"There are two people in this song — or three, if you count the highway, which I generally do. They look a lot like me and the woman who would later become my wife, driving from Chicago to northern Iowa on a summer day. Only I don't think that ever happened. I know we never had any '50s road movie conversations like the one that opens the song. We weren't, at the point in time when this song would have had to've taken place for it to be true, using overnight bags. We had suitcases. And there wasn't enough backstory between us for buildings to appear as "monument[s] of desperation."
But the picture I get in my head, or got in my head when I was writing it in a Grinnell apartment circa 1996, was of my girlfriend and I heading a little ways west and digging in for a long life together. I think it's almost a symbolic scene for me in that way. On one tour we opened the set with it quite a few times, and I enjoyed it more and more each night. The characters in this song aren't keeping secrets from you; anything they don't tell you just isn't any of your business. "
"There are two people in this song — or three, if you count the highway, which I generally do. They look a lot like me and the woman who would later become my wife, driving from Chicago to northern Iowa on a summer day. Only I don't think that ever happened. I know we never had any '50s road movie conversations like the one that opens the song. We weren't, at the point in time when this song would have had to've taken place for it to be true, using overnight bags. We had suitcases. And there wasn't enough backstory between us for buildings to appear as "monument[s] of desperation."
But the picture I get in my head, or got in my head when I was writing it in a Grinnell apartment circa 1996, was of my girlfriend and I heading a little ways west and digging in for a long life together. I think it's almost a symbolic scene for me in that way. On one tour we opened the set with it quite a few times, and I enjoyed it more and more each night. The characters in this song aren't keeping secrets from you; anything they don't tell you just isn't any of your business. "