Song of the Day 11/21: John Wesley Harding, “There’s A Starbucks (Where The Starbucks Used To Be)”

If John Wesley Harding were as popular with the public as he is with other musicians, he’d be a household name. Or would Wesley Stace be a household name? The former JWH now records under his real name, the one under which he teaches university classes and published four critically acclaimed novels.

Whatever name he uses, there’s no questioning the esteem in which he’s held by the music community. When he records an album he gets the help of a Who’s Who of backing musicians — the Jayhawks, the Decembrists, Roseanne Cash and Peter Buck among them. During the Covid lockdown some of his fans made a list of artists they’d like to hear cover various JWH songs, so Stace contacted the suggested singers — people like Graham Parker, Tanya Donelly, Ryan Miller and Josh Ritter — and compiled a charity album, “The Good Lyre,” from the results.

This song appeared on his 2011 album, “The Sound of His Own Voice,” with the Decembrists as his band. Lots of artists have written songs about the way the past is constantly bulldozed in the name of progress, but they’re usually emotional laments that lay on the sentiment rather thickly. Harding instead tackled the subject with his usual sly humor:

I miss the old Starbucks
Though the new one’s just the same
It’s got coffee and CDs
It’s got the same name
In fact, I wouldn’t’ve even noticed
If you hadn’t told me
There’s a Starbucks where the Starbucks used to be

Yet the critique is still pointed. Americans might not recognize the line from the first verse about “apartments on the pitch at Highbury” as a reference to the Arsenal football team selling its historic playing field, but they surely recognize the mom and pop shop owners who were driven into penury by a chain store.

The video has its own charms, as Harding plays his guitar outside a series of New York City Starbucks locations (the one outside Brooklyn’s Borough Hall subway station is easy to identify).

For more evidence of how highly other artists regard him, here he is singing a duet of Bruce Springsteen’s “Wreck on the Highway” with Springsteen himself during a course Stace taught at Farleigh Dickinson University.