A few weeks ago, the East Coast was still solid into winter: Connecticut was brown and cold, and a thin layer of ice, cracked like skin, had formed near the Tappen Zee Bridge. My friends and I were driving to DC, and as we reached southern New Jersey, we began to see signs of spring: a few bright branches of forsythia, a cluster of geese gathering near a Cinnabon. When we reached Baltimore, the air was warm and clear; the city stood clean against the blue sky. We passed a vinegar factory, and the Inner Harbor; it was early morning, and the city was waking up into spring. John Darnielle has always displayed a fondness for geographic metonymy, and his work on the Extra Glenns’ 2002 Martial Arts Weekend is no exception. “Baltimore” sounds like Baltimore in these early weeks of spring: the song bursts into bloom with a few guitar strokes, and then proceeds to move with a steady sweetness, the slow fade of an April sunset. Darnielle stands “just beyond the last of the sidewalk, where the beach begins,” and where the ocean begins, the land ends: this is a city that smells like salt; this is the edge of the earth. You can’t go any farther, Darnielle suggests, so you’ve got to be happy with what you’ve found. “In Baltimore, you’ll uncover what you’re digging for,” he tells us, as if we’re kids playing in the sand, as if all we want is summer and a castle, as if maybe that’s enough.

In “Lady Came from Baltimore,” off Tim Hardin’s 1967 album Tim Hardin 2, Baltimore is pressed into service as kind of talismanic adjective, a sign of simple, redbrick sincerity. The lady is “Susan Moore,” properly Susan Yardley Morss, mother of Hardin’s son, and a native not of Baltimore but Vermont and New Jersey. Sure, Baltimore and Moore work better than, say, Trenton and Morss, but the lady of the song is framed as an ingenuous naïf, and Baltimore gilds that frame. Hardin invokes the city—located, appropriately, in a border state—to suggest a sunny practicality, a shelter from extremes. When Hardin mumbles the word, he suggests, in his charming, melancholic way, a girl who isn’t “too” anything, and in being so is too good for him.

[buy stuff here / here]