When James Taylor tried to use the internet to track down an old muse
The internet, with all its dark sides and drawbacks, is an incredible tool. Living in a digital age, couples are reunited or brought together online. New friendships are made, jobs are found, and lives are changed. And when it comes to James Taylor, he hoped the internet might be able to end a lifelong hunt and find his lost muse.
The women who inspired James Taylor’s music are largely well-known. In ‘There We Are’, Taylor names his wife at the time, Carly Simon, by name singing, “Carly, I do love you”. In ‘You Can Close Your Eyes’, he waxes lyrical for Joni Mitchell. But one name always stood out as a mysterious addition.
Singing “Karin, she’s a silver sun, You’d best walk her way and watch it shine”, his track ‘Carolina In My Mind’ is known as one of history’s finest love songs. It’s the soundtrack to a million first dances and couples moments. But the woman who inspired the material has always been a mystery to James Taylor fans.
For a long time, the singer refused to talk about who “Karin” was, leaving many to theorise. Some people believed Karin was simply a personification of the place Carolina, given a different or more poetic name. A more cynical belief is that the song is not about love at all but about drugs. At the time of writing the track, in 1968, Taylor was trying to kick a serious heroin addiction. Through this lens, the song becomes a devastating take on addiction and longing to make it back to the innocence of home and who he was before his dependency.
A different, more literal theory comes directly from the lyrics, telling the story of meeting and falling in love with a woman in a sunny place while longing for home, leaving many to wonder if Karin was a real woman Taylor met while travelling around the world.
Eventually, after years of debate, Taylor finally revealed the true identity of Karin. During an interview with Seth Meyers, he recounted the story of his travels. As the first artist signed to The Beatles’ record label Apple, the band shut down their studios after their White Album recording sessions. In the break, Taylor decided to go island hopping and found himself on an island “off the coast of Spain, called Formentera”.
“I met some wonderful people while I was there,” he continues. “Myself and a girl called Karin from Sweden, we went to a neighbouring island,” he says, recounting their travels to Ibiza. “I started getting homesick, and I thought of this song and my home so far away and wrote ‘Carolina In My Mind’ as the sun was coming up.”
However, while Taylor remembers the story, he loses track of Karin. Back at a concert in 2009, when he first revealed the true story of the song, Taylor asked his fans for their help. Years after meeting Karin and writing the track, the experience and her memory still haunted him, and so with the advent of the internet, he decided to ask for help.
He asked his fans for help finding the original Karin that inspired the track. First, he commissioned a local police artist to draw a sketch of what she might look like years on from when he met her. This didn’t seem to work as Taylor joked he struggled not to think of her as a criminal now.
Taylor, his fans and the collective power of the internet tried the best they could to find Karin but had no luck. The woman behind the song remains lost, but it seems James Taylor will always remember her and the impact she had.
