In the 1980s, artists like John Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen sang swelling anthems about working people, family farms and factory towns. But heartland rock is also deeply political — and often misunderstood.

Guests

Erin Osmon, music journalist. Author of the new book “Won’t Back Down: Heartland Rock and the Fight for America.”

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

Part I     

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: In 1983, John Mellencamp released his seventh studio album and in it, the legendary anthem Pink Houses.

(PINK HOUSES PLAYS)

CHAKRABARTI: For anyone who was around in the ’80s, I bet you’re already singing along. It’s basically impossible not to, or at least I think so. John Mellencamp is from Indiana, and the song was inspired by a scene he witnessed on his way from Indianapolis, and he even recorded it in a farmhouse in Brownstown, Indiana.

So Pink Houses is a song very much rooted in a specific place, but it spoke to all of America, and it was played all across America. Its Billboard charting popularity and wide radio play meant that we were all singing ‘Ain’t That America,’ even if we didn’t pay close enough attention to what Mellencamp was trying to say.

And there’s winners and there’s losers

But they ain’t no big deal

‘Cause the simple man, baby, pays the thrills

The bills, the pills that kill

CHAKRABARTI: Mellencamp is one of the mainstays of heartland rock, a defining genre of the ’80s. But the heartland wasn’t a specific physical region of the United States. It ranged from New Jersey and Bruce Springsteen to California, where Tom Petty road tripped it out to LA in 1974. The heartland was a state of mind.

Songs about the paycheck to paycheck struggles of most people in this country, because ain’t that America? And that’s the focus of music journalist Erin Osmon’s new book. It’s called Won’t Back Down Heartland Rock and the Fight For America. Erin, welcome to On Point.

ERIN OSMON: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: And I should note that you’re joining us from another great American musical city, from Nashville today.

How much do you still love Pink Houses?

OSMON: I love this song. I grew up in Southern Indiana, about two hours south of where John Mellencamp lives, and so it feels like it raised me. I’m a child of the ’80s and heartland rock was everywhere around me all of the time.

CHAKRABARTI: So actually tell me more then about that growing up in Indiana, how much of what Mellencamp’s specifically sang about was literally around you or a part of your life?

OSMON: That’s a great question. Yes. To me, John Mellencamp’s songs are paintings of my childhood. The fields, the people, the farmers, the scenes, even, the freeways running through people’s front yards because of the practice of redlining. I saw all of that growing up in Evansville, Indiana.

And Bloomington, where Mellencamp lived was a cultural center, and so I went there, to go to college, to take in concerts, and yeah, his home was my home.

CHAKRABARTI: The other thing, we’ll talk about the other great musical artists in your book in a second, but as I binged Mellencamp over the past couple of days, it sounded to me like he was singing about life today, right?

There’s a timelessness, not much in America has actually changed. That last verse that we heard from Pink Houses when he talks about winners and losers, and some people basically numb their pain with the pills that kill, I just thought, “How did he … ” It’s like he knew that the opioid crisis was coming.

OSMON: It’s so interesting that you say that. The last time I interviewed Mellencamp, he actually pointed that out to me. He couldn’t have known what would happen today, but it’s as if he predicted it in that song. And his advocacy for working people and the paycheck to paycheck struggle that you mentioned just resonated so deeply with him, and he had such an empathy for it that I think he was able to predict some of this stuff.

But yeah, the pills that kill, that’s such a chilling observation.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, it’s amazing. Okay, so how do you define what heartland rock is?

OSMON: Yeah, I am a daughter of the Midwest. But when I look at the heartland rock movement, I mapped the Heartland as an ideological geography, and it’s for the reasons you stated.

By most metrics, Bruce Springsteen is the king of this movement, and he was born and raised in New Jersey and still lives there. So really the heartland in this music is anywhere and any people who pump the proverbial blood of America, and that’s farm workers in the California Central Valley, and it’s folks working in factories in Pittsburgh.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So speaking of California, let’s turn to Tom Petty, and this is I Won’t Back Down.

