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Nowadays, the chief source of angst in Portland is the sense that the city is changing too quickly. Don’t ever let anyone tell you the weather is all there is to care about. Written by a band that immigrated down the I-5 from Olympia, Wash., the mountain-sized riff that accompanies Corin Tucker’s breathless verses is charged by the ecstatic possibility that awaits on the other side of the Columbia—in the diners and bookstores, the strip joints and punk clubs and, of course, that great “dirty river.” Coming in the middle of One Beat, an album thoroughly coated in the ash of 9/11, the song positions Portland as a beacon of hope for anyone still wanting to live wild and free in America. Using the true tale of a coyote that once tried bumming a ride on the MAX as an entry point, “Light-Rail Coyote” mythologizes Portland as a millennial frontierland, where nature and urbanity are practically indistinguishable from one another.

Oh, sure, they say there are “no cities to love” now, but back in 2002, the ladies of Sleater-Kinney seemed awfully infatuated with at least one. In the final lyric-"When they clean the streets I'll only be the only shit that's left behind"-Smith betrays what "Rose Parade" is actually about: the feeling that, maybe, there's no place you actually belong. But we shouldn't take his disillusionment personally.

Indeed, it's something like a Dear John letter to the city: After the success of Either/Or, he'd move to New York, then Los Angeles, where he ended his life in 2003. In interviews, Smith described the song as being about the facade of self-congratulation, and the line "everyone's interest is stronger than mine" is often read as a sick anti-Portland burn. The marching band is ridiculous, and the trumpet player sucks so bad he must be drunk. He gets pelted by candy disguised as money, and trips over a dog. Everyone is shouting and jockeying for view. In "Rose Parade," Smith gets dragged down to one of the town's most popular civic traditions, and it sounds like he'd much rather be at the drug houses, or anywhere else. When Elliott Smith wrote about Portland, it was often with an eye toward those corners of the city most would be content never knowing existed: the drug dens along Southeast Powell, the cracked streets of Alameda, the sad fairgrounds out past Condor Avenue.