Let’s try this for a while: periodically post some song that happens to have some implicit or explicit geospatial reference. No, more than that it is somehow colored and informed by its geospatialness. It’s about an identifiable earth location. Accompanying the track will be a shortish yap about it (past which you’ll have to scroll in order to hear the track in question).

The first week is one of Tom Waits’ best straight-up love songs, “Johnsburg, Illinois.” This isn’t Waits’ best song ever (“Make it Rain” from Real Gone is, yo), but it’s so sweet and earnest and unobscured by conundrums and bullhorns and whatnot that it’s a bit of a surprise.

“Johnsburg, Illinois” is a spare, spare, romantic ballad. Straight up. No pretense, even. I don’t even think it’s ~exploring~ some potpourri of musical influence like a lotta these asshole musicians try to pull off when we’re not looking. The song aggrandizes the town in which his wife, Kathleen Brennan, grew up. The end. The place is [probably?] kinda ordinary and pedestrian – you might notice Waits doesn’t bother with a ton of, or any, detail about the joint – but it gets a song because he loves this woman it produced. Waits actually says (according to Pieter Hartmans’s 1983 interview posted at TomWaitsLibrary.com at least) that Brennan was raised up “by the Ching-a-Lings” on a farm that was situated “outside McHenry” near the Wisconsin border. Which is maybe less or more romantic than “You see I just can’t live without her, and I’m her only boy,” depending on taste, but still seems to be about the right sentiment.

MAPPING IT

Easy. Johnsburg is fully-formed in the OpenStreetMap set, copied.

HEARING IT