Help - I've got bored with my CD collection

Right now I'm ready to try anything. I am so desperate I might even give jazz a whirl

How I wish that the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro spent rather less time writing and more chatting to interviewers. Unlike most writers, who are happy to run off at the mouth on virtually any subject a journalist rings them about – Big Brother, Beckham's foot, Kylie's bum – Ishiguro allows himself to be interviewed only rarely and, perhaps for this reason, his views are almost always unpredictable and thought-provoking.

Ishiguro's most recent outing, an appearance on Desert Island Discs, has induced a personal crisis concerning musical taste. Explaining why one of his chosen records was a recent song by Bob Dylan, rather than one of his more obvious classics of the Sixties or Seventies, Ishiguro explained that, for a particular generation – his, mine – Dylan had been one step ahead of us, a frontiersman of experience, leading the way for us with his music and the way he lead his life. Right now, in his sixties, he is proving by writing and touring as busily as ever that even old age can be cool. He is lighting the way forward.

I was nearly convinced. I almost bought a recent Dylan CD. Then I remembered that I had made this mistake before, and it was not only with old growler himself but with several other singers and musicians who have the contributed to the soundtrack to my life. What I discovered was a terrible but obvious truth: like comedians and, some would say, novelists (I resist this idea), songwriters produce their best work before they are 40. There are one or two exceptions – Randy Newman, Philip Roth, maybe Emmylou Harris – but, on the whole, the second half of a career is spent reworking, with increasing weariness, the themes explored with incomparably more dynamism and verve in the first half.

Comedians tend to get the message, novelists on the wane have difficulty finding a publisher, but old musicians carry on recording and touring as if they were still in their prime. This summer, Dylan, Willie Nelson, Paul Simon, even the poor old Eagles, will be on the road, taking their sagging, wheezy, balding fans back to their pasts.

Seeing and hearing them is almost always a melancholy experience and, with a few exceptions like James Taylor, most of the oldsters on stage seem bored, too. Catching Willie Nelson at the Barbican was a grim enough experience, but not as depressing as seeing one of those cash-in-quick supergroups, with Ry Cooder, John Hiatt, Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner, strumming away for an hour before dragging their old bones back to the hotel to count their money.

But Ishiguro's casual remark has had a more serious effect than to remind me that, frontiersmen or not, these veterans have had their day. It is the taste problem. Suddenly, my CD rack and album collection have ceased to be a source of pleasure and have begun to seem like some kind of nostalgia museum. The music that I used to enjoy has started to bore me. I am tired of my own taste. Like those athletes who have their blood replaced before a race, I need a taste transfusion. Right now I am ready to try anything. Opera has been pretty much a closed book to me until now, as has hardcore blues. I am so desperate that I might even give jazz a whirl.

But it is difficult acquiring new tastes, I have discovered. Now and then someone new breaks through – most recently, the astonishing country revival singers Gillian Welsh and David Rawlings – but most of my one-night stands with new groups or singers fail to develop into relationships.

The problem is that, however brilliant a new, relatively young songwriter or performer may be, he or she is drawing on a different set of values and experiences than my own. It turns out that it is not only talent that one is looking for in music but a sense that the muddle of one's own existence is being interpreted, shaped and caught in musical form.

Worryingly, the same may well be true with fiction. When Martin Amis said recently that he had reached an age when it was not healthy to read the work of younger writers, his words were taken to be the defensive reaction of a competitive writer to new talent. In fact, he may have been articulating a sadder truth. At a certain point in one's life, one might actually prefer to read something passably good by a contemporary to a work of genius by someone in their twenties.

So in the end, one is stuck with the old groaners and growlers, both in the CD rack and on the bookshelf. Trading in one's old taste for new, it seems, simply does not work. It feels undignified, a bit like disowning your own past. Like Ishiguro, I shall have to look to the oldsters, however enfeebled and self-parodying they have become, to keep on playing the songs of my life. On the other hand, I think I'll stay at home when the Eagles come to town.

terblacker@aol.com