"I don't know what's come over me. It's just that there's these wolves at my door. Wolves at my door . . ." 

From the CD "Wolves at My Door" 

The wolves came to Annie Moscow in a dream: She was in her nice suburban house with the sliding glass doors. A party was going on, but she was by herself on a sofa, curled up under a blanket. The wolves pressed their noses to the door. "They were inviting me to run away. Something in their eyes called me out to the wild," says Moscow. "The wolves were saying, 'It's time to move on.' "

The dream was a jolt. Her adulthood was crumbling; the years of being a secretary and office assistant, of being a helpmate wife to her musician husband, of being a good mother to her son. Something wild and free was trying to burst out of her. 

She wanted to be a rock star.

"Who wouldn't want to be the Beatles!" she says.

But the Beatles started performing as fluffy-haired kids, not middle-aged housewives. Rock stars might make a comeback in midlife, picking up the sounds and gyrations of their youth. But a rock star is rarely born past a certain age.

Annie Moscow is rewriting the rules. At 47, she's a startup. She is thinking: If not now, when?

The emergence of the bonus decades gives Moscow opportunities that her grandparents never had. After completing the tasks of adulthood -- solidifying a marriage, raising a child, earning money -- she is ready to start a new life. 

"I'm a beginner at this. . . . I feel like a baby," says Moscow, who lives with her husband and son in Phoenix. "Maybe it will take a few more years for me to achieve full rock stardom. But that's okay. I have decades ahead of me. . . . This time it's my time."

Researchers note a surge of creativity in people in midlife, as though the psyche is finally liberated from the more practical demands of adulthood and is free explore and express. Latent talents get resurrected. Stories need to be told.

Gene D. Cohen, director of the Center on Aging at the George Washington University and author of "The Creative Age," points to Grandma Moses, who tapped her creative potential after the death of her husband. At 67, she turned to embroidery, and 10 years later, when arthritis made it too difficult to thread a needle, she switched to painting and began her illustrious career. 

Grandma Moses was the exception in her generation that proves the rule of aging for today's generation: Longevity gives opportunity. Adversity fuels creative expression. Experience provides a rich lode of material that can be transformed into art.

For Annie Moscow, becoming a rock star was a long-repressed dream. She grew up in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, studied music and worked hard to be a concert pianist. As she says: "I loved Beethoven. I would rather have been Joni Mitchell." But her family preferred that she not run off with the wolves. Her grandparents had come from Russia and Eastern Europe with a legacy of upheaval and a yearning for safety. "I did not give myself permission" to go the Joni Mitchell route, she says. Not then.

So she married the person she wanted to be: Steve Gold, a rhythm-and-blues keyboardist. She became his helpmate and downsized her dream, playing at a wedding or two, writing lyrics to go with his "gorgeous melodies," she says. With her husband's chaotic schedule of tours and gigs, she got steady day jobs with health benefits. ("Because I'm a pianist, I have amazing typing speed," she says.) Their son was born in 1986 and they moved from Los Angeles to Phoenix. (The reasoning: "We can afford to live in a nice house and our son can go to a good school," says Moscow.)

And then the losses started coming. She lost her health; she was tired all the time and bounced from one doctor to another. (She never got a diagnosis.) To regain her health, to pull herself together, to listen to the wolves, she stopped working as a secretary. (The symptoms began to fade.) 

She nearly lost her marriage. "He's a world-class musician. I was happy for a while being his support system. He was always in the forefront. When I started going through my own very serious growing pains -- when I realized I had to move into the forefront on my own -- we went through some really difficult times," she says. "I'm sure I was no picnic to be around."

She started writing her own lyrics, "very personal, some were very dark," she says. Then she began playing the piano when no one was home, putting her lyrics to music. She took voice lessons to train as a performer. "This thing that has been in me -- this need to express -- is coming out big time," she says. 

Her first CD is entitled "Wolves at My Door." Moscow now performs throughout Arizona and is planning a tour in California.

"I'm speaking at my age with as much honesty as I can," she says. Her songs reflect this perspective. "It's All Dissipating" is about the importance of family reunions. "The older you get, the more stuff happens to you. Illness, death -- things change dramatically that you take for granted when you're younger," she explains. And "Buy the Bitch a Cadillac/Give the Dog a Bone" is about breaking free of repressive, abusive relationships (not about her husband, she is quick to point out). "There is a lot of anger and emotion in the music," she says.

There is also beauty, she continues, in capturing the truth in her music. She's started on her second CD and "I'm not as mad anymore. I've been able to clear it away for something else."

Meanwhile, her marriage is having a renaissance, she says. "It's better because it's completely honest," she explains. "There's no more hiding or resenting on either part. We both feel the most valuable thing we can give each other is to be who we are. . . . We're partners in the truest sense."

She knows she'll never be Britney Spears. But in redefining her life in work and in love, she's excited about being Annie Moscow.