Going To A Town from Release the Stars
Salon: "Going to a Town" has been hailed as among Wainwright's finest songs, on this album or any other. It also sets up perhaps the strongest of this album's thematic fugues in an exploration of the idea of flight before disaster, that great and unspoken post-millennial American fantasy. Wainwright reprises "Leaving for Paris," but not before offering some of the most disturbing lines he has yet sung, in tones so uplifting that you will find yourself bouncing along if you don't really pay attention:
When the rocket ships all fall/ And the bridges they all buckle/ Quietly we'll exit as it all is happening/ Cause there's a river running underground/ Underneath the town towards the sea/ That only I know all about/ On which from this city we can flee
