One lover relies on the power of specific geography and memory as they invite a lost love back to a broken relationship.

Track: “Please Come Home to Hamngatan”
Album: Ghana (1999)

Hamngatan is a road in Stockholm, Sweden. The name means “Port Street.” I’ve never been to Sweden, but based on the map it seems to be a department store neighborhood near the water in the center of town. Pictures make it look nice and inviting. There’s a TGI Fridays.

It’s a testament to the importance of specificity that the narrator in “Please Come Home to Hamngatan” wants their beloved to come back to this specific street in Sweden. It’s not a neighborhood that could be tied up in cultural consciousness, likely even if you live in Stockholm. It seems like another situation where John Darnielle wants us to realize this is one specific person talking to one other specific person, but doesn’t need us to know what Hamngatan means to them so much as that they are very real to each other and were real in that exact location.

“Please Come Home to Hamngatan” was released in 1996 on a compilation with 23 other songs. On Ghana three years later, John Darnielle describes his characters as “sick” and says “I wish I could do something to help them.” Maybe they’re the Alpha Couple and maybe they’re just two people forcing a broken relationship onwards, but either way they are familiar. They care about each other and about their specific place they lived one day, but given the subject matter of jewel thieves, snake oil salesmen, and adulterers, we can be sure their testimony is unreliable.

What’s most compelling is the street in Stockholm. Imagine a place that you know but couldn’t describe in a way that would explain it to someone else. That’s Hamngatan and that’s this relationship. The narrator wants a lover back despite knowing that going home again either literally or figuratively may not be fulfilling.