On the night of July 27, 2021, Tom Jones stood in front of a packed crowd at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London for the first time since the world shut down. He was 81. He told the audience that the last time he had done a show, he was in his seventies. Now he was in his eighties. The room roared.
The crowd had come for “Delilah” and “It’s Not Unusual.” Tom had other plans. He played his new album, Surrounded By Time, from start to finish. And near the end of the night came a song called “I’m Growing Old,” a song he had been carrying with him since 1972.
The Song a Young Man Couldn’t Sing
The man who wrote it was Bobby Cole, a New York singer and pianist few people remember today. He spent most of the 1960s headlining at Jilly’s, the Manhattan bistro tied to Frank Sinatra, and Sinatra called him his favorite saloon singer. In 1964 Judy Garland hired him as musical arranger for her television show, replacing Mel Tormé, and in 1967 he conducted the orchestra for her concerts at the Palace.
That same year, Cole made the only album of his own songs he ever released, A Point of View. The last track was a slow, somber ballad called “I’m Growing Old,” a plain list of what age takes from a man: his eyes, his voice, his step.
In 1972, after one of Tom’s Las Vegas shows, Cole came to his dressing room with the song. He believed it needed a big voice to carry it. Tom was 32 or 33, depending on which interview you read, and at the height of his sex-symbol years. He loved the melody, but he could not sing those words honestly yet.
“I don’t think I can do it now but I’ll hold it.”
He told Cole that if he ever reached 80, he would record it. Bobby Cole never got to hear him keep that promise. He died in New York in 1996.
“Do You Really Want to Admit That?”
Tom turned 80 in June 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. When he sat down with his longtime producer Ethan Johns to plan a new record, “I’m Growing Old” was the very first song he played him.
Johns asked him whether he really wanted to admit to that. Tom’s answer was yes. He said the song was simply true now. He was aware of feeling older and wanted to face it head on. He even noticed it in the way he moved. His son had pointed out that when Tom walked, he kept looking down at the floor.
“I’m not frightened of being my age.”
On the finished album, released in April 2021, the track opens with a scratchy radio clip from 1940, the year Tom was born. It nearly closed the record, too, before he chose to end on something more hopeful.
The One Line He Changed
There was only one part of Bobby Cole’s song that Tom could not sing as written. In it, the aging narrator admits he rarely dreams about his wife.
Tom had known Linda, as he put it, all his life. They married at 16 in South Wales and stayed together for 59 years, until she died of lung cancer in April 2016 at the age of 75. A few months after she passed, he admitted how often she still came to him in sleep.
“I see her a lot at night.”
So when it came time to record, he turned that line around. As he explained to NPR’s Here & Now, everything in the song was true for him except that single line, and he flipped it.
In that same interview he described Linda’s last days. She knew she was dying, and she told him not to fall with her. He had to get back on stage and sing. If it got too hard, she said, he should picture her laughing, the way she did when he came home from the road with a new joke. Her ashes now sit on the chest of drawers in his bedroom, under her picture. She is the first person he talks to in the morning and the last one at night.
The Night at Shepherd’s Bush
By the time “I’m Growing Old” came around, Tom had already roared through blues and soul numbers in a voice that had barely aged. Then he slowed everything down.
He told the crowd the story of Bobby Cole and the Vegas dressing room, and of telling a songwriter he was too young for his song. Then he paused.
“And now, well, here we are!”
He sat on a stool with only a piano behind him, closed his eyes tight and sang it. The Guardian‘s critic called it the highlight of the night. When the last note faded, the crowd gave him a standing ovation.
He was clearly savoring every minute. After more than a year off the road, he told the audience he was just soaking it all in.
“Normally I’m just around my flat singing on my own.”
The Song He Still Opens With
Tom did not leave the song behind after that night. On his tours that followed, at 82, 83, 84 and 85, he often opened his concerts with it, sometimes walking out with a cane and sitting down before the hits began.
It took him 49 years to feel old enough for Bobby Cole’s song. When he finally sang it, he made one small change so it would tell the truth about him, and about the woman he still dreams about.
Did you have a song that only made sense to you once you were older? We’d love to hear about it.