“Anchorage” by Michelle Shocked

"Anchorage" was Michelle Shocked's first single, the song that led off her debut studio album, Short Sharp Shocked, in September 1988 on Mercury. She wrote it alone, and it plays out as an exchange of letters: she finally gets round to writing a pal who has relocated from Texas all the way up to Anchorage, Alaska, and the reply comes back, wondering if she's become a housewife stuck up north for good while still dreaming about a Texas childhood spent with Michelle, who went off to be a musician and a skateboarding punk in New York.

Much of it was lifted from a real letter from her newly married friend JoAnn Kelli Bingham, and her husband, Leroy, chimes in with greetings of his own. It got to 66 on the Hot 100, and it charted in Australia, Canada and the UK too.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.