Copperline

This song reaches back into childhood memory with the specificity of someone who spent a long time trying to get the details exactly right before setting them down. The acoustic guitar has a particular southern warmth, open-tuned and resonant, and there's a touch of slide guitar somewhere in the arrangement that ties the sound to place — to a particular patch of North Carolina geography that the song transforms into something mythic through accumulated detail. Taylor's voice here carries a weight that wasn't always present in his earlier recordings, the voice of a middle-aged man looking back and finding more grief than he anticipated, more beauty than he feared he'd lost. The melody moves with a kind of inevitability, as if it always existed and Taylor simply found it. This is a song about the way childhood places hold something essential that you can never fully recover — you can return to the geography but not to the self who first knew it, which is a quietly devastating idea the song carries without ever stating directly. It belongs to the early nineties and a phase of Taylor's work where he was writing more from biography and less from craft, and the directness shows. You listen to this when you haven't thought about your hometown in years and then suddenly, for no particular reason, you do — and the feeling is complicated in exactly the way the song understands.