(I WON’T BACK DOWN PLAYS)

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, man, Erin I’m definitely a Gen X-er and child of the ’80s, ’cause I find myself foot stomping to all of these songs. So Tom Petty, to me, actually at first wouldn’t have considered him heartland rock. So tell me a little bit more about why you include him in this genre.

OSMON: Yeah, Tom Petty certainly has an individual sound, but I think his messaging is congruent with the sentiment of heartland rock. American Girl, give me a break. He’s always talking, Even the Losers, he’s talking about the people who are overlooked, underestimated, and seeking a better life for themselves, wanting more than what they were born into.

And he certainly lived that story as well. He comes from a shaky background in Florida and went to LA and made it in the music industry by his own design and by his own hand and vision. And so I think on a lot of levels, he represents the people and places that heartland rock was advocating on behalf of.

CHAKRABARTI: Can you tell me a little bit about why you think this genre became so popular in the late ’70s and and the 1980s? Because these names that we’re talking about Springsteen, Mellencamp, Tom Petty, Bob Seger you call them the Mount Rushmore of heartland rock. But what was going on at that time that made these songs so wildly popular?

OSMON: It’s really fascinating, because these songs come in the wake of some of the kind of bombast and individualism of the 1970s. And really, these are simple rock songs rooted in the sounds of the 1950s and ’60s, calling for sort of a collective action in America.

And, by design, these are songs that are easy to take in, you know, easy to stomp your foot along to. The choruses are anthemic. The drums are booming. In the case of Mellencamp, he has that shotgun snare sound that really gets your attention. The guitar riffs are really sticky in that they stick in your ear. And so this is pop music. It’s rock music, but it’s also pop music in the sense that it’s easy to digest.

And then the messaging was so powerful, but it’s also, in some cases, feels a little vague if you’re not listening too closely. And so you can get in your feelings about these choruses without really understanding what they’re saying.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so I think we have a really great example of that.

By the way, Won’t Back Down was from 1989, and let’s move a little further back in time. This is 1980, Against the Wind, Bob Seger.

And the secrets that we shared

Mountains that we moved

Caught like a wildfire out of control

‘Til there was nothin’ left to burn and nothin’ left to prove

CHAKRABARTI: We’ll talk about Bob Seger when we come back because what I wanna do is give enough time for us to hear American Girl, which Erin Osman mentioned just a couple of minutes ago. Erin is author of the book Won’t Back Down: Heartland Rock and the Fight for America.

And here once again is Tom Petty. This is 1977 and American Girl.

(AMERICAN GIRL PLAYS)

(WORKING ON THE HIGHWAY PLAYS)

CHAKRABARTI: Boss, of course, Bruce Springsteen. That’s from 1984’s Working on the Highway. And Erin, I think we probably should spend a couple of minutes talking about how central Bruce Springsteen is to the concept of heartland rock. And this song in particular, what I love about it is the physicality of it.

It’s the New Jersey version of what John Mellencamp sings about farm life in so many of his songs. Yes, Bruce was really a great advocate for folks who worked in factories, folks who worked hard, manual labor. That’s a theme that comes up in his music time and time again, and of course, Born in the USA advocates on behalf of U.S. soldiers as well.

CHAKRABARTI: So but let’s talk more about that because in thinking of a song like Working on the Highway or Born in the USA, Springsteen is actually pretty overt in what he’s trying to say. But then when we were listening a little bit earlier, for example, to Against the Wind from Bob Seger, at least that little portion that we played, I feel like the messaging is kind of more subtle, right?

If you were just listening to it driving around in your car in 1980, you could, for Against the Wind, you could be singing to it and kind of miss what he was trying to say, right?

OSMON: Yeah, it is a subtle message, and I think it’s a message that a lot of people can project their own ideas and own struggles onto, and I think that’s intentional in its design to a degree.

And Bob has said that song was inspired by his high school days when he ran track running against the wind. So yeah, I think that’s part of the greatness of heartland rock, and also maybe part of the problem of heartland rock is sometimes it was gentle in its messaging and so nostalgic that people could miss the left-wing progressive populism that was threaded throughout all of it.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. So let’s talk more about that because you had started mentioning it earlier that it’s coming out of a particular time, right? And would you say that heartland rock kind of directly emerges from, let’s say, I don’t know, the Vietnam War and stagflation of the late ’70s? Or is it more a response to, I don’t know, Reaganomics in the early 1980s?

