To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High)

There's a ramshackle, lit-from-within quality to this opener from *Heartbreaker* — acoustic guitar tumbling forward like someone who's been drinking since noon but still has things to say. The tempo is unhurried yet restless, sitting in that particular space where youth feels simultaneously infinite and already slipping away. Adams delivers the vocal with a raw, slightly nasal twang that sounds like it was recorded in someone's living room at 2am, which it essentially was. The song captures the specific American Romantic delusion that suffering is glamorous, that sadness is proof of depth, that being high is somehow adjacent to being alive. It's Neil Young's ghost haunting a Nashville basement. The production is skeletal — just enough to hold the emotion without smoothing its edges. You feel the wood of the guitar, the catch in his throat. This is a song for the drives home after parties that didn't go the way you hoped, for sitting on porch steps in small towns, for being twenty-three and convinced your heartache is cosmically significant. Whether that conviction is foolishness or wisdom is exactly the question Adams refuses to answer, which is precisely why the song endures.