Young people with talent; don’t you just hate them? This week’s Wednesday Top Five is in honour of those snot-nosed brats who managed to make meaningful contributions to the word before leaving their teens. Damn their eyes. According to neuroscientist Daniel Levitin it takes ten thousand hours work to make someone a “master” of any particular skill, so this is essentially a list of kids who should really have got out more…
5. Jenny Lewis, from Rilo Kiley. Not a true musical prodigy, but she was kicking up a fuss as a child actress by the time she was ten.
Rilo Kiley – Paint’s Peeling
4. Buddy Holly. The ultimate live-fast-die-young idol. He wrote awesome songs, got shafted by his manager, played with Elvis, and died in an plane crash; all at the tender age of twenty two.
Buddy Holly – Oh Boy
3. Laura Marling. Last year’s darling of the London indie set, Marling wrote all the songs on her debut Alas, I Cannot Swim before she was eighteen.
Laura Marling – Night Terror
2. Conor Oberst, from Bright Eyes. This precocious scamp has been writing and recording music since he was ten. His first EP, Water was the inaugural release for Saddle Creek Records (then called Lumberjack Records), and was recorded when he was just thirteen. Admittedly most of his early stuff was absolute rubbish, but there were the odd sparks of genius.
Bright Eyes – Falling Out of Love at This Volume
1. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. This cheeky bugger was composing by the age of five, allegedly wrote his first fugue aged six, and was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg aged only seventeen, where he performed before the Austrian royal family. For the record, his full name is Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Theophilus Mozart (Amadeus is Latin for Theiophilus, and not actually his name at all, even though his signed all his manuscripts Wolfgang Amadeus)
W. A. Mozart – Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
19 February 2009 at 11:38 am
Buddy Holly – ultimate “live fast, die young idol”. What poppycock you speak. Young on demise Holly may have been, but the fastest thing he did was settling down to get married at the age of 21. Hardly the drug-fuelled, rock ‘n’ roll lifestlye the LFDY moniker suggests.
Ultimate track: True Love Ways (that “live fast, die young” anthem).
19 February 2009 at 4:41 pm
Ah, shudupayaface! It was late in the day, I needed a fifth, and he was on the jukebox at the time. Maybe I exaggerated the LFDY (great Four Letter Initialism, by the way), but he was young and successful: amply qualifying him for inclusion in this list.
So there!
19 February 2009 at 5:18 pm
Great title for a post. I was feeling the same way today (and everyday) when I learned that Lykke Li was 22. These people make me feel unaccomplished. Kudos for the first list ever to include Jenny Lewis and Mozart.
20 February 2009 at 12:52 am
Cheers, glad you liked it. I must confess; the title of the post is a quote from Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. It hit a nerve with me, that’s for sure.
But yeah, young people with talent suck…
27 February 2009 at 10:56 pm
Laura Marling’s debut was quite lovely, but the new stuff I find quite drab.