OSMON: I believe it is all of that. I, in the book, kind of attribute heartland rock’s big bang to Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run. That’s the moment where songs about regular people just trying to make it or live the American dream kind of exploded. And in the late ’70s, we see Bob Seger starting to write songs about his home area, and then Petty burbles up and at first, he was contextualized as new wave but later accepted as something else.

And then we get Mellencamp later. So really this is growing in the late ’70s, and then it exploded in the ’80s because as you and I both know, the ’80s was a decade of rapid social, economic, political change, and it was a really hard time for working people, particularly factory workers in Detroit, farmers across the heartland.

And so a lot of this music and messaging, and also the festivals that were forming and a lot of the benefits and things like No Nukes, this was all as a reaction to and to advocate on behalf of these things that were happening in America.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay, so you mentioned about farming, and that takes us right back to Mellencamp because in the video for Rain on the Scarecrow from 1985, he actually starts the video with this incredible clip of hog farmers who could basically be talking about the struggles of farmers today in 2026, but this is from 1985.

So let’s hear that video intro and then a bit of the song.

(VIDEO INTRO PLAYS)

All the government wants to talk about, they want to keep giving more loans and more loans. That’s all, seems like that’s all they’ve got in their head.

We don’t need another loan. We need a good price. Just another farm loan, that’s just another payment we gotta make and we can’t afford to do that.

I think the politicians are playing games with us, it don’t cost them anything to change a rule, and embargo another country.

All they want is cheap food, which I can see that, but they don’t take the farmer into consideration at all.

Just sick of working 10 or 12 hours a day or more and just breaking even if you’re lucky, if you’re real good.

If I had to start all over, if I knew what it was gonna be like when I got out of high school, I probably wouldn’t have done it.  

(RAIN ON THE SCARECROW PLAYS)

CHAKRABARTI: These musicians were oracles in terms of what America was then and what it would still continue to be. Because to hear those hog farmers in the video say, “Politicians are playing games with us,” and that it doesn’t cost them anything to change a rule and embargo another country, I was just like, how is this even possible that we’re literally still living that truth, Erin?

OSMON: It’s so remarkable that John Mellencamp, this is at the height of his fame. He was all over MTV, all over radio stations and record stores, and he puts hog farmers in his new music video. And it’s touching to me because he amplifies how intelligent these people are, and how much they’re hurting.

And these are folks that were being underestimated, and were subject to predatory loans.

CHAKRABARTI: In the back of my mind, I’ve been rolling around this thought that music as a form of human expression, there has always been a genre or multiple genres in every generation of music that was essentially singing about struggle, right?

And the difficulties of the lives of most people. And you could name a genre and it has it. But in the ’70s, I was thinking maybe punk was really, in a sense, angrily talking about especially political injustices. But the difference here, and you just said it, Erin, was that Mellencamp, Springsteen, all these guys had a profound empathy for the people they were singing about.

It wasn’t so much angry as it was loving and saying, “Just take a look, honest look at us, at who we are as people.”

OSMON: Yeah, and the really remarkable thing about each of these artists, and it goes beyond the Core Four as well, is when most of these artists began writing the scenes and the people from their own backyard, is when they really found their artistic center and their voice, and they exploded as kind of pop icons.

And I think that could have only happened in the ’80s perhaps, for a lot of different reasons. But it’s so remarkable. And yes, their empathy is on full display. But also, again, back to Born in the USA, the song, that is also a song of righteous anger.

CHAKRABARTI: Yes, absolutely, which so many people sang without really listening to what Bruce Springsteen was talking about.

But by this time in the show, I’m sure a lot of people are like, “You’re only talking about guys. You’re only talking about men.” But in the book, you have a much broader conception of who the greats in heartland rock were and are, so let’s turn to two of the most profound women in this genre that you write about.

This is Bonnie Raitt, 1982, Me and the Boys.

(ME AND THE BOYS PLAYS)

CHAKRABARTI: Tell me a little bit about how Bonnie Raitt figures into the bigger story of heartland rock era.

