the last one born and the first one to run

It’s pretty clear to me that Christian and Gloria live in a river town, and almost certainly one north of St. Louis. Maybe near Detroit, I don’t know. I like to think near Pittsburgh. But when I hear these songs, I hear Cheswick and Harmarville and Springdale and those worn-out little off-shoots of Pittsburgh, mill towns, steel towns, coal towns, river towns.

Maybe it’s only because that’s where I first heard it. Cheswick, Pennsylvania was the site of some gloriously epiphanatory moments for me in May and June of 2009 (not, incidentally, the one in which I invented the word “epiphanatory”), and it was indeed the first place I heard “See the Light,” an ending which brought some welcome hope to an album that had, at my first judgment, been a little short on that. (On later listens, I found a little more of it.)

But Christian and Gloria? There's no way they live in New York, or Chicago, or LA, or even the Bay. Their town was blind from something or other, busted up, rusted up, all the coal or oil or steel yanked up out of it and left it with just the bare bones. Skeletal, rickety. No place to grow up. But really, where is the right place to grow up? There isn’t one. There’s only the place you grew up.