Carolina Mountain Girl
In the summer of 2012, I went on a mid-Atlantic tour with the folk band I was in. For about two weeks, we gallivanted from Peoria, IL to Oshkosh, WI, to Chicago, IL, to Cincinnati, OH, to Knoxville and Johnson City, TN, to Greensboro, NC, to Norfolk, VA, before closing down the tour in Raleigh, NC. It was the first tour anyone in the band had ever been on. The short of it? It was really, really fun.
There are some small references to that tour scattered across my songbook, but it was a moment after our mostly unsuccessful gig in Greensboro that proved to be the most enduring echo of that time.
We shared the bill that night with a local duo from Greensboro —two singer-songwriters with excellent voices— and one of them made quite an impression on one of the members of our band. She was beautiful, her singing was equally beautiful, and she was, as I remember, genuinely kind and pleasant to be around. I vividly recall loading up our instruments into the cars and having my bandmate say, “Ugh, if I could find a girl like that and just move to a cabin in the mountains…” he trailed off before shaking his head with a smile, “That’s all I’d need.”
I don’t remember if I knew that was a song-in-waiting right away, or if it stewed for a while, but there was immediate intention on my end to be sure I committed it to memory. And so I did, and we rolled on to Norfolk, VA.
Four years later, I wrote “Carolina Mountain Girl.” After another three, it was the seventh track on These Hills Are Gonna Rise (2019).
Beyond some cosmic explanation that the song was simply waiting for its moment, I don’t know why it took me four years to start writing it. But I am pleased that it sat in the neurological brine for so long. I don’t think my 2012 songwriter-self would have done right by the idea. I fear it would have been a clunky love song in the spirit of much of my earlier clunky love songs. The song needed a certain self-awareness of its triteness that I’m not sure my younger self would have appreciated.
I think there is a distinction to make between the singer and the character in this song. The character really believes in this vision of paradise, where he and his lover live some kind of perfect existence, free of questions and criticisms because that’s what “love” looks like to this individual. The singer, and by extension, the audience, knows better. We’ll sit and listen to the lovestruck poet wax about the perceived perfection of his fantasy, but at the end of the day know this probably doesn’t end well, even if that ending happens offscreen.
We even hear the narrator jump on potential criticism, indicating that maybe, deep down, he knows there are some flaws to his thinking, but he can’t bring himself to use this information to better the situation, instead just preemptively chastising those who might press him:
I know what you must be thinking, maybe even what you want to say
Like, “live your life for the here and now, and let old fantasies fade”
I’m not gonna’ say that you aren’t right, but there’s one thing you can be assured
is that whatever fantasies befall me, I’d choose to spend them with her
That preemptive strike on criticism is very much me coming through the narration, stemming from the thinking that if you mention the shortcomings of what you’re doing, people can’t really say “I told you so!” when it doesn’t work. It’s more or less living in a defensive stance, where you feel like you have to show others that even if you fail, you’re not an idiot, and did in fact consider a lot of the possible pitfalls, thereby separating the failure from the lack of competence one might draw from the failure.
An element of the song that I didn’t consciously intend is that, ultimately, it’s kind of a sad song. I think the character is really lonely, and the verses move in a way that indicates him slowly coming to terms with that. The image he paints in the first verse is irritatingly perfect, full of cliched images and concepts. The second verse is him doing the self-critique mambo just so you can’t do it to him, and the third verse is him giving a mini-revelation that he is dreaming about this, and doesn’t actually have a real plan of attack:
Only I’ve served my sentence on the wheel of time
which has gone and given me the nerve
to dream tonight —not of the valleys or the oceanside
but of the only thing that matters in the world
He can’t quite get this out of his head and into the real world. Maybe he knows that once this perfect girl shows up in real life, they both will immediately lose that perfection. I acknowledge this is only one way to read this song, as I think another interpretation would be to bask in his optimism, and view this girl as what she is —a key to a much happier life than the life led without her. I like both interpretations, and think there is room in this life for both.
The trigger for the writing to commence was definitely related to my love of Townes Van Zandt that was beginning to develop at the time. I hear this track as some combination of Townes’ “Tecumseh Valley” and “Colorado Girl” —the latter serving as a love letter to a woman in a particular place, the former serving as the sonic template (the IV-heavy chord progression; the slightly schmaltzy flute like the harmonica equivalent in “Tecumseh Valley." You can even hear me “borrow” a bit of Townes’ singing of the name “Caroline,” which I always thought was such a defining element of “Tecumseh Valley.” So, naturally, I kind of stole it.
What I like about “Carolina Mountain Girl” is that it feels very realized to my ears. Regardless of where it does or doesn’t fall among by best songs, it doesn’t really leave any points on the field. It set out to be one thing, achieved that, and then reached a little deeper. I’d be so lucky if more of my songs did that.