Jonathon Penn always carried two versions of himself: the songwriter who self-produced two EPs and an LP in college, and the professional who built a career in finance. For nearly two decades, the music was buried — a private dream, a half-remembered version of himself. Then came the breaking point: the loss of his father, the birth of his children, and a life-altering decision to walk away from his career, all colliding at once. In that moment, Penn chose which self would define him going forward. He chose the songs.
“It felt like this God-like force making me blow myself up,” recalls the San Luis Obispo–based artist. “This record is that story. It’s about losing and finding oneself; a journey through spiritual crisis and transformation; and growing up, and hopefully, aging gracefully.”
Now, Penn is returning with It Took A Long Time To Get Young, his first solo album under his own name. The Americana-tinged indie-rock effort is a coming-of-age album for anyone still finding their way.
The 11-track record brims with hard-earned wisdom, spiritual grappling, and unflinching self-reflection, recalling the tradition of moment-of-truth albums like Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love, Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, and Tom Petty’s Wildflowers. The unvarnished ethos also imbues its production and instrumentation: It Took A Long Time To Get Young is recorded on real instruments, in real time, with minimal editing and processing.
Tracked at the legendary Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas — home to recordings by Fiona Apple, Bon Iver, and Waxahatchee — the album was produced by multi-instrumentalist Adam Nash and features a cast of accomplished indie-rock and Americana musicians. Several songs trace back to a School of Song workshop led by Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker, whose exercises and philosophy became a guiding light for Penn during the writing process.
The breaking point that ultimately led to the album crystallized in a single, dramatic act. After months of wrestling with grief from his father’s death, the new responsibilities of raising young children, and the gnawing sense that his career path had run out, Penn brought it all to a head in a searing note to leadership that ended his professional life as he knew it — and with it, the future he thought he’d built his life around. “It was a crack-up of sorts,” he recalls. “Part of me knew I didn’t want to keep going down that road, and when I felt the door was closing, I blew it off its hinges.”
In the aftermath, Penn left New England and settled back in California, where he and his wife had both grown up. For months afterward, he wrestled with his actions, finding temporary solace in writing a novel before drifting back to his old acoustic guitar, a lifelong companion since age 14 that once belonged to his father. The songs that would become It Took A Long Time To Get Young poured out, anchoring him in grief, transformation, and renewal.
The album title is directly inspired by a quote often attributed to Picasso: “It takes a long time to become young.” The longer version reads: “One starts to get young at the age of 60 — and then it’s too late. Only then does one start to feel free; only then has one learned to strip oneself down to one’s essential creative simplicity.” It Took A Long Time To Get Young is Penn’s rediscovery of that simplicity.
Today, Glide is offering an exclusive premiere of the single “Hawk Circling,” an existential back-porch musing woven with banjo, folksy guitars, and raw vocals. It’s inspired by Hamlet, Dante’s Inferno, and the daily walks Penn took with his dogs as he was coming to terms with his new identity in California. On those walks, he started to notice a red-tailed hawk that nested in the canyon behind his house. “It was always up there, gliding and circling, scanning the earth below,” Penn recalls. “It felt like a sentinel. Like it was watching over me as I went through this painful but necessary process of internal transformation.” Musically, the song feels heartfelt and warm with sweeping instrumentals providing the soundtrack to Penn’s thoughtful lyrics. Twangy pedal steel complements intimate harmonies as Penn crafts the kind of song that feels deeply honest and reflective.
Jonathon Penn describes the inspiration behind the tune:
Hawk Circling was the first song I started and the last one I finished. I began writing it in February 2023, before I even knew I was making a record, and didn’t finish until days before heading to Sonic Ranch to record It Took A Long Time To Get Young.
In the early demos, the song had a completely different chorus, and the line ‘one man’s crazy is another man’s wild’ was just a passing idea. A few close collaborators helped me realize what I couldn’t yet see in it. My oldest friend, Greg, who I first learned to make music with, heard the line and told me it stuck with him. Around that same time, Laura Jean Anderson, who sings on the track and served as its vocal producer, thought the phrase could be the song’s real hook. Their reactions made me listen to it differently, and I realized that this idea was really the center of the song. Over time, as I was writing the rest of the songs that would become It Took A Long Time To Get Young, it started to become clear that the idea was one of the central themes of the entire record. I kept coming back to Hawk Circling and reworking the story around that center.
For me, the narrator is learning freedom from the red-tailed hawk circling above him, a kind of unselfconsciousness I was also chasing as I wrote the rest of the album. That sense of rediscovery, of coming back to something true in myself and letting go of outside definitions of value and success, became the heart of It Took A Long Time To Get Young.
Hawk Circling is track two and is kind of a thesis statement for the whole record to me. It documents the doubt, the struggle, the pain, and the release that runs through all of it.
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