Album: I’m Staying Out.
Year: 2003.
There was no way that Caitlin Cary was ever going to match fellow-Whiskeytown alum Ryan Adams in terms of quantity, but for a moment in the early 2000s, it looked like she might be albe to have at least one or two amazing tracks per record. And I still don’t think that Adams has written a song as empathetic on the nature of talent and memory and chance encounters as “Cello Girl.”
The pretty girl who played the cello
What was her name?
What was her name?
Particulars can slip away
Pictures etched upon the brain
Whooo-hoooa
Like her long blonde hair and her big thick brain
Long low notes that took years to fade
Years to fade
As the song goes on, Cary remembers more particulars about the Cello Girl, and and invents a whole life for her: moving to New York City, riding the F train, dating younger men, all along trying to remember:
What was her name?
What was her name?
Then she looks at herself and finds her own talent lacking in comparison to her memory of the Cello Girl:
Picked a squeaky violin to play
But I can’t really play
No, I can’t really play
I think I wished for something deeper
Because high notes won’t keep her
They’ll never keep her
And you start wondering, were they lovers? Did they spend a blissful evening playing their instruments for each other, never to see each other again? In the end, Cary imagines a happy life for her as an apartment-dwelling professional musician, and then wonders:
Sometimes I ride the Downtown F train
Would I recognize her anyway?
What was her name?
What was her name?
What was her name?
What was her name?
The music is the normal gorgeous alt-country, fully of lightly crunching guitar, classic-sound organs and Cary’s own fiddle haunting the edges, but it’s not what makes this song for me; its the beautiful meditation on the nature of memory, of how transitional people – even important transitional people – can fade away in your memory over time.
Video For “Cello Girl”