What rhymes with ‘parking lot’?

Astronaut rhymes with parking lot. Songwriters (and poets) have problems most of us do not. I have been listening to Reunions, the newest album by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. Only Children is one of Jason’s songs, which you can watch here as a live duet. One verse says that:

“ ‘Heaven’s wasted on the dead,’

 that’s what your mama said

 and the hearse was idling in the parking lot.

She said you thought the world of me

 and you were glad to see

 they finally let me be an astronaut.”

Only Children is discussed in an article from May 15, 2020 at NPR titled Jason Isbell on the past lives that inspired his new album, Reunions. He said:

“The first song that I wrote for the record, the one that really kicked it all off, was a song called ‘Only Children.’ I was over in Greece, me and my wife [the musician Amanda Shires] and a couple of our really close friends, we were over there on vacation. Both of my friends are writers. We were all just sitting around one night on this little villa on the side of a mountain and we were singing and playing and reading the work we were doing for each other.

That song came out of that situation. I started thinking, now that I’m a professional creative person, this doesn’t happen as much as it used to. You’d find yourself in rooms with other creative people just sitting around playing songs for each other. That’s pretty rare once you get older and your hobby becomes your job.

Interviewer: I’m reading the lyrics about living ‘hand to mouth and reel to reel.’ That is written from the perspective of a guy who’s made it to the other side, but as you say, you’re looking back at where you came from?

There was a period in time when everybody around me was desperate in a different way, and you could hear it in what they were doing. And even peopled who didn’t have the gift, or hadn’t done the work to be really good and writing songs or writing whatever, they still had that hunger. And nowadays, surrounded by people who are all making a living doing what they want to do, that hunger is kind of hard to find.”

“Heaven is wasted on the dead” appears on page 33 in  the title story of Steve Stern’s 1995 book Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (that originally appeared in The Greensboro Review in 1985).

On March 16, 2020 I blogged about another song from the Reunions album in a post titled Be afraid, be very afraid. But do it anyway, do it anyway.

An image of a parking lot came from Wikimedia Commons and an image of an astronaut’s suit came from the Library of Congress.