Midwest Town

Song story & origins

Introduction

Midwest Town was released on Nebraska Catfish (2012), though I wrote it much earlier—around 1990–91—when my wife and I moved back to Nebraska after several years in Texas. I grew up mostly in York, Nebraska (my parents both taught there—Dad at York College, Mom in the public schools). We’d left for Lubbock, Texas during my high school years, then I came back to Nebraska for junior college, returned to Lubbock to finish college, and eventually my wife and I began our teaching careers there. Texas was good to us, but she was raised in Iowa, and I was still a Nebraska kid at heart. In 1990 we went back north, and the tug of home—small-town streets, winter, the sound of semis and geese—set this song in motion. The version people know landed in that jazz-swing pocket on Nebraska Catfish, but the song’s roots go back to those first months of coming home.

Where the song came from

The lines are stitched straight from memory. Winters in York meant the ground stayed covered—that hard, frozen crust that sometimes lasted months. Texas had storms that came and went; Nebraska’s snow settled in and kept you company. The image of brick streets and autumn leaves comes from childhood—running bundled up, leaves scudding along the bricks like a moving carpet, as if I were part of a little migration.

“Take yourself to a small café” is the town’s morning rhythm as I knew it. As a boy my dad sometimes took me downtown to Daylight Donuts before he headed to the college. I didn’t drink coffee yet; I’d order chocolate long johns and watch the farmers—“leather hands and brown toothpicks”—talk the day’s politics over their cups. As a young adult I’d sit in the Big Red Café (Husker signs everywhere), eating greasy eggs and sausage under a sign that actually read this entire establishment is smoking. A different era.

The storm stanza remembers not just flakes on your face but drifts over your neck. We had big blizzards when I was little—digging a tunnel out the front door, wading through snow above my head, hoping school would be canceled for days.

The highway verse is York on the map: US-81 crossing I-80. At night you’d hear the semi whine—a steady drone—while geese moved overhead. Sometimes you could see their big V’s by day; what felt magical was when a cloud deck hid them and you could only hear them, the sky singing though it looked empty. That’s where “night-blind sky” came from.

Then the song turns to safety: tucked away off the interstate, side streets up through neighborhoods to a little house. They’ll never find you there. As a kid I could walk at 3 a.m. in that town and meet no one and not be afraid. I know not everyone’s small-town experience is like that, but mine was steeped in that sense of shelter.

There’s a lyric change between my earliest notes and the 2012 version that reflects my own shift: what began as “you can go to church without your head held down” became “people go to church…”—a small move from first person to observation. By then I was still a believer in God and the spiritual life, but more ambivalent about organized religion. The second line—raising kids with their feet on the ground—was always true to the place: dirt roads, cornfields, raccoons in the garbage, dirt bikes on trails, summers working the fields. The creek verse remembers how prairie creeks either flooded in spring or grew still and a little rank in the heat—very different from where I live now on Spearfish Creek, always clear and running.

The last images are love stories: a porch swing, a kiss, and the fact that I met my wife in York, fell in love there, left and then returned with a young family. “Found my love in Nebraska” isn’t metaphor; it’s biography.

What the song is saying

It’s a celebration of a small town, but not a blind one. I know the pitfalls: everyone in your business, living in a bubble, a universe too small. The song holds both truths: a safe place to spring from, and the need not to stay small. It’s an invitation to love where you come from and still roam wide—knowing the things that made you sturdy: winter, work, neighbors, the steady hum of the interstate a few miles south and the wild music of geese somewhere overhead.

Music and arrangement

The 2012 album version leans into jazz swing: stand-up bass sets the pocket; acoustic guitar and piano carry the body; occasional brass slips in; the vocal phrasing nods to swing stylings. That album was my deliberate turn toward a jazzier palette, and this arrangement fit.

But the song wandered through earlier skins:

In 2004 I cut a rock arrangement aimed at a kind of John Mellencamp energy—acoustic plus electric guitars, harmonica, straight-ahead backbeat. It didn’t make Circuitous because it didn’t live well with the other tracks, but the attitude was right for the theme.

And before that, in the mid-90s (’93–’95), I did a singer-songwriter take on a Tascam 4-track cassette: acoustic guitar, slide acoustic, mandolin, lead and harmony vocals. With only four tracks I had to ping-pong—mix a few parts to a single track to free up space, losing fidelity each bounce. Still, there’s something immediate in that version that I love: the bones of the song without adornment.

The 2004 rock demo was tracked on a Roland 4-track digital recorder—also a ping-pong puzzle, just cleaner than cassette. The 2012 release was done on the Mac, in GarageBand. Somewhere in there I can hear a second influence besides Mellencamp: Dream Academy’s “Life in a Northern Town.” The strings and atmosphere in that hit stirred nostalgia in me back in Texas, and I hear myself nodding to that feeling in the 2004 arrangement—my own “northern town” memory recast as a Midwest one.

Only the 2012 swing cut was released; the other two remained unreleased sketches. But they tell the story of how the song evolved and how my tools—and ears—changed.

Why it stays with me

Because it’s true. It’s true to the feel of York, to the weight of winter, to semis and geese, to donuts and brick streets, to porch-swing kisses, to leaving and coming home and leaving again. It names the gifts of a small town without pretending away its limits. And it remembers that I found my love in Nebraska, which is the kind of line that keeps a song alive long after the studio is quiet.

Source: New Music Memoir (1).docx