Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

We still have time to mess this up!

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Petty moves from a petty man.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

You cannot shame the shameless.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Can’t you just feel the moonshine

Can’t you just feel the moonshine

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I was first introduced to Tom Waits by my college roommate, who was from Glendale, but I didn’t really get into him til I moved to the Bay Area where it was foggy all the time and my only friend was my old college roommate’s dive-bar-loving sister.

The other day I put on Nighthawks at the Diner and it really put California, especially LA, in my mind. So I thought it would be fun to do a post about songs and albums that are evocative of a particular place. For some reason, there’s a lot of songs I like that are evocative of LA (“Carmelita”!) and almost none about New York, except “Across 110th St.”, even though I’ve never spent much time in LA and I used to live in NY.

Anyhoo, how about songs that remind you of a particular place? It doesn’t have to be a place you’ve ever actually been, it could be a place you want to go because of the songs.

I’ll start with the above songs mentioned plus:

All Dr. John, Professor Longhair, and James Booker — New Orleans
All Desmond Dekker — The Caribbean (unfortunately, Bob Marley by contrast makes me think of college-aged dude bros)
Dixie Chicken — Memphis
Don’t Go Back to Rockville — Athens, Georgia
White Man In Hammersmith Palais and London’s Brilliant Parade — London (though I’d never been when I first heard these songs)
Songs In the Key of Life and Innervisions — Parts of Rochester (even though I think they’re about parts of Detroit or New York)

Update. I’ll add a few more, including some New York ones

Blue Sky (Allman Brothers) — Route 441 in Georgia
Coney Island Baby, Romeo had Juliet, I Happen To Like New York — New York City
All Leonard Cohen — Whatever godforsaken place McCabe and Mrs. Miller takes place
All Pogues — Ireland (though like a good Irish-American, I’ve never been)

Reader Interactions

138Comments

  2. 2.

    DougJ

    @RandomMonster:

    I almost added in “Coney Island Baby” and “Dirty Boulevard” too, but I think sometimes Lou overdoes the gritty NYC stuff, e.g. Street Hassle and Walk on the Wild Side.

  3. 3.

    tesslibrarian

    If you haven’t listened to Dead Letter Office, Chronic Town, and Murmur while driving through Georgia on 2-lane highways surrounded by forests, farms, and pecan orchards, you haven’t actually seen Georgia.

  4. 4.

    smintheus

    Taste – Blister on the Moon, Belfast

    Duke Ellington – New Orleans Suite (esp Thanks for the Beautiful Land of the Delta)

  5. 5.

    Amir Khalid

    Penny Lane, the Beatles, about a street in Liverpool. I’ve never been to the city, would love to go someday.

  8. 8.

    Mnemosyne

    Peter Gabriel’s “Red Rain” always brings back memories of getting off work late at night at Six Flags in Illinois and driving home. Dark, flat, sometimes foggy roads.

  9. 9.

    I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet

    Randy Newman – “I Love LA”
    The Cowsills – “Indian Lake”
    Ian Hunter – “Cleveland Rocks”
    Robert Johnson – “Sweet Home Chicago”

    I’ll quit now. :-)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  10. 10.

    scav

    Randy Newman seems to have a good lineup of geogeaphically evokative songs. Dayton Ohio, 1903; Dixie Flyer; The flood one (Louisiana, 1927); a series of LA and southern ones. Warren Zevon does indeed have a few good LA ones.

  14. 14.

    Omnes Omnibus

    Grace Jones, I’ve Seen That Face Before) (Libertango – Paris

    Violent Femmes’ first album is very Milwaukee to me.

  15. 15.

    SatanicPanic

    That one Robin Thicke song was on every radio station when we took a vacation through the Pacific Northwest, so when I hear Blurred Lines I think of Olympic NP.

    A Cranberries song came on the radio before I got on a plane to China and was stuck in my head the entire flight, so anytime I hear that song I think of China.

  16. 16.

    p.a.

    Blasters/Dave Alvin/F-Thunderbirds: Good Texas
    AKUS: Appalachia
    Philip Glass: NYC
    Kelly Willis: Oklahoma
    Seger/MC5/Eminem: Rustbelt, not just Detroit

  18. 18.

    Tommy

    @raven: For me it would be the Blues Travelers in the early 90s. Baton Rouge. LA. They played the Varsity a number of times. I think their CDs ever left one of my CD players. Oh and of course The Meters and New Orleans.

  19. 19.

