An analysis of the song "Root Beer" by Smith Wildwood
First of all, Smith Wildwood has made no bones about his songwriting mostly involving aesthetics as the priority, with meaning taking a back seat (but still a passenger). Thus, the main thing he was after in writing Root Beer was through the lyrics (and the sound of the instrumentation & melody) to evoke an impressionistic poetry that in elusive ways captures the spirit and essence of "root beer"—in his scheme, autumnal references and more subtly and less tangibly, the names "Robert" and "Amber Sloan", the suburban feel of the allusions (with a woodsy fringe to the suburbia), and the casual suburban whiteness of the overall ambiance—with a passing nod to the city in the destination of the narrator and his friend being a "city park". Even what they’re going to the park for could have some elliptical association with root beer: a casual tennis game with a "yellow ball"; just as later another root-beer-like sport is evoked, soccer. Neither baseball, nor football, nor basketball quite fit that particular soda pop.
As we noted above, meaning isn't absent from the song, even if it may take second place (but even that can be argued to be subjective). The overarching "story" is pretty simple: a young kid, let's say in transition from being a boy to a teenager, in the first half of the song just spending a day ("another Saturday") with his best friend—and at the end of that description, before a long instrumental break, the boy/teen as he and his friend take a long walk to the tennis court encounters a girl he knows "coming the other way". Typically for that limbo stage of that age, he's simultaneously put off by girls yet attracted: "I see the girl who makes me feel like a fool"—and his response is to "kick a can as far as I can" and of course the girl retorts that he's "just showing off".
Before she leaves them at that casual crossroad ("fork in the road") she impishly flirts ("she gave me one of those smiles—and a jump and a skip and a hop!"). This is followed by an instrumental break so long and interestingly varied in chords it fosters an intermission tantamount to significant time passing in the boy's life—perhaps signalling a fast-forward to a year or two when, more mature, he has already begun to hang around with that same girl (maybe not quite “going out” with her), with intimations of increasing intimacy leading to the last line in that scene: "she kissed me on the cheek. . ." This nicely followed with an almost comical, yet somehow endearing, deflation: ". . .and then she wiped her nose and then sneezed on my corduroys"—this in turn leading to a long scat singing interlude with a melody almost plaintively nostalgic, and very elusively, in some curious way, evocative of root beer.