“Carousel,” the concluding track on Miranda Lambert’s 2022 album, Palomino, is a deeply reflective song co-written by Lambert with her frequent collaborators Luke Dick and Natalie Hemby. This standout among Miranda Lambert Songs offers listeners a bittersweet glimpse into the transient nature of life and performance.
Lambert herself describes “Carousel” as having a “bittersweet” quality. She reveals that the songwriting process involved drawing inspiration from personal surroundings. “Smith County is the county I grew up in, and Johnny Davis is a road out by where my farm is,” she explained. These specific, real-world details ground the song in authenticity, making it resonate with genuine emotion for both the writers and listeners. For Lambert, the collaborative writing session with Hemby and Dick felt particularly productive, marking “Carousel” as a song where “stuff’s happening. I’m feeling things.”
The central metaphor of the song revolves around a circus leaving town, a powerful image that encapsulates the ephemeral nature of her profession and life itself. Lambert elaborated on this imagery, stating, “It’s okay that the circus leaves town because it does at some point for everybody.” She shared a vivid picture of staying behind after concerts, observing “empty beer bottles and the wind blowing piece of trash across the lawn and amphitheater,” emphasizing the stark contrast between the vibrant performance and the subsequent emptiness.
This imagery, for Lambert, becomes a “metaphor for what we do.” She connects the transient nature of a traveling circus to the life of a touring musician: “There’s a part of the circus that lives in us, because of what we chose to do when we bring the party to town. And then we pack it up and we take it to another town and it’s very sad.” This poignant reflection captures the bittersweet reality of fleeting moments of intense connection and the inevitable departure.
The emotional depth of “Carousel” culminates in its final moments. Lambert shared the profound impact of the lyric, “When it becomes her at the end when she says I miss my Harland it’s like kills me.” Even as a writer of the song, knowing what’s coming, the emotional weight of that line still affects her deeply. She concludes, “If you write a song that makes your own self cry, I guess we did something right.“ “Carousel,” among Miranda Lambert songs, stands out as a testament to her songwriting ability to evoke profound emotion and explore the poignant beauty within life’s fleeting moments.
