I grew up on the Indiana side of Chicago | With the rusty steel mills belching in the westward wind | I watched Mom and Dad trying to clean their sorrow | With my brothers and me at old Lake Michigan
There's a little boy | He's got big brown eyes | He's got swimming trunks 'bout twice his size | Looking at a steel mill sunset | Skipping a stone, "hey, ain't you a little young | To feel so alone?"
Well they changed the name of my hometown | When we moved away | Now it's more than words that I don't recognize | That kid down at the filling station | Tried to keep my change from a twenty | I could see that cold a**urance in his eyes
Hey you need ten dollars for the rainy day? | Save and go to college or just get away | Or you could spend that money on a two-day stone | Oh, there are worse things in this world than being alone | Let me tell you now...
So, if you're driving from Chicago, east of Gary | And you find a fallen town that has two names | There'll be no one to possibly remember | A little lonesome brown-eyed boy who went by James
Oh the mill's shut down | But the air's still sour | You get a hotel room | You gotta pay by the hour | Oh the good old days are just good and gone | Like autumn leaves on a burning lawn
I grew up on the Indiana side of Chicago | With the rusty steel mills belching in the westward wind
There's a little boy | He's got big brown eyes | He's got swimming trunks 'bout twice his size | Looking at a steel mill sunset | Skipping a stone, "hey, ain't you a little young | To feel so alone?"
Well they changed the name of my hometown | When we moved away | Now it's more than words that I don't recognize | That kid down at the filling station | Tried to keep my change from a twenty | I could see that cold a**urance in his eyes
Hey you need ten dollars for the rainy day? | Save and go to college or just get away | Or you could spend that money on a two-day stone | Oh, there are worse things in this world than being alone | Let me tell you now...
So, if you're driving from Chicago, east of Gary | And you find a fallen town that has two names | There'll be no one to possibly remember | A little lonesome brown-eyed boy who went by James
Oh the mill's shut down | But the air's still sour | You get a hotel room | You gotta pay by the hour | Oh the good old days are just good and gone | Like autumn leaves on a burning lawn
I grew up on the Indiana side of Chicago | With the rusty steel mills belching in the westward wind