Why this tune?
This week I’m revisiting a song I wrote in 2011 as part of Jason Mendelson’s MetroSongs project, and ambitious collection of songs inspired by the stations of the Washington, DC Metro subway system. Jason produced eight albums between 2011 and 2017 documenting our public transit system with songs in a wide variety of styles. Along the way he worked with many area musicians, and we performed several shows in the 2010s drawing on that Metro corpus. “Cleveland Park” was released on Volume 3 in 2012.
For “Cleveland Park,” a leafy, affluent neighborhood in Northwest DC, I wrote a wistful song building on the neighborhood’s reputation for nostalgia for the past and resistance to change. The melody for the chorus came first, and the lyrics started with the refrain “We still remember Grover,” the US President who gave the neighborhood its name.
The original lyrics ended with a mention of the Uptown movie theater and its one large screen. Sadly, the Uptown closed during the pandemic era, giving me an excuse to revisit the song and re-evaluate the rest of the lyrics as well. I found a few other areas to polish for this new recording.
Tunes On Tuesday Reel
Check it out!
Complete track
Original recording
Oren Levine, jazz pianist and songwriter 