I’m a few weeks into life in New York where I said I’d never live. While I’m amazed at how much I like it, there are undoubtedly things about it that I struggle to accept. First and foremost is the limited access to the natural world. As a demonstration of this struggle, I’ll confide that I am in fact writing this not from New York, but from New Hampshire, which is forested just about the right amount by my estimation. Outside there are stars. In the field there are critters. In the woods there are bears. Et Cetera. Being as-of-yet unsettled, and bouncing back and forth from one planet to another for the past few weeks, I have had an opportunity to reflect on what a place like New York has to offer somebody like me, who can’t imagine life without trees. To begin with, there are a ton of trees in New York, and not just in parks. They line streets and avenues, and they adorn rooftops and patios, but my favorite ones are the trees that subversively push their way up through cracks in the sidewalks. They don’t last long, because they aren’t part of the plan, but they are an assertion of life’s power. Still being rather unsatisfied by the flora of my new city, I began to ponder: there aren’t enough trees, so what does a city have a lot of? The answer is of course people. People are like trees in so many ways. They are perplexing and captivating natural objects, and they too are subversively unpredictable. This song is about life in the city, by which I don’t mean living in a city. I mean the phenomenon of life and its true abundance in the city. Us country folk can be pretty pretentious to believe that we have a monopoly on nature. It just isn’t the case.