Throwback Thursday: Deana Carter, ‘Strawberry Wine’

Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly series showcasing an album, single, music video or performance of a bygone era and its personal and/or cultural significance.

“I still remember when 30 was old,” Deana Carter waxes nostalgic on her debut single, 1996’s sticky-sweet “Strawberry Wine.” In between shiny steel guitar and the tip-tap a waltz structure, there is a very deep and rich story about longing for the hey day of one’s youth. “I was caught somewhere between a woman and a child,” she sings, an irresistible ache seeping through her lush, fervent alto. Why, yes, when you’re just coming into your youth, wide-eyed, wild-haired and free, 30 seems so damn far away.

The song, written by Matraca Berg (Kenny Chesney, Trisha Yearwood) and Gary Harrison (Martina McBride, Tim McGraw), kickstarted her debut full-length, Did I Shave My Legs for This?. She was 30. She had lived so much of life at that point, and her graceful precision of phrasing illustrated her wisdom, from the yearning to be young again to wandering through her memories of heartbreak. As she curls her way through the faded wheat fields surrounding her grandparents farm, the story trembles with teenage angst and heaviness of lost time and fleeting romance. “A few cards and letters and one long distance call / We drifted away like the leaves in the fall / But year after year I come back to this place just to remember the taste of strawberry wine,” Carter warbles, attempting to reconcile the reality of the present and what the past really means now.

Berg, who first began collecting hits when she was 18 (T.G. Sheppard’s 1983 classic “Faking Love,” a duet with Karen Brooks), didn’t expect it to ever become such a defining staple of the late ’90s. “I had the title, because we drank that Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill crap ’til we were sick when we were teenagers. We just painted a picture that told the story. Right after I wrote it, my publisher, Pat Higdon had this little barbecue thing where he’d invite publishers and artists to come hear our new songs. Deana was the only artist that showed up! When the time came for her to go into the studio, every girl had passed on it,” she told Rolling Stone four years ago.

But Carter pushed to have it as her first single, a bold move for a newcomer on Music Row. “She was a friend of mine, so I was trying to talk her out of it because I wanted her to do well,” Berg added. Well, the song did quite alright for Carter. It was the Song of the Year at the 1997 CMA Awards and earned a cavalcade of other deserved nominations, including Best Country Song at the Grammys. The video is stunningly simple and has a dreamy quality to it, as if Carter is replaying that summer over and over and over again, just for us.

Growing older is much like the supple texture of strawberry wine, tender to the lips but with unexpected, sometimes razor-sharp, jabs sticking in your throat and stomach. If you aren’t too careful, by looking back far too much, you lose grasp of the present and ultimately the future. Every once in awhile, it’s OK to relive the sweetest parts of life. That’s how we know we’re truly alive.

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