    RandomMonster

    Palace of the Brine (The Pixies) makes me think of Mono Lake, CA, except that the song is actually about Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

  20. 20.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset

    @Amir Khalid: I have a lot of those, songs that make me nostalgic for places I’ve never been. A song about green hills and hollows makes me want to road trip to Appalachia and, even though I’m not much of a beach person, songs that make me want to go to the FL Keys and other islands, including, I guess somewhat perversely, Steve Earle’s Good-bye (a soft breeze blowing up from the Crribean) and (yeah, yeah, screw you music snobs, you need to unwindulax) Jimmy Buffett. Buffett also gets me with “I think about Paris when I’m high on red wine/ I wish I could jump on a plane”.

  22. 22.

    Scott

    Having grown up on Long Island in the 60s/70s, I have to say that Billy Joels songs pretty much nailed the whole New York suburban life.

  23. 23.

    Omnes Omnibus

    For purely personal reasons, I will always associate Golden Earring’s Radar Love with Davos.

    ETA: Also for personal reasons, GnR’s Paradise City makes me think of Mykonos.

  24. 24.

    Roger Moore

    For some reason, there’s a lot of songs I like that are evocative of LA (“Carmelita”!) and almost none about New York, except “Across 110th St.”, even though I’ve never spent much time in LA and I used to live in NY.

    Maybe it’s easier to evoke your ideas about LA because precisely because you haven’t spent as much time there. Your ideas about LA are much more heavily influenced by cultural references than personal experience, so those cultural references have an easy time evoking your sense of place. In contrast, you’ve actually lived in New York, so your sense of it is highly personal, and it takes a song that matches your personal experience of the place to evoke it for you.

  25. 25.

    RandomMonster

    And the Pixies in general often make me think of Los Angeles, maybe because of Black Francis’s liberal incorporation of ‘white guy spanish’, but something else about their sound too.

  28. 28.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Leavin’ Louisiana in the Broad Daylight— Non-NO Louisiana, another place I’ve never been (Emmylou’s version)

  32. 32.

    Steve from Antioch

    @mwbugg: Funny, I was just about to post that Muhlenberg County song by John Prine … I got the name wrong.

    But it makes me think os Southern WV, not KY.

  33. 33.

    SatanicPanic

    @Roger Moore: Plus there’s also the element of time. Sublime, to pick a random example, makes me think of 90s California, but places look different now, so maybe 20 years ago I associated “lovin is what I got” with a particular place, it’s probably gone or changed enough that it doesn’t fit anymore.

  34. 34.

    Professor Purple

    Taos, NM – Joe West’s “$2000 Navaho Rug”
    Oklahoma – James McMurtry’s “Choctaw Bingo”
    Texas – Peter Rowan”s “Riding High In Texas”

  35. 35.

    SectionH

    Leonard Cohen’s from Montréal and sometimes I can hear echoes of it in his songs, but his novels may resonate about it more –
    Beau Domage IS Montréal (Vous pourrez m’écrire ici/Soixante-dix-sept soixante St-Vallier, Montréal
    Runrig = Scotland, but some songs are Highlands, and some are Glasgow

    NY: 59th Street Bridge Song
    NOLA: The Vampire Song (Concrete Blond) or because we have half a filk song written to the tune, The Kinks (Lola)
    IZ: there may be a place in the Islands he doesn’t have a song for, but damfino what that would be.

  36. 36.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @SatanicPanic: Time is certainly a factor. I tend to connect music to moments (a time and a place). It can be general (like the first Clash album is London in the 70s) or specific (like the oddity that the first time a girl told me she loved me, Meatloaf’s Two out of Three Ain’t Bad was playing on the radio in her car).

  37. 37.

    Tommy

    The Allman Brothers and all of Texas. When I was in grad school at LSU in the early 90s my best friend was from Vermont. His girlfriend, Midland TX. Her father a high-level executive at Exxon. They had a summer house in San Marcos, TX right on the San Marcos river. We’d often head over to it for the weekend and The Allman Brothers were just on repeat.

  39. 39.

    Roger Moore

    One I will always have is John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” with Fort Collins; there’s a Rocky Mountain High School in Fort Collins, so I made the connection at quite an early age.

  40. 40.

    jayboat

    NY is the Boss for me-
    The Wild, The Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle

    (so many here are bullseyes)

  41. 41.

    Tommy

    @Roger Moore: I am with you there. For Spring Break two years I went to CO and Fort Collins. Went skiing, which is kind of funny since we were all from IL and none of us really were skiers. It just seemed like John Denver was the soundtrack of each trip.

