This one’s been kicking around for a very long time. It’s called “In Listvyanka.” A verse and a chorus have been living, undisturbed, in a songwriting journal from 2002 when I fished it out in 2023. Presumably, it’s about Listvyanka, a town in Irkutsk Oblast in Russia. Carson and I visited there in 2001 on a train/backpacking excursion across the country. We were there in November and it was icy cold. I think the name of the town, Listvyanka, had this cadence to it that suggested a song; I remember singing it to myself long before I’d written it into a notebook.
I dug it up and dusted it off, finishing it out with a few more verses and giving it a little structure. Why did it take me nearly twenty five years to get around to
it? I guess I’d always thought it was a bit of a throwaway, a novelty number, with its goofy, vaguely fifties-sounding wide-wide-wide line in the chorus and its Russian-kitsch references. I kept coming back to it, though, over the years. I figured I might as well finish, give it some kind of send off.
For you, adored paid subscriber, I present “In Listvyanka”:
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