"The music starts faintly, as if in a vintage pleasure palace..."

"... with the band — the stalwarts who've played with Dylan for a while and join him on the Never-Ending Tour — playing rock and roll ragtime off in the corner. The electric guitars sound almost like clarinets. Everybody's swinging! But what's that in the distance? Dylan himself unleashes the rubbery guitar chord change that repeats for the rest of the song...."

You can pre-order the new album, "Tempest" here. The song at the link, which you can play in full, is "Duquesne Whistle."

ADDED: While over at Amazon, I happened to click on another link and see this new Art Garfunkel 2 CD set, "The Singer," which becomes available tomorrow. Funny, seeing "Duquensne" in the Dylan song got me thinking about a conversation Meade and I were having earlier this morning about the Simon and Garfunkel song "America." That came up in the context of the post from last night about the WaPo writer "searching for the 'authentic America'" in Madison, Wisconsin (of all  places). In the comments, Pogo did a parody of the old S&G song:

Emily said as we boarded a Greyhound in DC
"Madison seems like a dream to me now"
It took her four days to hitchhike from Washington
She's gone to look for America

"Emily, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was drinking
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why
Could be those cheese curds from authentic supper clubs
WaPo's gone to look for America
All gone to look for America
All gone to look for America

Meade had been singing that and, referring back to the old Paul Simon lyrics, began musing about why it took "four days to hitchhike from Saginaw" (to, apparently, Pittsburgh), and we were talking about songs that named a lot of places. I seemed to know that Simon used "Saginaw" because he liked the sound of the word. Yes, I vaguely remember blogging about that. Ah. Here. Now, I see it's that he declined to cancel a concert in Saginaw because "he said he had to see what a city named Saginaw looked like." Hey, that's a crazy old post from last month, tripping from topic to topic. That's the kind of post that this blog is really about. Did you know that?

Anyway. Back to today's conversation. Songs that contain the names of places. I was saying "Saginaw" is a cool name. What are the other songs where the writer liked the sound of a place name? Maybe "Duquesne Whistle" is one.

Meade brought up that song "I've Been Everywhere," and I dismissed it on the ground that it just named a lot of songs, but looking at the list of place names, I can see they're pretty amusing names. Muckadilla, and so forth. Wait. That's the Australian version. Australia has some funny sounding place names. The American version is more just a lot of names, thought I like Baraboo and Kalamazoo (and Baraboo is in Wisconsin). But if you're going to have Baraboo, Kalamazoo, why not Waunakee, Kankakee?

There are lots of songs with place names. Don't be naming all of them. I want songs with place names where you genuinely believe the place was named because the songwriter loved the sound of the word.