The Replacements’ Let It Be is the greatest album ever made about growing up.

The legendary pitcher Leroy “Satchel” Paige once remarked, “ Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you .” It’s one of the great bons mots on the subject of aging, and particularly fitting coming from a man who threw his last professional pitches at the age of 59. Much like sports, music tends to be a young person’s game, and especially so since the earliest years of the rock ’n’ roll era, when artists like Chuck Berry , the Coasters , and Eddie Cochran found pay dirt by mining a hitherto underexplored topic in American song: teenage angst. In the mid-1950s, the idea that the cutting edge of pop would come to be dominated by relatively young people writing songs for and about people even younger was a revolutionary notion, one that in the next decade would come to be take