Road

The road, street, pavement, and alleyway as a recurring image of the relationship's traversed path - the figure that holds together the abstract sense of life-as-route and the embodied urban geography in which the relationship is walked, observed, and remembered. The image surfaces in overlapping registers across the catalogue. Road-as-life-direction marks the path the traveller did not choose: the road less travelled, the road that gets hard, all roads leading back to the same destination, the dead-end street, the road to ruin, the speed bump, the spikes thrown down to keep a traveller from passing. Named streets fix the relationship to particular coordinates of urban memory (Cornelia Street, 16th Avenue, Sunset and Vine, Bond Street, Gallatin Road) with the address standing in for the relationship that took place there. Streets as public space stage the relationship for observation, gossip, or witness; sidewalks and pavement mark the intimate scale at which the relationship is walked together - footprints on the sidewalk, the kiss on the sidewalk, the glow off the pavement after rain. Alleyways and backroads mark the off-the-main-route version of the path, reached by stepping off the planned route. Distinct from the traffic-light motif (decision points), the getaway-car motif (vehicle of structurally-doomed escape), the train motif (un-authored fated momentum), the cars motif (vehicle as agency and shared movement), and the back-seat motif (the car's interior as bounded privacy): the road is the path itself.

The road carries the doubled charge of direction set by others and direction the speaker is walking herself - the path the traveller did not choose, and the route she is wearing into the pavement step by step. In life-direction register the image marks the fatedness of certain arrivals: the road that runs out, the road that bends, the road that closes off, the road whose curve the traveller has had to accept rather than redirect. In the named-street register the image holds memory in place: a particular address becomes synecdoche for the relationship that lived there, the speaker returning to the coordinate to find the past still legible. In the public-street register the image stages relational visibility (what passers-by see, hear, or interpret of a relationship) with the street as the site of witness rather than passage. The sidewalk and pavement scale this down to the body: where feet land, where chalk-and-snow is mistaken for the other, where the kiss is given in view. Across registers the figure marks how much of the relationship is happening in space the speaker can see: the catalogue's most public-visible motif, distinct from the interior-of-the-car (back-seat motif) or the rented rooms (hallway and door motifs) that hold the relationship's private register. Whoever is walking the road, and whether they are walking it with someone or alone, often marks the song's emotional turn.

Appears in 45 songs