I consider "House on the Median Strip" on of my greatest songs, although I may be alone on that score.

At the time I wrote it, I was stuck in an awful marriage, and one of the things my ex used to beat me over the head with was that we didn't own a house. This was the 90s and real estate bubble was just a boom then and if you didn't own, well...you were a loser.

All of her friends owned houses, but as I looked around, it wasn't like they bought them by saving up. Most were "helped" by their parents with a huge down payment. Neither of our parents were willing to do that for us, and who can blame them? I was a mess. She was a mess, we was a mess.

We were living in suburban Washington, DC at the time and development was running wild. Driving home one night at rush hour speeds of 5 mph on the highway, I thought, "At this rate, they'll be developing townhouses on the little strip of grass between the interstate here...By the time I get money for a house, that'll be all that's left to buy..." And so the seeds of this song were deposited.

This song has a swell spooky lilt to it, kind of Peter Gabriel, perhaps, and some swell plays on words, and inventive faux real estate agent words to describe an impossible living space.

It's a fantasy of our culture of isolation and wealth taken too far, that makes loners even of the family unit. That is, in the middle of the highway, they're on their own.