Carl

Lyrics

[Intro]
(one guitar in a kitchen. Nobody else is meant to be hearing this.)

[Verse 1]
She met him outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat in Nashville in 1964.
She was eighteen and two days off the bus and he drove past in a white Chevrolet
and told her she was going to get sunburned, which is how that went.
They married in Ringgold, Georgia, in 1966, in a small church, with her mother.

[Chorus]
And then he disappeared. Not from her — from everyone else.
Sixty years married and he came to almost nothing.
He went to one awards show in his life and said never again,
and she went and did the world alone, and came home, and told him about it.

[Verse 2]
People did not believe he was real. That is a thing that actually happened —
for years there were rumours she had invented a husband
because nobody had a photograph, because he would not have his photograph taken,
and she let them wonder, and protected him from every single question.

[Chorus]
And he liked to hear her sing. That is the whole of what she said about him,
over and over, for sixty years, when anyone asked what he thought of it all.
He liked to hear her sing. He liked her songs. He came to the house shows.
And that was, apparently, sufficient, for both of them, for six decades.

[Bridge]
He died in March 2025. Eighty-two. Private service, five people.
She wrote that she would always love him and asked for privacy and got very little,
and she went quiet for a while, quieter than she had ever been,
and she was eighty and had been married to that man since she was twenty.

[Outro]
(the guitar alone, then one harmony voice, too late)
Seventeen months.
She followed him in seventeen months.
He liked to hear her sing.