‘Letter to L.A.’ Joe Ely | 1987

TEXAS troubadour Joe Ely grew up staring west to where the train tracks met the horizon, and distant cities promised a life less dusty and flat. As a young man, in 1967, he hopped a freight train in New Mexico that, three days later, brought him to San Bernardino.

He found his way to the ocean just in time for the Summer of Love. “I was broke,” he recalled wistfully, “and sleeping under the pier in Venice.”

Twenty years later, Ely was back in L.A. with a major label deal. The money was nice, but the love was gone. One night he found himself walking the length of Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard. “I suddenly felt so alone.... All the egos in the city were like billboards to me with nothing behind them.” The solitary trek led to “Letter to L.A.,” a musical mash note to a callous town.

Your love is like the city

Only shines at night

Your love has no pity

Baby, baby that’s all ... right

Your vanity is your castle

You’re like a neon sign

And the poor lost souls in your shadows

You forget, they are friends of mine.

“I was having some turmoil in my personal life, so it was about a person but also about a place. It was about love that was only there for one side of the clock, you know, just at night.”

The song has some Tinseltown references, but they sparkle with menace, not glamour. (“Afraid to bare your soul / Like an Alfred Hitchcock lover / Who slowly goes out of control”) and a spirit as lonely as “The Last Picture Show.”

The music is like a half-speed honky-tonk, a pace that “gave it a tougher, city sound,” Ely said. “There’s a lot of room in the song, a lot of air. I had more lyrics, but I left them out.... There was a line about ‘How many lovers have you swept beneath your bed, how many roses have you watered until they were dead?’ ”

Ely’s songbook is usually a mix of roadhouse and border cantina, but in “Letter,” he was in an L.A. twilight. “I never really had another song quite like that one. Talking about it makes me want to play it again.”

-- Geoff Boucher