The Ballad of Hank Greenspun is a song about the Jewish kid born in 1909 (when "Flatbush was farms") who, after making his fortune and fighting Nazis, moves to a recently-founded Las Vegas and creates a newspaper to sell the idea of a desert pilgrimage to the American public. After "toiling to create the Yankee Mecca" he trades one desert for another, and leaves Vegas to run guns to Palestine via airplane from South America and fight alongside the founders of Israel. "Old Hank Greenspun had a hell of a green thumb - His plans for those lands were the seeds that survived."

Ballad of Hank Greenspun

Revolutions is about the specter of nuclear war and the threat posed to cities by climate change-fueled super storms. The vehicle here is actually several vehicles, as the most advanced nukes boast "buses" of multiple independently targetable re-enty vehicles that launch a dozen or more decoy missiles, assuring the end of civilization. This dread of the atomic revolution is framed against the revolving hurricanes that bring destruction to our cities now. In a nod to Tom Lehrer, Werner Von Braun is name-checked, as the godfather of the Apollo mission to the moon, an "empty cemetery where we planted three-hundred stars."

Revolutions

The vehicle here is television, and the song tells the story of Philo Farnsworth, the Mormon farmer who pioneered the way we view images on cathode ray tubes, but eventually came to regret his invention.

Left To Our Devices

llinois Central closes out the album with the most literal use of the "dissent vehicle" metaphor; boxcars covered in graffiti that journey from northern, urban rail-yards back to the desert referenced in the beginning of the record. The car from Weslaco is referenced again, as well as the trucks that are fueled by Saudi oil, and the tollroads that have replaced railroads. The graffiti covered trains are presented as postcards, but far away on the horizon where the sky and desert heat blur, making the colorful boxcars appear as "postcards on a string in the rain."

Illinois Central Line

This upbeat, loop-based song is entirely composed of excerpts from Dick Cheney's memoir. (Cheney was born in Casper, WY.) The vehicle in this case is electrical current, used both to inflict pain and to send telegrams. (Cheney claims his parents sent a telegram to FDR announcing his birth.) The song repeats Cheney's defense of torture as "safe, legal and effective."

Caspers Ghost

Urbs in Horto is Latin for "City in the Garden," Chicago's motto. The song is loop-based, and also about Chicago's "Loop." It takes inspiration from the water cycle, and Chicago's backwards flowing river that brings sewage to the gulf of Mexico. An ode to the Windy City, this song references light-pollution, the "Tropic of Ashland" avenue, Nelson Algren, as well as the statue of Demeter that stands high above the LaSalle Street canyon. In the third verse, she is called not Demeter but Ceres (starting in Greek and moving to Roman).

Urbs In Horto

Twenty Five Feet tells the story of a fatal 2010 Chicago sailboat accident involving the vessel Joan's Arc. A few close friends decide to go night swimming, and when the vehicle drifts away, they are all alone on Lake Michigan, only twenty-five feet above the bottom of the lake, but still deep enough to drown.

Twenty Five Feet

This song is about a car accident, cassette tapes and memory. Calipers refers not only to an automotive braking system, but also to the tool used to measure the exact size of objects. The song is about the value of individual human life to the larger systems that control us, and the extent to which we choose to forget. "We live to forget these Alamos, that sit on the tip of the tongue when the fear feels close."

Calipers

The album opens with this sentimental road-song, and the vehicle here is a car. "Weslaco" is an acronym for "Western Land Company," a Texas company town near the Mexico border. This song is about re-united lovers on a road-trip, but it also references our inability to properly armor the vehicles our troops drove; an embarrassment laced with the bitter irony that we were using Middle-East oil to fuel our own dangerous civilian SUV's at home. Weslaco is nostalgic and bittersweet; a song about the futility of both war and love, and the inability to escape the ghosts of the past.

Weslaco

Los Angeles actor & singer Alexis Martino + Chicago-based musician & graphic artist Karlis Kandero = an echo-folk duo called Chalk the Gates.

Chalk the Gates

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