The Missing Playlist
The songs I had to write because midlife deserves its own anthems.
Pop music only toys with aging—The Beatles asked playfully, “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?” while Lorde, still a teenager, sighed, “It feels so scary, getting old.”
But who’s writing about what happens when you age… wrinkles, gray hair, menopause?
There isn’t exactly a Spotify playlist called Hot Flashes & Crow’s Feet. Pop music loves youth, with the rare nods to aging, but mostly skips the messy middle. Once estrogen leaves the chat, the soundtrack cuts off.
That silence felt like an invitation.
Pop music loves youth—but it’s time midlife had its own anthems.
Carl Honoré, who writes about aging, frames life like a video game—each birthday a new level, and the later ones, he insists, are the most exciting. I love that. I just unlocked level 59, and I'm curious about what adventures come with it.
So, I wrote my own songs: Silver Lining, an ode to embracing this stage, and Level Up, a cheeky anthem about menopause—the hardest level of the game.
AI gave me the soundscape: a mashup of dramatic strings and something resembling 8-bit bleeps, sonic textures I’d never have stitched together alone.
Silver Lining
“The silver lining of clouds is not always visible at first glance, but it is there, if only one looks.” — Virginia Woolf
I wanted Silver Lining to feel cinematic, moody, dramatic. Think Lana Del Rey. Inspired by women posting gray-hair selfies, celebrating wrinkles, and clapping back at trolls—it wasn’t the nastiness I remembered, it was the women refusing to shrink.
👉 Read the full lyrics here → Silver Lining Lyrics
🎧 Listen to the song here → Silver Lining
The sparks came from different places. First, my husband, who once looked in the mirror and shrugged, “I earned these”—wrinkles not as flaws, but as evidence, receipts of a life fully lived. That moment became “I earned each line, each sweet design, that marks the passage of time.” Then came Paulina Porizkova, the supermodel turned writer and truth-teller on aging, who said, “One of the incredible things about aging is that you care less and less about what other people think”—a sentiment that echoes through “I wear these years like victories won.” And finally, Jamie Lee Curtis, actress and unapologetic champion of aging naturally, who declared, “I am pro-aging. I want to age with intelligence, grace, and dignity, and verve, and energy. I don’t want to hide from it.” That spirit shines in the lyric: “Baby these aren’t flaws you see, it’s my soul shining free.”
Time doesn’t just take—it also gives..
That’s the heart of Silver Lining: wearing years as victories, each one adding layers of texture and meaning. Time doesn’t just take—it gives back in depth, in story, in perspective. Not denial. Not defiance. Acceptance—with style.
Level Up
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” — Friedrich Nietzsche
If aging is cinema, menopause is a glitchy 8-bit video game.
Think Atari in the ’80s: all chaos, no instructions, just a joystick and blind faith. Those clunky consoles dropped you into a screen of blinking pixels and zero guidance. No map, no tutorial. Sometimes you just hammered buttons, desperate to make something happen. That’s menopause in a nutshell.
If aging is cinema, menopause is a glitchy 8-bit game.
I gave mine an AI soundtrack: choppy arcade sounds colliding with orchestral swells. Quirky and grand, grueling and monumental—all in the same song.
Hot flashes mid-meeting? Like sudden lava under your feet. Mood swings that wreck a Tuesday? Pure demolition derby. Sleepless nights where you wake up drenched and defeated? Survival mode, no exit screen.
👉 Read the full lyrics here → Level Up Lyrics
🎧 Listen to the song here → Level Up
Writing about it gave me a way to turn chaos into a story. “Mood flips like the pinball lights” — that’s me, on repeat. “Energy drains in final fight”—also me, collapsing into bed by 9 p.m., game over. The lyrics weren’t abstract; they were daily life, set to a beat.
The real shock wasn’t the symptoms; it was the silence. Menopause is everywhere in real life, but nowhere in music. That gap made me want to crank the volume.
Here you go. “From princess to warrior I’ve rearranged” may be tongue-in-cheek, but it nails the shift. You laugh or you cry. Laughter always makes the story better.
Why These Songs Matter
Silver Lining reframes aging: not decline, but story.
Level Up reframes menopause: not disaster, but redesign.
Both are experiments—lyrics from my life, and beats from my AI toolkit. I built the songs in pieces, using AI tools to shape melodies, harmonies, and voices until the sound carried the right emotion. It was a strange duet: me feeding words and moods, the machine echoing back possibilities. Somewhere in that back-and-forth, the songs became playful collaborations—part exploration, part mischief, and completely addictive. Writing them wasn’t just freeing; it was fun.
Still Playing the Game
Nobody’s clamoring for aging and menopause anthems—but maybe they should. And maybe they will. These stories are everywhere, even if they don’t chart yet.
So here they are: one cinematic, one pixelated. Two songs about growing older, changing, pressing “Start” on the next level.
Until Spotify makes a Midlife Anthems playlist, start building your own—Silver Lining and Level Up make a pretty good opening tracklist.
Nobody’s clamoring for aging and menopause anthems—yet. Maybe they should.
While you age—because we do that all the time— check out my website, give my songs a listen, leave a comment, and stick around for more of my AI-fueled experiments and behind-the-scenes stories.
Very positive outlook, I’m level 32 💖