How Old Can You Be Before You Make Your First Solo Record?

Bob Dylan said in 2015: “Passion is a young man’s game, OK? Young people can be passionate. Older people gotta be more wise. 

“I mean, you’re around a while, you leave certain things to the young, and you don’t try to act like you’re young. You could really hurt yourself.”

So are you allowed to make a debut record when music executives no longer consider you “young”? 

Leonard Cohen was a successful Canadian poet and novelist when, at age 33, he decided to become a recording singer-songwriter. The deep life’n’love insights of his songs swept the globe.

Deborah Harry was that age when Blondie’s Heart Of Glass went to Number One around the world. But she was 36 when she released her first solo album, KooKoo, at the dawn of the 1980s, creating a new audience for herself.

Pharrell Williams was a successful hit producer at 28, but he was 40 when he recorded Happy.

Mick Jagger was 42 by the time of his debut solo album, She’s The Boss.

Tina Turner was 44 when she made her first solo album, Private Dancer, and was the oldest solo female artist to top the US charts.

Here are eight examples of musicians whose first solo records were released well into their pensionable age.

Harry Vanda

Age of record release: 79

In 1965, Harry Vanda was lead guitarist with The Easybeats, whose run of hits began that year with She’s So Fine reaching #3 in Australia. He was 19.

Its success paved the way for more teen and working-class anthems, such as Friday On My Mind and Good Times, written with George Young. 

After the band imploded in 1969, the duo transitioned to writing and producing for Alberts Productions, working with acts such as AC/DC, John Paul Young, Stevie Wright, Flash & The Pan (a stage name for Vanda and Young), William Shatner, and Cheetah.

Between 1974 and the early 1980s, Alberts had a 20% share of the Australian charts, regularly having three or four tracks in the top 20 at the one time, and with an impressive global strike rate.

Vanda (born Johannes Hendrikus Jacob van den Berg in Holland) went into semi-retirement in his 60s, with an unconfirmed fortune of $50 million, and with his own Flashpoint label and studios.

In September 2025, he returned with his debut solo single Devil Loose (Flashpoint via Orchard/Impressed), sparked by wanting to say something about the chaos in the world.

Co-written with Mark McEntee of Divinyls, Devil Loose has all the swagger and soundtrack elements of Vanda’s back catalogue. 

He said about his desire to get back into the studio, “Things are not what they should be, and Devil Loose became like a social commentary. After the riff came, it seemed to just write itself.”

Seaman Dan 

Age of first record release: 70

Henry Gibson Dan was a Torres Strait Islander singer-songwriter and musician from Far North Queensland, of Melanesian, Polynesian, Jamaican and African American descent.

The “Seaman” nickname came from his time as a boat captain, pearl diver and aspiration to join the Navy. 

He played his jazzy “hula” style blues around Queensland. His first album, Follow The Sun, came out in 2000, on his 70th birthday. It made him a festival favourite, and his music was used in surfing movies and TV soaps.

Perfect Pearl (2004) and Sailing Home (2009) won the ARIAs for Best World Music Album, making him the oldest ARIA winner. In 2010, he semi-retired aged 80, and died near Cairns, Queensland, on December 30, 2020, aged 91.

Marjorie Grande

Age of record release: 98 years, 163 days

Marjorie Grande became the oldest living artist to appear on the US charts when she featured on her granddaughter Ariana Grande's song Ordinary Things, which peaked at Number 55. 

Under the name “Nonna”, she featured on Ariana's seventh studio album, Eternal Sunshine, from March 2024. She died in June this year.

Sharon Jones 

Age of first record release: 40

Sharon Jones was a corrections officer at Rikers Island prison in New York and sang backup vocals for singers when she was signed in 1996, aged 40, by French label Pure Records and started recording the Soul Tequila album as a full-time musician.

Sharon Jones Records & The Dap Kings became festival favourites, launching in Australia at Bluesfest. Their 21st-century soul and funk onslaught brought them to a young audience discovering the style through albums as Dap-Dippin, 110 Days, 100 Nights, and I Learned the Hard Way.

“We’re not about a soul revival, it’s a living, breathing thing,” she said. “I see Taylor Swift and Justin Timberlake winning R&B and soul awards, and I’m like, ‘What? They’re pop singers. But very good ones.”

In 2013, Jones was diagnosed with bile duct cancer and later pancreatic cancer. She lost her hair to chemo treatment, going bald rather than wear a wig. 

She suffered a stroke during the 2015 US presidential campaign (quipping Donald Trump caused the stroke) and died on November 18 at the age of sixty.

