Thoroughfare

A nine minute Western, and the album’s last long stretch of open sky. The narrator takes to the road with a stranger, and for a while the song lets her, and us, believe in the freedom of the highway, the borrowed hope of somewhere better ahead.

It is the calm the rest of side two will shatter. Spacious and patient where what follows is claustrophobic, Thoroughfare is the deep breath before the descent, love and distance stretched as far as they will go before they break.