Singled Out: Nick Carter's My Guitar is My Compass

Keavin Wiggins | 12-06-2022

Photo courtesy NoVo

New England-based singer-songwriter Nick Carter just released his new album, "Fountain Pen", and to celebrate we asked him to tell us about the single, "My Guitar is My Compass". Here is the story:

When I started working on "My Guitar is My Compass," my vision for the song was to look in a different direction. I wanted to write about winter 1969 when Life Magazine came to my hometown, Caribou, ME, and did a photographic essay on the lives in that community. I initially planned to use that "snap shot" of the town as the basis for a song about "then and now" and how life gets in the way and how hopes go unfulfilled.

Over time as each successive draft got tossed, the Life Magazine hook slipped away and was replaced by the metaphor of roads you can find yourself walking, looking for answers in different lines of work and in all the wrong places. I started imagining how dreams that go untested can haunt you and carry a high replacement cost.

During college, I chased down every chance there was to perform. Yet after graduation, I put down the guitar and took a "real" job back home. Winter '78 found me in my hometown and going to work with business cards, price lists and order forms instead of my guitar. The 18 years that followed saw that guitar gather dust; if she had been a person, she would have written me off.

I distilled those years into a couple of core stories: an emerging musical life that gets set aside first for a job "back home," then for a career found after leaving Maine, and, finally, the rediscovery of the truth. The fact is, music was meant to be my traveling companion all along. It took time to get back on course but once I picked up my guitar again, I found my road.

These days, every time I try to explain why I did what I did back in '78 -- that is to say, setting music aside and ignoring the muse --- I always find myself wondering out loud and in the same breath, "how could I have ignored her for so many years?" I now consider myself lucky and judging from the way "My Guitar Is My Compass" has turned out, I'm thinking, with gratitude, that she must have forgiven me.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more about the album here