Odes to Westside Atlanta · Track 1 · opener
Westside: The Industrial Reinvention
Opener — Westside Atlanta as the post-industrial reinvention corridor, the way the old Marietta St rail-industrial belt became West Midtown's food + arts + retail spine in the 2010s, the layered identity from rail yards to galleries to bourbon cocktails. Sisukiro hands the corridor its name.
Lyrics
[Verse 1] I remember the quiet here. Not peace, but a held breath. Rust-red dust on every sill. Norfolk Southern cars sleeping on the sidings off Marietta Street. The air thick with creosote and memory, a hundred years of making things that left. Just brick ghosts and broken glass, waiting for a name nobody had spoken yet. [Chorus] And they asked what to call this place, this new skin on an old machine. I said, just Westside. Let the name be clean. Let it hold the rail yard’s groan and the chef’s sharp knife. I’m calling you Westside. I’m giving you this life. [Verse 2] Then a flicker. 1993. A single light in a cavern of brick. Anne Quatrano, Clifford Harrison, a table set where the engines used to tick. They didn’t know they were a beginning. Just a kitchen, a risk, a flame. But the scent of duck fat started to cut through the rain, and you started answering to a different name. [Chorus] And they asked what to call this place, this new skin on an old machine. I said, just Westside. Let the name be clean. Let it hold the rail yard’s groan and the chef’s sharp knife. I’m calling you Westside. I’m giving you this life. [Bridge] Now the goats at the Farm chew on canvas scraps. And the saws that cut plows are silent, replaced by the clatter of forks at Star Provisions. By the ghosts of men who cleared the kudzu, their names un-traced. From a bourbon glass at JCT Kitchen, I watch the warm light spill on the cracked asphalt. You wear it all. The rust and the reservation. The industry and the art. It’s not your fault. [Outro] I’m calling you Westside. Westside. Yeah.