No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.5 - "Oh My Sweet Carolina" (Ryan Adams)

A lot of people (wrongly) cite Heartbreaker as Ryan Adams best album, and (wrongly) name "Oh My Sweet Carolina" as its best song. As conventional wisdom goes this isn't hard to understand. I sympathise, obviously; why else would the track be on this list? There's a lot of button-pushing with this one. It's a melancholy ballad, with great guitar, masterfully-used piano, and the absolute best guest spot any Ryan Adams song has ever enjoyed. The middle eight is a thing of windswept beauty. But it's the subject of the song that really hits me in the feels-box.

"...Carolina" is about how nostalgia and wanderlust fight against each other. About how for many of us the pull of home is ever-present, even if we were desperate to escape it while we were there, and even if we're deliberately putting more distance between us and it every year. The song's narrator spends the opening verses first destitute and then addicted to cocaine, but the possibility of actually going home - as oppose to simply yearning for it - is never raised. It simply isn't who he is. There's something out there he has to find first, and it doesn't actually matter he has no idea what that is. He might recognise the irony of having to constantly change where he lives because of his inability to change himself, but knowing how you're broken and knowing how to fix yourself are very different things.

The result is that the sorrow of homesickness is experienced at a remove. The narrator doesn't want to go home so much as he wants to want to go home. He wishes he was the kind of man who could go back to the place he misses without immediately needing to leave again. He wants to stop being the guy who races newspaper boats in gutters to see which one disappears first. The guy who gambles on speed, in other words, and in doing so mistakes disappearance for a form of success. That need to race away - the specifics never mattering, away the only destination specified - is just bringing him sadness and confusion. Our narrator can't even decide if it's Carolina or Kentucky that's home at this point. The sweetest winds may blow across the south, but he let those winds blow him away, and he doesn't even remember where he started from anymore.

Maybe he's still out there, looking for whatever it is. Maybe he settled down someplace when he had the money for decent light-bulbs. Either way, that urge to return must still be there, deep beneath the surface. You don't cure nostalgia; you just keep generating it to the point where you forget to feel every pull at the same time.

 I guess that's why I've never stopped loving this song, even though I've lived with it for almost as long as I did my family. Some things never change.

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