In the 1980s, with a celebrity in The White House and an American public nervous about Russia, the youth-obsessed genre of rock 'n' roll coughed up a product the world had quite simply never consumed: the middle-aged rock star. Twenty years on from The Beatles—with synth-pop, dance music and hip-hop still largely niche affairs—the big hitters of the sixties and seventies hit their forties, and because mainstream rock radio was essentially conservative, they kept getting play and selling albums.

But the music they were recording didn't reflect the hopefulness and hedonism of their youth; they were too old for that. By the '80s, rock 'n' roll's first graduating class was beginning to address The Big Issues. The hunger to succeed had been satisfied, and the hunger to be heard, man began to rumble. In continuing to make records into middle age, rockers like Don Henley, Paul Simon, and Bonnie Raitt were inventing a whole new genre of music: “DivorceCore.”

Carrie Fisher and Paul Simon...
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Paul Simon and Carrie Fisher in New York City in 1983, the year the couple married and the year Simon's D-Core masterpiece Hearts & Bones came out. Simon and Fisher had a turbulent relationship that ended in divorce a year later.

The last of the great first-wave DivorceCore albums—John Cougar Mellencamp's Mr. Happy Go Lucky—was released in 1996. But with a whole new generation of time-tested musicians hitting middle age, including John Mayer and Mark Ronson, D-Core is about due for a comeback. In fact, in an America as tense as at the height of the Cold War, we might even need it. Rock n' roll can help us with the big questions if we're old enough to let it.

More on that later. First, let us define the genre.

The emotion driving D-Core need not spring from actual divorce; it often does, but it’s just as frequently inspired by a life event typically experienced by the not-young: the death of a parent, menopause, sobriety. It’s the sound of (usually) a guy in his (usually) forties, (usually) twentyish years into a recording career, just trying to figure out life’s serious questions in a way that won’t alienate radio programmers.

Rock 'n' roll can help us with the big questions if we're old enough to let it.

Mostly, first-wave DivorceCore is a late 20th century phenomenon wherein a 15-year-old would go to the mall and plunk down their allowance on an album from a 45-year-old, a transaction that is at least three different kinds of inconceivable from today’s perspective.

'Celebrity Lifecasts Art Exhibit Benefit'
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Carly Simon in 1986, a year before the release of her D-Core staple, Coming Around Again, which was a full-blown episode of thirtysomething.

Classic DivorceCore is also largely a rock situation. Michael Jackson was too warped by worldwide fame to make a DivorceCore album by the time he hit his forties, Lionel Richie too eternally chipper. The closest to DivorceCore R&B got is Marvin Gaye’s 1978 Here, My Dear, a record he literally made to share its profits with his ex-wife as part of their divorce settlement. It sold poorly, which led to more cocaine, which led to tax exile in Belgium, which in a roundabout way led to “Sexual Healing,” and in the spirit of the Oscar-winning film Bohemian Rhapsody, I’m just going to stop telling the Marvin Gaye story right there.

The seeds of DivorceCore were sown in 1978, in Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street.” You know the majestic sax hook, but listen closely to what are secretly the saddest lyrics ever written about the unavoidable end of your rock 'n' roll lifestyle.

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You go home with a charismatic guy who’s a little too old to be at the bar where he picked you up, he talks a big game about changing his life, which it is clear he never will, and then the next morning he’s like: “How about you put on your clothes and get out of my studio apartment?” We hadn’t seen this kind of savage honesty on rock radio before, and surely the just-aging first wave of rock stars were taking notice.

Here's a primer of the key albums from the halcyon days. And just in case you're dealing with your own Cold War midlife issues—regardless of whether you're actually middle-aged—we have just the DivorceCore playlist for you (and your therapist) on Spotify.


Paul Simon Hearts & Bones, 1983

The genre takes root with this 1983 album, a record so middle-aged its first track is called “Allergies.” 42-year-old Simon obliquely references his relationship to Carrie Fisher here, primarily on the title track and “Train In The Distance.” (Simon and Fisher would go on to marry later in 1983, divorce 11 months later, and date off and on for years afterwards.)

The album includes the rhythmic experimentation that would take him down to South Africa a couple of years later to record his masterpiece, Graceland, and closes with what you can only call a meditation on grief: “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” which weaves together the violent deaths of three prominent Johns in Simon’s life (Ace, Kennedy, Lennon) and ends in a Philip Glass synthesizer elegy. He’d previewed the song at the legendary Simon & Garfunkel Central Park concert the year before, with a special appearance by a fan who could not possibly have known he was rushing the stage at exactly the wrong time.

Key Track: “Train in the Distance”


Bruce Springsteen Tunnel of Love, 1987

The release of Tunnel of Love made 1987 a banner year for D-Core. Springsteen had had his commercial breakthrough with “Born in the USA,” he’d married model and actress Julianne Phillips, yet he still couldn’t shake his feeling that all was not as it should have been. Like the equally dour Nebraska, this is strictly a Springsteen album, and by year’s end both the E Street Band and his marriage would break up.

