>http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2003/01/13hornby.html
>
>“ O H M Y
>S W E E T C A R O L I N A “
>B Y
>R Y A N A D A M S .
>
>BY NICK HORNBY
>
>- – – –
>
>[In celebration of the release of Nick Hornby’s Songbook, we will be
>publishing brand-new essays all this week on the subject of favorite songs.
>Today’s is from Mr. Hornby, and does not appear in his book, or anywhere
>else that we know of. We hope you enjoy it.]
>
>- – – –
>
>A long time ago, when I was still teaching English to foreign students in a
>London language school, I gave private conversation lessons to an unhappy
>man who called himself Edward, even though that wasn’t his name. Edward was
>an African living in Rome, where he was a foreign correspondent for his
>home-town newspaper, and he was unhappy because he was going through a
>divorce. But he was lucid in his unhappiness: he talked with regret, of
>course, but also with insight, and enormous intelligence, and his melancholy
>took him off to all sorts of interesting conversational places — places I
>never normally got to visit in the normal run of things. I remember the
>concentration our talks required, and the stillness and intensity they
>engendered; I knew that he was in pain, but when our fifty minutes were over
>I felt invigorated and inspired. When it was time for him to return to Rome,
>he asked me to go and stay with him, and I accepted the invitation.
>
>But when I got there, a few weeks later, he wasn’t unhappy any more. He was
>revelling in his status as a single man, a status that, apparently, required
>very little self-reflection or intelligence: on the night I arrived, I found
>that he’d fixed us up with a couple of call-girls. I copped out, in my
>prissy English way, but he disappeared for forty-eight hours (leaving me
>with sole use of a beautiful apartment in the centre of Rome); when he came
>back, he told me he was engaged.
>
>Some people are at their best when they’re miserable. Ryan Adams’s beautiful
>Heartbreaker album is, I suspect, the product of a great deal of pain, and
>“Oh My Sweet Carolina“ is its perfect, still centre, its faint heartbeat, a
>song so quiet that you don’t want to breathe throughout its duration. (It
>helps that Adams got Emmylou Harris, the best harmony vocalist in the
>history of pop music, to sing with him on it.) On Adams’s next album, Gold,
>he seems to have cheered up, and though that’s good news for him, it’s bad
>news for me, just as it was when Edward stopped being miserable. His upbeat
>songs are fine, but they sound a lot like other people’s upbeat songs (you
>can hear the cheeriest incarnations of the Stones, Dylan and Van Morrison
>all over Gold); his blues gave him distinction.
>
>What rights do we have here? Are we entitled to ask other people to be
>unhappy for our benefit? After all, there are loads of us, and only one of
>them. And how can you be happy, really, if you are only ordinary in your
>happiness, but extraordinary in your grief? Is it really worth it? It sounds
>harsh, I know, but if you are currently romantically involved with someone
>with a real talent — especially a talent for songwriting — then do us all a
>favour and dump them. There might be a Heartbreaker — or a Blood On The
>Tracks or a Layla — in it for all of us. Thanks.
--
Captain Beefheart to audience: Is everyone feeling all right? Audience: Yeahhhhh!!! awright...!!! Captain Beefheart: That's not a soulful question, that's a medical question. It's too hot in here.