OSMON: I view Bonnie as both a progenitor of heartland rock and also a key figure within the movement. She’s both of those things, and there are several people like her that were re-energized in the ’80s by heartland rock.

But she is so important because, A, she was influential over the men who became the Mount Rushmore of the sound. … She sang on Bob Seger’s record. She played the first Farm Aid with John Mellencamp’s band. They all admired her. She was a shredder, to be sure. She was one of the best singers in the genre, and she was also a great cipher for songs.

So if Bonnie Raitt covered your song, you knew your song was good. Like a lot of women in music, she has been overlooked. But I wanted to reframe her and actually put her on the cover of the book because of that. Yeah. I would say that she, I wouldn’t have thought of her as a heartland rocker because I think of her so much more in terms of, tell me if I’m wrong, but blues. Really because of her guitar-playing ability and her family history. But hearing you describe it, it makes so much sense. Now, here’s another one which maybe people are gonna be like, “Huh?” Even though it is an absolutely iconic song. This is Tracy Chapman from 1988 with Fast Car.

(FAST CAR PLAYS)

CHAKRABARTI: Erin, talk about this song and talk about Tracy. The drums alone in that song make it a heartland rock song to me.

OSMON: But Fast Car is one of the greatest working-class anthems ever produced in America. And so many critics and music writers at the time, like the only analog they could summon for Tracy was other Black women.

Joan Armatrading and that’s just a deficit of the perspective at the time. But when I started mapping heartland rock as a scene and an interconnected movement, which I believe it was, I saw, the merits of Fast Car within the arc. Also, Tracy Chapman was playing shows with Bruce Springsteen regularly throughout the decade. And he was certainly a fan of her.

Another thing, another connection I try to make in the book is how heartland rock really opened the door for the Americana movement to come, and also how influential it was over contemporary country music. And that was best illustrated when Luke Combs, who’s a massive country star today, covered Fast Car and took it to the top of the country charts. So I think for all of those reasons, Tracy Chapman should be considered part of this.

CHAKRABARTI: Can we talk about the Luke Combs cover here for a second? Because I think I remember him saying that one of the reasons why he wanted to cover it is that he had these very powerful memories of riding around with his dad in his dad’s truck when he was just a kid, and his dad had a cassette tape of Fast Car.

Here we are talking about two white men who found resonance, like a profound emotional resonance in the song of a urban working-class Black woman, and then when Combs covered the song, I just thought it was so terrific that he didn’t change the gender of the narrator in the song.

He still sang it with, from the point of view of Tracy Chapman’s original woman in the song.

OSMON: Absolutely and the best ones do that. John Prine did that in a lot of his music too. And what I love about the Combs cover as well is not only the visibility that it gave the song to a contemporary audience, but also that he worked with Tracy hand-in-hand to make sure she was okay with what he was doing, and then they performed it together at the Grammys.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, exactly, to a standing ovation. That’s right.  Okay. So why, though, do you think these songs were able to get so much radio play? That’s the thing that I wonder, because when we listen deeply to heartland rock, it’s presenting this tough message to everyone.

It’s not exactly the kind of stuff that makes you think, “Oh, this is fun. I’m gonna turn it on during a party,” and yet we all did. Why did they, why were they so commercially Successful?

OSMON: It’s funny. Today I feel like we live in such a black and white world, but in the ’80s many things could be true at the same time.

So the interesting thing about heartland rock is it was a product of the music industry machine, right? These artists worked with the most popular and perfectionist-minded producers … and their brief from the record company was to sell records. And so that’s how these songs were constructed, was to make them earworms so they could get on the radio.

CHAKRABARTI: I think we’re hearing exactly that with these iconic chords from Tom Petty’s Free Fallin’, 1989.

(FREE FALLIN’ PLAYS)

We’re gonna head into the break with that song. We’re talking with Erin Osmon, and we’re talking about heartland rock.

(SMALL TOWN PLAYS)

CHAKRABARTI: John Mellencamp again, Small Town, 1985. We actually also wanted to play a little bit of what these artists themselves thought about the concept of heartland rock, both as an actual genre, as a commercial force, and as a label. So here is Mellencamp himself. He was asked about the term heartland rock in 1987 in an interview on NBC’s Today Show where he was talking about his album, The Lonesome Jubilee.