Key Track: “One Step Up”


Robbie Robertson Robbie Robertson, 1987

The same year brought the solo debut by The Band’s Robbie Robertson, who worked with producer Daniel Lanois for a strange sonic masterpiece. The album features “Broken Arrow,” which would go on to be a hit for Rod Stewart on his own 1991 DivorceCore album Vagabond Heart, and “Fallen Angel,” about The Band’s keyboard player Richard Manuel, who had died by suicide the year before. (Deceased former bandmates are a D-Core mainstay.) But its centerpiece is “Somewhere Down The Crazy River,” wherein he teams with then-up-and-comers The BoDeans for a song that is probably about something very personal, but for me it is the approximate sound of doing mushrooms with a 44-year-old.

Key Track: “Somewhere Down The Crazy River”


Carly Simon Coming Around Again, 1987

When your title track references a broken toaster and a burnt soufflé, you can rest (on a high-end mattress) knowing that you have created a DivorceCore classic. This album manages to be a full episode of thirtysomething, boiling down twenty years of adult romantic disappointment into one hard-won truth—don't get too upset about the valleys in your relationship, because another peak is coming, maybe even with a fresh, new partner—while also referencing "Itsy Bitsy Spider." A classic.

Key Track: “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of”


Steve Winwood Roll With It, 1988

40-year-old Winwood sounds like he's turning over a new leaf in "The Morning Side," wherein he becomes the kind of guy who starts his day at 6am rather than ending it there. But then two tracks later he's asking "Don't You Know What The Night Can Do," a song he licensed to an ad campaign for Michelob, so it's hard to say. Sending a more consistent message the same year was Glenn Frey, with his iron-pumping, recommended-daily-allowance-of-fiber-getting anthem "Livin' Right," which was used in ads for LA Fitness.

Key Track: “Holding On”


Bonnie Raitt Nick of Time, 1989

A chart success from back when the Grammys had the power to make chart successes. Bonnie Raitt had been cranking out blues-rock albums for nearly 20 years by this point, but had never achieved mainstream success until Nick of Time won Album of the Year in 1990, making her one of rock music’s few 40-year-old breakthroughs. The album’s frankness about middle age, mortality, and love found late in life (with Caddyshack’s Noonan, Michael O’Keeffe) are still startling, as are 36-year-old Dennis Quaid’s arms in the video for “Thing Called Love.”

Key Track: “Nick of Time.”


Don Henley The End of the Innocence, 1989

“The Boys of Summer” had already begun Henley’s march toward D-Core (“a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac” is only still shocking because today it would be on a Lexus crossover), but this album would cement it. This album is so solidly D-Core it features both a 42-year-old man with a ponytail and a cameo from 1989's must-have rock star Axl Rose.

The title track is more an indictment of Reagan-Bush America; as Jackson Browne’s “For America” and John Cougar Mellencamp’s mid-‘80s masterpieces of condescension “Pink Houses” and “Small Town” show us, if you are not yet ready to search your soul in middle age, turn your powers of observation on America. But the introspection kicks in later, with post-divorce pickup song “The Last Worthless Evening.”

Key Track: “The Heart of the Matter.”


Lyle Lovett Joshua Judges Ruth, 1992

Lyle Lovett was only 35 when he released this album, but in fairness, I have seen no evidence that Lyle Lovett was not 35 from birth. Things were just beginning for him; he’d meet Julia Roberts later this year. But the exuberance of relative youth didn’t hold him back from making a beautifully stark album about religion and America and doomed relationships.

Key Track: “She’s Already Made Up Her Mind”


John Cougar Mellencamp Mr. Happy Go Lucky, 1996

The last great D-Core album was inspired by Mellencamp’s first massive heart attack three years before at age 42. He didn’t quit smoking, but he did find a new lease on life and some fresh rhythms. (Okay, maybe not fresh—“The Full Catastrophe” borrows its entire rhythm track from Beck’s “Loser”— but still bold.)

Mellencamp was still married to Elaine Irwin here; Christie Brinkley, Meg Ryan, and Meg Ryan again were years off. But his brush with death finally got him to turn his magnifying glass on himself on tracks like “Circling Around The Moon” and “Life Is Hard.” He had his last big hits here as well, with “Key West Intermezzo” and “Just Another Day,” but it’s the weirder, funkier stuff that lingers in the mind.

Key Track: “The Full Catastrophe”


So Who’s Doing D-Core Now?

Bands like The National, The Shins, and The War On Drugs seem to have arrived freshly divorced with a kid to pick up from school, and I mean that with respect and admiration. More recently, however, two upcoming releases show it's poised for a resurgence.

The imminent new album from John Mayer, whose new single “I Guess I Just Feel Like,” hints at the world-weariness of a man freshly into his 40s with few mountains left to climb.

But let us not sleep on the powerhouse that is Mark Ronson. He’s 42, he’s just won an Oscar, his real-life divorce is still fresh, and his next studio album is coming this spring. Plus, if you got past “Uptown Funk,” you know: the rest of Uptown Special shows this is a guy who can make magic out of melancholy. (I mean, “Heavy and Rolling?” Come on now.) Sure, he works more in a pop idiom, but that’s where the cool kids have been for ages anyway.

With these two, DivorceCore is due for a resurgence in 2019. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to open a mid-priced bottle of Cabernet and pop a statin.