Talk:The Battle of Sunday Island
this song prompted me to once again search the internet for explanations of the names on the street signs, and i found this:
http://www.gapersblock.com/airbags/archives/father_arnold_damen_avenue/
which cites this:
http://www.amazon.com/Streetwise-Chicago-History-Street-Names/dp/0829405976/sr=8-1/qid=1159460208/ref=sr_1_1/002-7785101-3624852?ie=UTF8&s=books
sadly out of print. but an interesting place to start. i wonder if there's a web archive somewhere that talks about this?
Sara 13:04, 28 September 2006 (PDT)
Geography
I think at some point I read or read about a Tom Waits interview in which he said that all songs ought to have the name of a town, and food, and if possible, sailors in them. I don't know about the sailors, but I really latched onto the idea that a song should be geographically grounded. I'm a map fiend, and a sense-of-direction kind of guy, and I seem to have strong emotional ties to locations, so it made so much sense to me. I think most of the songs I've written since then have been very conscious of where they take place.
This song is probably the most purposefully geography-driven song I've ever written. It's about Evanston, and my CTA trips there to see Melissa when she was at Northwestern. Long, lonely, cold trips when I was young and afraid of everything. The first thing you see when you come up out of the Howard train yard on the Purple line is Cavalry Cemetary, which stretches from just below the tracks east to the lakeshore. Sheridan makes a weird right angle curve to go around it. Sunday Island was a name we gave to this weird round plateau that was built in the middle of what seemed like a drained man-made pond in Dawes Park. It had a tree on it. We had a picnic there once, on a Sunday.
So my feelings about Evanston in general and Melissa and our time there kind of got grafted onto this imagined history of the namesakes of the Purple line stops... And our struggle to stay together got conflated with some sort of hopeless war involving horses.
That place is a place of defeat and casualty for me, and that's what the song is about.
Gabemcelwain 14:21, 28 September 2006 (PDT)
