Sufjan Stevens live on KCRW. I link to it only because he reveals which states he’s considering for his next geography-driven album — Oregon, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. (At 22:00 in the video.) And, more importantly to me, he reveals that the New Jersey album will be a musical about the exits on the New Jersey Turnpike.
That is awesome primarily because, when that comes out, I will seem retroactively extremely cool. Because for several years in the mid-1990s my email signature was:
“Thomas Edison! Grover Cleveland! John Fenwick! Joyce Kilmer! Clara Barton! Vince Lombardi! Walt Whitman.”
I knew those names as the ones Jon Spencer yells out at the end of “Big Road,” on the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s Extra Width. (Which, by the way, was probably the first “indie” record I ever bought, back in 1993.) At the time, I didn’t know those names, aside from being fine citizens of New Jersey, were also all service areas on the Turnpike, along with Woodrow Wilson, Molly Pitcher, and James Fenimore Cooper.
(It may be a sign of my impending blog bankruptcy that I’ve been reduced to recycling posts from 2001. Not sure. Also, I’m using more italics these days, it seems.)