Pure sweetness

Song lyrics, like poetry, are works of beauty when they have at least two levels of understanding.  The song American Honey is one of those works of beauty.  The song works from a symbolic point of view very nicely.

She grew up on a side of the road.
Where the church bells ring and strong love grows.
She grew up good, she grew up slow,
like American Honey.

A girl grows up in a really small town, one where, if you blink, you miss the town.  The main road through town didn't go through the middle of it.  It went around it since it was so small it wasn't worth stopping in.  Oh, but there was magic there.  The girl has those great small town morals that come from careful nurturing.  She represents the American experience.

This American experience has the same comparative process as honey.  Honey takes time.  The bees follow a particular process of bringing back nectar to the hive, transferring the nectar to other bees, and those bees following the rest of the process to spread and fill the hive with honey.  American honey then represents the average person's process of growing up.  This is great nostalgia.  The good old days for people are sweet as honey to the figurative palate.

Steady as a preacher, free as a weed,
Couldn't wait to get goin', but wasn't quite ready to leave.
So innocent, pure and sweet,
American Honey.

The childhood experience is so uneven.  The road to adulthood is sweet, pure, and innocent, yes, but also is a road filled with contrasts.  One can be steady, yet wild as a weed, much like the saying "16 going on 30."  The honey making process also contains a bit of uneven drama. The bees have to deal with a wild card, bacteria as they deposit and seal the honey they will eat in the honeycomb.  Most of the sticky, digested nectar is, of course, stored successfully as pure, sweet honey although some of it falls to the bacteria.

Get caught in the race of this crazy life,
Trying to be everything can make you lose your mind.
I just wanna go back in time,
To American Honey.

The present day is hard and tedious unlike those sweet, carefree childhood days.  People, like the girl, love the thought of going back to those precious, formative years when life tasted good.  As for honey, eventually, bees get caught up in doing the same thing time and time again - flying to the flowers to collect nectar, going through the process of converting the nectar to honey, storing it in a honeycomb, then eating it and starting all over again.

The chorus echoes the sentiment containing the message of the poem.

There's a wild, wild whisper blowin' in the wind,
Callin' out my name like a long lost friend.
Oh, I miss those days as the years go by,
Oh, nothing's sweeter than summertime
And American Honey.

It also is the point where a person knows for sure that the composer has combined the two processes of making honey and being raised in a youthful, carefree, simple atmosphere.  The whisper in the wind is the nostalgia that takes one back to those wonderful, playful days of childhood and the instinctual call of the bee to start the nectar gathering process.  The result of remembering is a sweet summer.  For the bee, it is the time of the year for productive gathering of nectar.  What beautiful symbolism compared to literal honey.

The song's melody is slow and rhythmic, very nostalgically written like a breeze blowing through one's hair.  Both words and music take a person's mind back to the uncomplicated sweet things of life.

Now that's the symbolic level.  There is the literal level, of course, the obvious level.  A woman nurtured from birth that is to have such an appeal that she becomes a man's honey, sweet to the memory every time a person recalls those memorable times.  The whisper "callin' my name" has hypnotic power to draw the memory back with every thought to the time when the two were together.  What beautiful literality compared to symbolic honey.

The key line for both symbolic and literal levels of interpretation is:
Oh, I miss those days as the years go by.

Nostalgia is good.  It keeps us centered.  Roots are important for tempering what happens in our present and for guiding what ventures are pursued in our future.  And while nostalgia is good, the present is where we live.  So, I want to add a new stanza (mine, not Lady Antebellum's of course)

Oh congrats on today, what the future brought you,
It was built on the past as you made your way through
Although it's new, it's sweet too
It's American Honey.