The Cure Is the Best Soundtrack for Middle Age

How my relationship with the goth icons, who just released a brilliant new album, is still evolving

There are few things I dislike as much as sitting in a medical office, waiting to submit myself to a full blood work panel.

But I’m in my mid-50s now and it’s become a fact of life. I’ve discovered, however, that a great distraction when you’re in a hospital waiting room and trying not to freak out about your own mortality is listening to music. And on this particular day, my earbuds are blasting “Endsong,” the closing track on The Cure’s newly released Songs of a Lost World, their first album in 16 years.

It’s comforting in its familiarity. It delivers exactly what you’d expect from a Cure song: it’s brimming with dreamy guitars, synthesizers, and beautiful despair. It sounds like something that could’ve been on The Cure’s masterpiece, Disintegration—an album which, if you want to feel ancient, celebrated its 35th anniversary this year. (The only thing sadder than a Cure song is the goddamn passage of time.)

But it’s not just the nostalgic undertones that make the song work. It feels both like something I would’ve loved in my teens, and the perfect soundtrack for having blood drawn because my doctor is worried about my cholesterol. Just consider the lyrics…

It’s like lead singer Robert Smith is sitting next to me in the waiting room, flipping through a dog-eared magazine, sighing deeply as he waits for his name to be called. It makes me feel less alone in my stress bubble.

The whole record is like this, actually. It’s like a musical about day-drinking with a middle-aged friend who’s feeling more despondent and muscle-achy than usual. “I know, I know that my world has grown old,” Smith sings on “And Nothing Is Forever.” Get out of my head, Bobby! Or this perfect line from album opener “Alone”: “We were always sure that we would stay the same, but it all stops.” That’s a song designed to accompany you on the drive to get a colonoscopy.

The new album sent me back into a deep Cure listening phase. I loved the band back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when I was younger and their songs spoke directly to my “the world is unfair and nobody understands me but music” soul, but they fell off my radar in recent decades. Songs of a Lost World was just the excuse I needed to sit down and revisit their discography. It’s been like getting together with an old college pal you haven’t seen in years. 

The songs still give me goosebumps and the occasional tear that I pretend is allergies. But why exactly? Is it just nostalgia? Some of it, probably. But the emotions these songs stir up today couldn’t be more far-removed from what they did to me in my teens and 20s. I’m not so… how do I say this delicately?... performatively miserable as I was at 18.

The reason I—and maybe you—still love Cure songs has more to do with how our brains are hardwired. 

“Listening to a very familiar piece of music can be rewarding for the reason that our brains love making correct predictions,” says Susan Rogers, Ph.D., a director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory, and author of This Is What It Sounds Like: A Legendary Producer Turned Neuroscientist on Finding Yourself Through Music. “When we know that a crescendo or a favorite solo is coming, we enjoy anticipating it and then experiencing the dopamine release when it finally arrives.”

Before becoming a neuroscientist, Rogers worked in the music industry, most famously as the chief engineer for Prince’s Purple Rain. And perhaps unsurprisingly, she tends to get a dopamine rush when listening to Prince more than other artists. “Recently I was surprised to discover that Nirvana’s ‘Heart Shaped Box’ sounded kind of dated while Prince’s ‘I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man’ sounded as fresh as when we recorded it in 1987,” she told me. “But I don't think it was personal attachment. Some of the work I did then sounds stale now. My impression relates to reassessing the choices made on the record. The Nirvana record sounds ‘trendy,’ for want of a better word. The Prince record sounds more timeless. Food is similar. Cheese pizza is timeless. Pizza with kale is less likely to be appealing after its time.”

An appreciation for music when you’re 50 or older tends to get downplayed, even among researchers. There was that much circulated 2013 study that suggested our interest in music “declines with age.” The older we get, the less that music—old music, new music—actually matters to us. Or at least that was the theory. 

But a new national survey from the University of Michigan, published last February, found something much different. According to their research, two in five adults over 50 consider music “very important.” Three-quarters said music helped them with stress and relaxation, and 65% said it helps their mental health or mood.

And those positive effects aren’t just because they’re remembering their carefree youth. “Our relationship with music has to change as we reach 50, because we’re different people,” says Dr. Joel Howell, a professor of internal medicine at the U-M Medical School who worked with the poll team. “The music doesn’t change. When a hammer strikes the strings and produces vibrations, it has no meaning. We impose meaning on it, and it’s all about context. That context can change over time.”

A 2020 study from Cambridge suggests that the music we respond to is about more than just the notes. We “prefer the music of artists who have publicly observable personalities (‘personas’) similar to their own personality traits,” the researchers wrote. I think that explains at least part of my midlife love for The Cure, especially Robert Smith. He has aged perfectly. He looks constantly disheveled, like he’s just dropped off his kids at soccer practice and he forget to brew coffee before leaving the house and he’s dreading having to talk to other parents. He looks exactly like I feel; exhausted, a little annoyed, trying to keep it together, wondering if it’s too early for a nap.

Robert Smith, looking exactly how I feel all the goddamn time.

But it’s the songs that have the biggest impact, sometimes even more than they did when I was young enough to think gloomy was sexy. I’m not an especially maudlin person anymore, especially since I hit my 40s and became acquainted with adult problems. (Teenage me wasn’t prepared for taxes, skin cancer anxiety, and raising kids.) But those sad songs still find a way to crawl inside my skull and refuse to leave.

Rogers assures me that’s normal, and even healthy. “For most of us, having a musical companion walk us to the brink of sad thoughts and then bring us safely back from the ledge is a good feeling,” she says. “It reminds us that sad times do end.”

What makes me sad has changed so dramatically over the past 30 years. And yet the songs still feel like they’re talking directly to me. It’s almost as if they’ve evolved along with me, saying what I need to hear at the exact moment I need to hear it.

Look at a brilliant Cure song like “In Between Days”. When it came out in 1985, it felt like an anthem to teenage angst. But in my mid-50s, the lyrics hit a little differently.

Or how about “Pictures Of You”? When I first listened to it incessantly in the early ‘90s, it was clearly about missing ex-girlfriends, something I could absolutely relate to at the time. But today, it feels like a song about growing older, and looking at pictures that remind you how fast time moves. It’s the rush of unsolicited feelings when your Facebook “Memories” gives you another photo of your son when he was a toddler or on his first day of kindergarten, and it sends you into an emotional tailspin, because wait a minute, wasn’t that just yesterday? In the blink of an eye, the kid in that photo got replaced by a surly teen who won’t even talk to me.

And now I’m crying to “Pictures of You” for reasons that have nothing to do with why I cried to it in 1990.

That’s a pretty impressive magic trick, if you think about it. How can a song mean something so personal and true when you’re 18, and also personal and true for entirely different reasons when you’re 55?

“We reinterpret familiar music,” Dr. Rogers tells me. “Every event in your life is filtered through all of the music you’ve ever heard in your life. You categorized The Cure according to what you knew as a teenager. In your 50s, you’ve had many more experiences.”

My blood tests came back fine, btw. So, I’ll probably live long enough to be nostalgic about Songs of a Lost World. I’m curious if I’ll still like it, and if it’ll feel like the band is still riding shotgun with me, playing sad melodies to help me get through life’s peaks and valleys. What will these new songs mean to me, or to you, next month or next year or ten years from now? Will they say something different to us when we’re 70, or 80, or even 90?

I guess we’ll all find out together.