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# "GROW UP, NATE!"
- URL: https://nathandale.com/shadow/grow-up-nate/
- Published: 2026-09-11T02:14:37.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T17:21:51.000Z
- Description: A formative friendship began with modems and radios. A James Taylor song made maturity feel different.
- Author: Nathan Dale
- Tags: #shadow, #story

Sometime around ’86 I became accidentally obsessed with James Taylor, who brought my short-lived skatepunk phase to an abrupt end. I hadn't started playing music yet. [That came later.](https://nathandale.com/heart) It started in the 7th grade with a bulletin board system, or BBS, I ran from my bedroom on my Commodore 64\. The propeller on my head was starting to spin. This was before the World Wide Web. Imagine dialing up my computer over the phone line to visit a little online world I hosted from my house. I'd spend endless stretches in front of my screen trying to figure out what this new world was all about.

My BBS was called The Skater's Inn. Its first user was a teenager who went by the handle Edgar. Of course, I gave myself the handle Nate The Great. Unearned, unapologetic, and unimaginative for a boy with my name.

Edgar was a power nerd but still very cool and knew a lot more about punk rock than I did. He was from New York and hadn't lived in Sacramento very long. He was definitely a hacker. We would talk "voice" (on the phone instead of typing over the BBS's chat system) for hours. He was about four years older than me and taught me so much about my computer in such a short time. He loved to teach and I was a pretty good learner. But one of his biggest passions was music.

Edgar always had his radio on in the background while we talked. His tastes were diverse and deep. In the summer of '86 his radio was always tuned to K108 at 107.9 FM. He loved Tom Nakashima and all the oldies Tom played. K108 was a soft rock station, playing plenty of what the kids today call yacht rock. We would sit on our speakerphones for days (yes, DAYS), chatting and coding BASIC together on our Commodore 64s. I was a KZAP kid, but just to go along with him, I'd tune my radio to the same station and listen on my end. Some of the songs were familiar, but I'd written them off as music for very old people.

Edgar would make comments on lyrics and ask what they meant to me. Before that I'd rarely paid attention to the words of a song I didn't like. Edgar wasn't like that. He would know just as much about a song he didn't like as one he loved. After a few months, I was listening differently. I could hear the ideas inside the songs.

I heard a lot of Jim Croce, Gordon Lightfoot, Cat Stevens and those other 70s folky types, but James Taylor was the one who grabbed me. It was his voice singing those words that first drew me in. Over the next couple of years I wore out two *Greatest Hits* cassettes. The elegance of his music and the eloquence of his lyrics were otherworldly to my ears. By the time James released *Never Die Young* in '88, I was a big fan. I bought the cassette and really latched on to the title track.

I still had some teenage angst bottled up. I had a half-shaven head and a leftover scowl. But "Never Die Young" reached deeper. It helped me enjoy something that felt mature and quieter. It softened me. 

I'd get a bittersweet feeling when I played the song, thinking of my grandma and her quiet generational strength. She grew up during the Depression and rarely talked about the hardships she'd lived through. She never wanted her troubles to become an inconvenience for anyone else. I didn't fully understand the song then, but for some reason its words made me feel the weight of what she'd lived through.

I shared the song with a friend yesterday and called it my "guilty pleasure song." But that isn't true. Not at all. Hearing it again after so many years, I felt embarrassed by how flippant that sounded. The truth is, I think it's one of the most profound songs James has ever written. I hear more in it now, but I know some part of me understood it then too.

There’s something funny about a song called "Never Die Young" being my coming-of-age soundtrack. It was the first time growing up felt like something I liked, instead of just something people kept telling me to do.

![](https://nathandale.com/content/images/2026/09/NEVERDIEYOUNG.jpg)