guide to the Western Isles, from my 2022 album Tourism, which was recorded about a year before Twenty Years Too Soon, Twenty Years Too Late and is essentially about the same thing. Both songs express my anxiety about not being a good enough parent to my first child as she begins to find her way through adulthood. Both are part of the process of learning to do it better.
music and words by Andrew Eaton Lewis 