Center City 1

Center City 1 was written and recorded by me at my apartment at 23rd and Arch in Center City Philadelphia in 2010. Center City 1, also, was written in late 2010 out of the pronounced sense that the euphoria of Aughts Philadelphia and Neo-Romanticism, the dream-like trance it engendered, had dissipated into the mist of the Great Recession. Thus, the playpen that Center City had been for me and my cronies was not there any more, and had become a place of privations and deficits. The characters in the song have something in common with Springsteen characters— youth, desperation, willingness to stand up against authority— but they are more involved in the arts and in “hipster-ism” in general, including deals and dealing. As of 2015, are there any real hipsters left in America, like Sara? When the dream ended in Philadelphia as of around 2009— and it did end, very specifically, for many of us, in the summer of 2009— we all had to crawl our way towards whatever new life we could establish for ourselves. It is no surprise that the sound of this “crawl” in the Recession’s crawlspace is a plaintive one— here, just me and a guitar.