  44. 44.

    Goblue72

    @RandomMonster: that sound would be the Boston sound of the late 80s / early 90s – Pixies, Throwing Muses, Lemonheads, Dinosaur Jr, Breeders, Sebadoh – all lo-fi alt-rock bands from Boston area active around same time.

    The Pixies are the sound of Boston at a particular time – classic Boston punk squeezed through an indie rock slant.

  46. 46.

    Tommy

    @raven: Was John still in his wheelchair? I am of course happy he recovered. Lost a ton of weight. But I kind of think it was the post-wheelchair days that his music started to “suck” a little.

  47. 47.

    Omnes Omnibus

    Dire Straits, Walking in the Wild West End connects with Soho (London, of course, not New York).

  48. 48.

    scottinnj

    La Vie En Rose – Paris
    Almost anything by Lyle Lovett – Texas (in a good way Texas not like in a Governor Goodhair way).

  51. 51.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Goblue72: While I, like you, connect the Pixies with Boston and a particular music scene, not everyone is going to do so – even if they know that the band came out of that scene.

  55. 55.

    Gin & Tonic

    “Take the ‘A’ Train.” Billy Strayhorn for the Duke Ellington band, of course, but covered by everyone since.

  57. 57.

    SectionH

    I was introduced to Tom Waits by my best friend from High School, after hours in a bar in Richmond, Kentucky. He’d just finished a concert at EKU, and she’d been in a long distance thing with him for a while. Can’t say I remember much about him. It was a good party, though, which might explain…

    @raven: Richmond is the place “We gotta get out of” always takes me back to (shudder).

    So, a few more random mentions:

    Springsteen’s early stuff has srs Sense of Place
    Lotsa songs about Paris, but Piaf embodies it
    Patti Pravo (La Bambola) will always take me back to Rome

  59. 59.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Omnes Omnibus: Knopfler’s What It Is makes me think of Edinburgh, even though I think it’s about Glasgow, but I’ve been to Edinburgh and not Glasgow, and the images of a night full of drunks and ghosts makes me think of Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh.

  64. 64.

    RandomMonster

    @Omnes Omnibus: You made the point I was going to make re: The Pixies. I learned that the band came out of Boston long after I started listening to them, so all of my (bad) assumptions about where they were from had to do with the surfer music influence in some of their songs and, again, the liberal use of spanglish…

  65. 65.

    Old Dan and Little Ann

    There is a bar in Keystone, Colorado named The Snake River Saloon (The Snake). I used to go there after work on the weekends and “Mustang Sally” would always be played live by whatever band was playing. I always think of that joint whenever I hear that song. Along with the bartender who would take a big swig of something, extend a lighter above his head, and spit to create a glorious fireball across the ceiling. Good times.

  66. 66.

    raven

    Our Crime, Canned Heat

    “The police in Denver
    Lord, they don’t want no long hairs hangin round
    and that’s the reason why
    whoo hoo
    they’s tearin Canned Heat’s reputation down

  68. 68.

    SectionH

    @raven: the one in Kentucky? Wow. I expect she did better than a geeky 12 yr old who got stuck into Model High 9th grade. (Moved to Richmond when my mom took a job teaching at Eastern.)

    I’ve never heard of the Fan, but then I haven’t spent much time there in the last 30 years.

  71. 71.

    john fremont

    Los Lobos album By the Light of the Moon reminds me of the Mojave desert in Southern California. Especially the songs One Time One Night and Shakin Shakin Shakes.

    Springsteen’s Tenth Avenue Freezeout, Fever and Rosalita take me back to South Philly, the Penn’s Landing area and across the Delaware into South Jersey. As does Hall and Oates She’s Gone.

    Townes Van Zandt’s Tecumseh Valley evokes Taos and the Sangre de Cristos in Colorado.

  73. 73.

    piratedan

    That whole Missing Persons album in the 80’s screams LAarea (I mean “Walking in LA” specifically, but destination unknown applies too), as does The Motels (Only the Lonely and Take the L) album from the same time period. Other period pieces that stand out are U2’s With or Without you album while driving the rural stretches of the US Southwest. To be further old School, just about anything from the Eagles has a California feel to it. Can’t speak to the NY vibe since I’ve never been there, although I hear that Smithereens kind of nail it, but it’s a ymmv kind of thing I suppose.

  74. 74.

    James Gary

    And the Pixies in general often make me think of Los Angeles, maybe because of Black Francis’s liberal incorporation of ‘white guy spanish’, but something else about their sound too.