You’re called a heartland rocker, Springsteen and Bob Seger. First of all, are you comfortable with that description? What does heartland rocker mean to you?

MELLENCAMP: I don’t know. I wrote a song called Small Town, and since that time, it’s heartland rocker. But the point is, I’ve written hundreds of songs, and so why that one stuck and not necessarily pigeonholed me, but put me in a specific category.

Because, I don’t think that much of The Lonesome Jubilee has anything to do with geographical locations. I think it has to do with heart and soul of people our age and what we experience.

CHAKRABARTI: Erin Osman, respond to that. What do you think about what he said?

OSMAN: It’s unsurprising to me. He has been the most vocal about the fact that he doesn’t like the term, and I actually wrote that in the book. I think in general, musicians, artists don’t like to be categorized, especially by industry or music writers. So I think most of them would reject the banner, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And I think in the book that you write about how he talked about heartland rock as a term made, created by lazy journalists. Is that right?

OSMON: Yes. He actually said those words to me once as well. And I think it’s fair, because if you zoom in closely, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, John Mellencamp, they don’t really sound alike sonically, right?

Like Springsteen makes this saxophone forward rock music quite frequently. Bob Seger sings at a mid-tempo frequently. That’s his greatest form, is like what he called his mediums. Tom Petty is clearly inspired by The Byrds. There’s a lot of jangle in his guitar sound. And Mellencamp is super minimalist, and he was the first person to turn away from the big, booming rock sound and start incorporating folk instruments, which was the Lonesome Jubilee, as he mentioned.

So yes, if we are zoomed in really closely, there’s a lot of difference and a lot of nuance there, but it’s when we zoom out and we look at this thing thematically and holistically and who was working together and what they were standing for, that’s when it emerges as a movement under the heartland rock banner.

CHAKRABARTI: So let’s go back to a little bit more to the origins of what we’re calling heartland rock because this is usually the point in the show where I know a lot of listeners, when we do music shows, they’re like you didn’t mention this artist,” or, “You didn’t mention this band.” And I’ll get a lot of emails from people.

We can’t talk about them all, folks. I’m really sorry. But when our producer Claire and I were talking about this, Claire also mentioned like what about bands from earlier than the ’80s? Because CCR comes up a lot. And in fact, I think the entire 1970s with so much music that was a direct response to the Vietnam War.

Would you include that in the heartland rock genre?

OSMON: I contextualize a lot of those artists as progenitors, like the thing that inspired heartland rock because the arrangements of the songs and the commercial accessibility and a lot of the production values are quite different.

But certainly, heartland rock would not exist without CCR’s Fortunate Son or Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty. These are songs that helped set the template and inspire the likes of Springsteen and Mellencamp.

CHAKRABARTI: What’s so interesting to me is they’re very much of their time and follow, they follow the story of the United States, right?

Because CCR, for example, singing directly about the Vietnam War. Born in the USA from Springsteen also obviously hearkens back to the war, but it’s about also what happens after which is so interesting to me. But speaking of Springsteen, let’s listen to a little bit from him. This is from 1984, and he was interviewed on MTV, and he talked about growing up in a small New Jersey town and how it was music that expanded his horizons.

And so he said he tried to do that same thing, expanding people’s horizons with the music he makes, too.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN: There’s more to life than what you see around, and that was something that they couldn’t teach me in school. But you couldn’t learn it from people you were hanging with out on the street or anything.

That’s the only thing we try to say, or try to do. It’s really the, it’s the only message really, is don’t sell yourself short.

CHAKRABARTI: Erin, I think this is so important because so far we’ve been talking about heartland rock as something that was sung to educate the rest of the country who wasn’t having that sort of metaphorical heartland experience.

But here, Bruce Springsteen is saying, it’s also for people living that life, saying, “Don’t sell yourself short.”

OSMON: Absolutely. A lot of these songs are about dreamers and strivers and people who are searching for more than what they were given by the place that they were born or the job that they work. It’s not denigrating those areas or those positions, but it’s saying that if you want more, you can have it.

