3:14
High On Tulsa Heat, 2015
Written by John Moreland
Sounding like a countrified Brian Fallon, John Moreland (who apparently started as in punk bands) rasps his way through this rootsy rocker with a voice that feels permanently scuffed by disappointment. The song surveys a bleak emotional and economic landscape with no easy exits ("damn every inch of this town"), and, like many a Springsteen protagonist, locates its one refuge not in escape but in intimacy: "You're the place I miss when my heart gets heavy / Trouble my tombstone mind." There’s no pretense that affection fixes the larger problems. Money is still short, prospects still dim; the only real relief comes from "getting wrecked on love in the heavens above," a line that manages to sound both desperate and sincere. The song treads a familiar path of grit, frustration, and hard-earned tenderness, and it lacks the gallows humor or narrative surprise someone like Steve Earle might bring to similar terrain. Still, the song compensates with sheer emotional credibility, a rough, humane beauty of its own.
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