“Boston" by Augustana (updated repost), Tuesday, November 7, 2023
Nothing beats the foliage in the American Northeast. However, being the first week of November, the colors peaked a few weeks ago, and now the trees are looking bare. When I was young, growing up in Central New York, when the leaves came off the trees, it meant a long winter was on the way. One year we got snow on Halloween which lasted until April. New England is romanticized in America, from movies to books to magazines and even a few songs.
BOSTON, WHERE NO ONE KNOWS MY NAME. In Season One of The Big Bang Theory, Leonard is moping after his love interest, Penny, starts seeing another man. He comes into the apartment singing Augustana's "Boston," quite horribly. "Boston" is Augustana's signature song. It placed on the Billboard Hot 100, it was a Top 40 hit, and a top 10 Adult (light rock) hit. The band formed at Greenville University, a conservative Christian college where Jars of Clay formed before them and Paper Route after them. While the two other bands were comfortable with the Christian circuit, Augustana's lead singer, Dan Layus, talks about breaking free from the strict rules of Christian college and choosing not to be a Christian band. "Boston" is not only a breakup with a lover, but a place too. If you've never moved to a city where no one knows you, it's freeing. You possess the ability to rebuild your reputation and become whomever you want to be. I've done this several times in my life, sometimes by choice and sometimes out of circumstance. When my family moved to North Carolina in 1998, my parents only knew one family there. They ended up moving a year later. My mom was tired of the New York weather and she wanted to be closer to her family in Florida. So we moved between the two sides of my family. Then there was high school. My parents wanted my sister and I to go to a Christian school, but they chose one outside of our denomination because it was much cheaper. Then it was time for college. I decided to go to a Seventh-day Adventist university in Tennessee where I only had a few acquaintances. And then there was Korea. But in all of this moving to a city where no one knows my name, I was still stuck in the rut of the person I thought I should be.
I'LL GET OUT OF CALIFORNIA, I'M TIRED OF THE WEATHER. No one ever moves to the Northeast because they are tired of Southern California weather. Tyson Motsenbocker talks about his Southern California life as a place "where the seasons never change." My family moved away from it. In music and literature, California often symbolizes the land of Canaan for humanity. Going to California means you've made it or are closer to making it. You have shed off the Puritan ways of the East Coast. Yet this song shows and interesting regression, as if to says, I've had all of the new and it's left me empty. I'm going back to enjoy the tradition of a city that used bricks and cobblestone rather than asphalt. This image is especially strong today because, as the new school year has started, new students always ask where I'm from. I have to educate them about American geography. Before I tell my students where I am from, I ask if any students have been to America and where they visited. From there, I'm able to compare what places look like. Certainly the feeling of Boston is a stark contrast from California. LA feels different from San Francisco. Florida is different from North Carolina. Place matters, and if you have a choice, it's important to find the right city for you.
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