Bill Withers 

Age of first record: 32

After serving in the US Navy and working as an assembler for aeroplane manufacturers Boeing, Bill Withers didn’t make it into the music industry until he was 32.

He taught himself guitar and piano, and during shifts at Boeing, wrote gems as Ain’t No Sunshine (a tale of lost love inspired by watching the 1962 Jack Lemmon-Lee Remick movie Days Of Wine And Roses on TV), Lean On Me, Lovely Day and Just The Two Of Us.

These made him a global sensation. He won three Grammys, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, and had his songs covered by artists such as Michael Jackson, Sting, John Legend, and Billie Eilish. 

His mix of folk, R&B and soul saw Questlove declare, “Bill Withers is the closest thing black people have to Bruce Springsteen.”

However, a bust-up with his record company led him to leave the spotlight in 1985 after releasing eight albums. He died on March 30, 2020, at 81 due to health complications.

Speaking to Rolling Stone USA about his late arrival into music and the impact he had, Withers said, “Imagine 40,000 people at a stadium watching a football game. About 10,000 of them think they can play quarterback. Three of them probably could. I guess I was one of those three.”

Seasick Steve 

Age of first solo record: 65

According to Seasick Steve’s colourful and somewhat exaggerated narrative about his early days, he was born Steven Gene Wold in California.

A mechanic at his grandad’s service station taught him country blues (“I had very limited ability and the songs were simple”). At 13, after violent confrontations with his stepfather, he left home, busking in between jobs on construction sites and as a carpenter, using personalised guitars, including one made of hubcaps and a broomstick.

Looking for the blues, he headed for Tennessee and Mississippi, living rough and hopping freight trains.

In 1969, he became a recording engineer and session player in the US and Europe, played in bands as the raga-rock Shanti whose members were all into transcendental meditation and disco band Crystal Grass, produced a record for Mighty Mouse set up a guitar store and studio called Moon Music, and, apparently, was a backing musician for Lightnin’ Hopkins, Son House, Joni Mitchell and Albert King.

To his luck, English radio jocks discovered his rough music, which opened doors for club gigs. In 2006, he got on Jools Holland's annual New Year’s Eve BBC TV show Hootenanny, with a performance that went down a storm.

His low-tech approach found him a revering following, and albums as I Started Out With Nothin’ And I Still Got Most of It Left (2008, featuring Ruby Turner and Nick Cave's Grinderman), Man From Another Time and Sonic Soul Surfer were commercial hits. 

In July 2011, he got a rock star welcome at the UK’s Milton Keynes Bowl, where Dave Grohl introduced him, and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones joined him. Tours of Australia followed.

He suddenly decided he’d “had it” with America and moved his family to Norway.

Susan Boyle

Age of first record: 47

Scotland’s Susan Boyle had won a couple of minor singing competitions and done some acting and singing lessons to get over being bullied mercilessly at school for what was later diagnosed as Asperger’s syndrome.

Once she hit her 40s, she figured she was too old to join the music industry and focused on caring for her elderly mother.

But at 47, at the urging of her mother, she made an unforgettable appearance on TV’s Britain’s Got Talent performing I Dreamed A Dream from the musical Les Misérables to a televised audience of 17.3 million. 

The studio audience tittered at her looks, and judge Simon Cowell smirked. “When they saw me step out on stage, people thought I was going to be awful. I proved them wrong. You don’t judge a book by its cover.”

She ended up runner-up to a dance troupe. Within nine days, the video of her performance was viewed 103 million times on 20 different websites. The world’s media came a-calling.

Cowell signed her to his recording label. Her first album I Dreamed A Dream became the fastest-selling UK debut album of all time. The follow-up, The Gift, reached Number One, making her the oldest female act to top the UK album charts. She went on to sell 25 million albums.

Boyle went on to perform before the Pope and the Queen, made cameos in movies, suffered a stroke in 2022, got her first boyfriend at the age of 53, wrote books, made a documentary of her life and had Oasis dedicate their song Stand By Me when they played Edinburgh this year. 

In May 2025, she revealed that she was back in the studio for the first time since 2019.

Marshall Allen 

Age of first solo record: 100 years & 265 days

American avant-garde jazz sax player Marshall Allen had long reached legendary status as leader of the Sun Ra Arkestra. 

But he made Guinness World Records status when he released his debut solo album, New Dawn, on February 14, 2025.

Made with long-time Sun Ra partner Knoel Scott, the recording began in Philadelphia two days after the celebrations of his 100th birthday. 

The album pulled together songs he’d accumulated through the years, like African Sunset, the 10-minute Boma and the mellow title track on which Neneh Cherry sang.

The record was described as a “love letter to spacetime that channels a century of musical transience and transcendence”.