    @RandomMonster and Omnes Omnibus: Frank Black/Black Francis grew up in Redondo Beach.

  75. 75.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @James Gary: He was born in Boston, went to high school in Massachusetts, and attended UMass-Amherst. He formed the Pixies in Boston. I know he lived in California for a time as a child as well, but the Boston connection is very strong.

  77. 77.

    Dr. Dave

    Once he ditched the “Johnny Cougar” persona, John Mellencamp did a great job painting pictures of life near his home in rural southern Indiana. Jack and Diane, Pink Houses, Blood on the Scarecrow, and a bunch of others from that time period. We saw him do a great live show around then in the football stadium at Indiana University–good times!

  78. 78.

    Greg

    Concrete Blonde….Mexican Moon. I’ve been to Mexico City many times and that song always takes me right back.

  79. 79.

    SG

    Benny Goodman, 1938 Carnegie Hall concert, “Sing, Sing, Sing.” If this isn’t New York, nothing is.

    Also, for my money, Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” — first played at The Village Gate and recorded in NYC but, oddly enough, inspired by Turkish street musicians playing in Bulgarian meter (according to Wikipedia).

  82. 82.

    Bob In Portland

    1978 or 79, on Elvis Costello’s “Farewell America” tour, when he was playing lots of stuff from his “Armed Forces” album, he did what he called the “Dallas version” of “Less Than Zero”. At Winterland. Quite a show. Mink DeVille opened up, then Rockpile, then Elvis.

    It was soon after the Milk-Moscone murders and Jonestown. Strange times.

  83. 83.

    divF

    Tom Waits – “Diamonds on My Windshield” : San Diego. I listen to that song and can see in my mind every interchange in the lyrics.

    I courted Madame in the 70’s by taking her out dancing to various bars in Berkeley that featured rockabilly / western swing and had dance floors: the West Dakota, the Keystone Berkeley, the Long Branch Saloon. Bill Kirchen singing various songs written or performed by Moon Mullican – “Seven Nights to Rock”, “I’ll Sail My Ship Alone”, “Columbus Stockade Blues” are indelibly associated with those clubs (all now gone, alas, although Bill Kirchen is not – he is still touring).

    Two U. Utah Phillips songs that I heard Rosalie Sorrels perform many times: “The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia”, and “Rock Salt and Nails”, evoke the Appalachian region on the VA / WV border (where I used to go backpacking when I was growing up). Also a small folk club in Minneapolis where I saw Rosalie perform once when I was on a sabbatical visit in 1985 and was terribly homesick, with Madame left at home attending med school.

  84. 84.

    sidhra

    Jonathan Richman – “Roadrunner” – Massachusetts when it’s late at night with the radio on.

  85. 85.

    divF

    @p.a.: I interviewed Joe Ely on KALX sometime in the late 70’s. I don’t rmember anything about the interview, other than noticing that he did indeed keep his fingernails long.

  87. 87.

    Goblue72

    @Omnes Omnibus: true enough. I was living in Boston at the time that scene was as its peak. Good times at The Middle East, TT’s, the Ratt. So the sound reminds me of its specific time & place.

  88. 88.

    Scout211

    We met a young woman from Norway on our trip this past summer through the Southwest National Parks. She was camping through the U S for three months by herself. We invited her to visit us on her way from Yosemite to Lassen.

    She was beyond thrilled that we drove her through Lodi because Stuck in Lodi by CCR was one of her father’s favorite songs. She immediately posted a pic to her Instagram account.

  90. 90.

    Scout211

    From Wikipedia:

    The song describes the plight of a down-and-out musician whose career has landed him playing a gig in the small town of Lodi (pronounced “low-die”), a small agricultural city in the Central Valley about 70 miles from Fogerty’s hometown of Berkeley. After playing in local bars, the narrator finds himself stranded and unable to raise bus or train fare to leave.[1] Fogerty later said he had never actually visited Lodi before writing this song, and simply picked it for the song because it had “the coolest sounding name.”[2] However, the song unquestionably references the town’s reputation as an uninteresting farm settlement, although the narrator does not mention any specific complaints. The song’s chorus, “Oh Lord, stuck in Lodi again,” has been the theme of several city events in Lodi.[citation needed]

  93. 93.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Scout211: OTOH, if you were still four years old when the song came out and your family drove past the exit sign for Lodi, WI, several times a year on I-90/94, you might connect it with that town.

  94. 94.

