As previously mentioned, Nick Hornby has released a new book of essays called Songbook (available through McSweeney’s). In celebration of the release, a series of essays are being posted on the McSweeney’s web site. Nick Hornby wrote a little something about Ryan Adams’s “Oh My Sweet Carolina.”
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.
