Providence Is – The Mighty Mighty Bosstones
Tucked away underneath Massachusetts, Rhode Island is often forgotten. The smallest state, featuring few major cultural landmarks (apart from the 90s classic Wings, of course), it’s generally tossed into the generic category of New England and left as good. But I want to stick up for the state. It’s partly personal. My family came from Rhode Island, going all the way back to its founding (a certain Thomas Olney was one of the co-founders of the original colony), and continuing up through to my grandfather who taught at the University of Rhode Island.
I never lived there myself, but family roots run deep. So I scoured deep, trying to find a song to really do justice. Only to ultimately end up right back where I started, with a perfectly nice but fairly inessential track from the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, buried on the 2001 Warped Tour compilation album.
While there’s nothing particularly specific to Rhode Island here – the story of settling down and settling in could apply to virtually any city in the country – it communicates a sense of a city that will never really escape from the shadow of its more famous neighbors. A city in which plenty of lives are being lived, plenty of stories are being told, plenty of dreams are being deferred and plenty of promises being forgotten.