    Wag

    Many Tom Waits fans don’t realize it but a few songs on Nighthawks are set in what is no the LoDo neighborhood of Denver. At the time Waits was there, it was skid row.

    Back in the 80’s we used to drink at the Terminal Bar (which Waits songs abou in the song Nighthawk Postcards From Easy Street) at 17th and Wazee street. Now it’s a high end sushi restaurant. Overall I’m really happy with the changes in LoDo, but seething has been lost, too.

    So Nighthawks always takes me to LoDo.

  96. 96.

    altofront

    Nighthawks at the Diner is one of my favorite albums, and I really think there’s no greater bard of SoCal than Waits.

    However, I feel compelled to point out that “Nighthawk Postcards,” the song embedded in the post, is actually set in Denver: “Maybe you’re standing on the corner of 17th and Wazee Streets / Out in front of the Terminal Bar there’s a Thunderbird moving in muscatel sky / You’ve been drinking cleaning products all night / Open for suggestions…” Waits is perhaps also the greatest bard of Denver (and Minneapolis, for that matter: two largely unsung locales).

    There’s a verse in the Luna’s “Slide”–“SoHo’s got the boots / NoHo’s got the crack / New England’s got the foliage / But I’m not going back”–that always summons up the Northeast for me in a visceral and bittersweet way. I’m not going back, either.

  97. 97.

    Steeplejack

    I tend to associate songs with moments/places in my own life rather than the place they are allegedly “about.” Here is one that covers both: the Trade Winds, “New York’s a Lonely Town.”

    In the early ’80s I had to travel a lot on business, and whenever I was in New York when it was snowing I always thought about this song from years before. I make no excuse for it—it’s a supremely trivial pop song, and that’s probably an insult to songs that are merely trivial—but it really nails “clean, quiet, snowy New York City” for me. I think the bells in the background remind me of Christmas, which hits the trifecta.

  102. 102.

    jannydarling

    This just happened to me a few minutes ago in the car. Warren Zevon covered a 50’s song, not sure of the name, I think its “There’s a girl I know I’ve been in love with a long, long time.” “What’s her name?” “I can’t tell you.” ” Aw.”
    We were just going over the Golden Gate Bridge when I first heard it, and I was there again just a little while ago.

  103. 103.

    Bob In Portland

    @sidhra: When I was stationed at Fort Devens ’72-’73 there was a testing center in Natick, Massachusetts. You could volunteer to go there and test, and then get a three-day pass. They were testing gas masks, protective gear, and the things you needed to be protected against.

    I don’t know anyone who volunteered. That’s what I remember when I hear about Route 128 late at night.

    The song I associate with Devens, though, is “Do Ya” by The Move. I bought the album at the PX. There was a pizza place we’d go to right off base, in Ayer. There was Argent’s “Hold Your Head Up,” but it was a song about heaven on the flip side, maybe “Closer To Heaven,” that we’d play. I guess Ayer was closer to heaven than Fort Devens. And Isaac Hayes’ “Theme From Shaft” but we’d play the flip side, “Cafe Regio’s.”

  106. 106.

    Bob In Portland

    @Steeplejack: “New York’s a lonely town when you’re the only surfer boy around.”

    “My folks moved to New York from California. I shoulda listened when my buddies said, ‘I warn ya. There’ll be no surfing there, and no one really cares.’ My woodie’s outside, covered with snow…”

  109. 109.

    Frank in midtown

    Party, Party weekend – Joe King Carrasco – Austin
    I’m not strange, I’m just like you – Keith Sykes – Memphis
    New Dehli Freight Train – Little Feat – Sawai Madhopur
    You’re always the sun – Supreme Beings of Leisure – L.A.
    Gloria – Eddie and the Hotrods – Tuscaloosa
    All the way from America – Joan Armatrading – Jakarta

    If I hear these songs I’m taken back to these places.

  110. 110.

    ducktape

    The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s American Dream and Augusta GA.

    It’s not just from the reference. Back in 1981, I was heading back in Atlanta after a job interview with TRW in Augusta (when they were actually making things, not being a credit bureau). They had offered me the job …. and I really did not like them and did not want to take the job. But I really needed a job.

    That song came on the radio, and “Augusta Georgia is just no place to be” resonated. Thank you, Nitty Gritty guys. I did not take the job.

  111. 111.

    eemom

    @ducktape:

    That’s really weird…..I was thinking about that song right before you posted that.

    I was in high school when it came out. Later in life it came to mind when I visited Martinique and drove past Coconut Grove, other places named in the song. Never been to Jamaica, though.

