THERE'S A PLACE YOU MIGHT WANT TO GO

My favorite Halloween carol is Halloween by Dream Syndicate. It stumbles around with murky menace, rather than simply going splat, and is all the better for it.

When I was a kid, we used to go on family car vacations, usually up to New England, and I was strangely comforted whenever I saw a street name that matched one of the streets back home.

It was not as if I thought that one of my familiar home roads had somehow snaked its way 300 miles north—it just had an odd way of making the unfamiliar seem local.

That sensation pretty much sums up how I felt about the first Dream Syndicate album…