  116. 116.

    Kathleen

    New Orleans – Can I Change My Mind by Tyrone Davis. The song was very popular in a New Orleans bar I frequented with other students from Xavier. Dancers could do the “Four Corners, one of the most popular dances the year I was there..

    Portland, OR – Jefferson Airplane – Surrealistic Pillow album. It captured the different moods and lights and shadows of the skies above the St. John’s Bridge, which I could see from my dorm room.

  117. 117.

    BillCinSD

    Portland I think if The Thermals
    Boston is always Mission of Burma in my heart
    Manchester UK is Joy Division
    Minneapolis The Replacements

  119. 119.

    DougJ

    @Roger Moore:

    I think it’s more that too many New York songs are celebrating the city or making hipster references to some obscure part of it (Great Jones Street).

    Even though I lived in NYC for two years and have only visited LA sporadically, I’ve had more LA experiences that connected with Tom Waits songs in my head than I had NYC experiences that connected with NYC songs in my head.

  120. 120.

    sharl

    @Steeplejack: Now that brings back memories of my youth in a small (now Rust Belt) city – not Detroit, but similar in its economics. That song got a lot of air play locally back then. I assume it was popular with the transplanted Appalachian folk who had come North to where the jobs were, once the coal mines back home shut down; I went to school with their kids.

  121. 121.

    Melissa

    Gram Parsons Streets of Baltimore. I spent time in Baltimore in my early twenties (boyfriend from there) & the song is great.

  123. 123.

    Birthmarker

    Brown Sugar will always remind me of flying down I 10 towards New Orleans.

    Miss American Pie brings to mind exams at Auburn in the early ’70’s because it’s such an earworm it disturbed our concentration!

    Marshall Tucker’s This Old Cowboy reminds me of partying at Auburn.

  130. 130.

    SiubhanDuinne

    Late to the thread (Met Opera today, the six-hour Wagner epic Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg) but the Kingston Trio song “The Seine” makes me all nostalgic for Paris and being in love for the first time. The KT album came out a short time before my first trip abroad, and I was in Paris for my 17th birthday (in the company of my high-school boyfriend and his entire family, long irrelevant story). I played that one track overandoverandoverandoverandoveragain, and still get a little teary-eyed when I listen to it.

  132. 132.

    Tom the First

    @jayboat: Beat me to it. Out of all his work, it seems the most evocative of a specific time and place (one which I’ve never been to).

  133. 133.

    Tom the First

    Not to highjack, but on a related topic, I have a ton of albums I associate to specific seasons, usually the one in which I first listen to it.

    For instance, Fables of the Reconstruction by R.E.M. is a total fall album for me. For my brother, it’s a summer album (when it was actually released). I didn’t listen to it until a couple years later.

  135. 135.

    john fremont

    @Wag: Yeah. I remember going to the Terminal Bar in 1989. Before Coors Field was built LoDo definitely had a different vibe. Up on 22nd and Market Street is the El Chapultepec. Back in the day it was the backstreet dive to go see live jazz. Tom Waits , Johnny Carson, and just about every jazz musician passing through Denver jammed at the place.Neal Cassidy hung out there in the 1960’s. It was a cool place to hang out at on Sunday nights when the sidewalks were rolled up after sunset. Now with Coors Field right across the street it still holds out with live jazz and cheap burritos amidst a sea of posh sports and sushi bars. Hearing Sonny Rollins album Saxophone Colossus and John Coltrane’s Blue Train takes me back to those Sunday nights in the early 1990’s.

  137. 137.

    Hunter

    A little out in left field, but Arvo Pärt’s Passio always makes me think of sitting on the old Belmont Rocks (Chicago’s gay beach at the time) early in the morning (before the Army Corps of Engineers turned it into something resembling an airport runway), because I did that for a whole summer. Something about the early sun and that unearthly chorus and looking out over the lake. . . .

    Oh, and about “Nighthawks at the Diner”, see here. (I’d dump the image in, but I can’t figure out how. And I’m surprised none of this erudite bunch have done it already.)

  138. 138.

    OGLiberal

    At the Foot of Canal Street – New Orleans.

    Done by Cowboy Mouth, Paul Sanchez and John Boutte. Any one will do but my preference is Sanchez’s, with Boutte’s a close second. (They co-wrote the song.) My wife is from New Orleans but she doesn’t like any of them. Her preference is Big Freedia, who is also all New Orleans, just in a different way.

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