And Tom Petty wrote a lot of those great anthems as well.

CHAKRABARTI: What happened to heartland rock? Because as, you and I are both children of the ’80s and so these songs are just, they’re, like, embedded in my brain forever. But there was a time in which sort of they start, they started going silent on commercial radio.

What happened?

OSMON: Yeah. What happened was the 1990s. Heartland rock is incredibly earnest music, right? And when we get into the ’90s, and especially with the explosion of Nirvana rock and roll turns back into a youth culture. Rock and roll is no longer songs written with adult audiences in mind. It becomes a thing that’s embodying kind of disaffection and this disaffected sort of posture that we see emerge in the ’90s.

And kids didn’t want to hear earnest songs about the promise of America when the new president is taking us into another war. There was a lot of uncertainty in a different kind of way, and yeah, alternative rock became the predominant form on the radio, but that was rooted in counterculture and the underground, in a very different way than heartland rock was.

Heartland rock was very much music of the overground.

CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. I would also make the argument that some of the most powerful social commentary towards the end of the ’80s was coming from hip hop, actually. And hip hop that was capturing, doing the same thing that heartland rock did, but through the experiences of young Black Americans that also somehow really powerfully spoke to listeners of all races in this country.

And here’s a really interesting tie-in to the heartland rock theme that we’re talking about between heartland rock and hip-hop. So first, let’s listen to Bruce Hornsby from 1986, and this is the terrific song, another one which everyone will just start singing to, called The Way It Is.

(THE WAY IT IS PLAYS)

CHAKRABARTI: Gosh, I love that song as much today as I did when I first heard it. But what was interesting is the song was reintroduced or introduced, I should say, to a brand-new audience about 12 years later in 1998 via Tupac with his track Changes.

(CHANGES PLAYS)

CHAKRABARTI: Erin, the sample of The Way It Is in Tupac’s track there, first of all, it’s a testament to the creativity of hip hop. But I’m just wondering what you think about that, that for a lot of people who weren’t of the ’80s, their first introduction to Bruce Hornsby was through hip hop.

OSMON: Yeah, it’s a remarkable thing, and I completely agree with you that as we get into the ’90s, as rock music becomes alternative, in air quotes, hip hop really did pick up the populist messaging of heartland rock. And so there is a great connection there, and I love that you made that observation.

And Bruce Hornsby and also John Mellencamp were the two strongest anti-racist voices within heartland rock. And I think because of that and because of Bruce Hornsby’s artistry and the kind of propelling nature of his songs and his piano playing, he more than any other heartland rock artist was embraced by the hip hop movement.

There have been so many rappers who’ve sampled The Way It Is and have wanted to collaborate with Bruce, and that to me is so interesting and fascinating.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Actually, I have to say that again, as a child of the ’80s, The Way It Is was one of the first times I had heard in popular music a clear storytelling around segregation, right?

Because he sings about a sign saying colored people not allowed to come in, and I just, it really just kind of hit me with full force. Because I’d never heard that discussed in popular culture.

OSMON: Yeah, and Bruce Hornsby has several songs that are that explicit about kind of the inequity baked into America and who benefits from that and who doesn’t.

And that makes him fascinating as well. If you scan his discography, you’ll see these songs that have these very powerful messages.

CHAKRABARTI: Let’s talk about one more artist in this genre. This is Neil Young, and we’re going to Rockin’ in the Free World from 1989.

(ROCKIN’ IN THE FREE WORLD PLAYS)

CHAKRABARTI: Tell me why you think heartland rock is still powerfully relevant in our lives today beyond the obvious affectionate nostalgia that people like you and I have for the music of our youth.

OSMON: Yeah, for better or worse, a lot of the things that these musicians were singing about are still happening today, even right down to political campaigns.

One of the opening quotes in my book is President Reagan saying, “Let’s make America great again,” right? And so we entered kind of the Trump era with under that same banner and under the same problems. And so I think, I don’t know how, but as you said, a lot of these artists were oracles, and their messages ring true.

Another thing that has happened, which is so interesting, is the production values and kind of the sonic aspect of Heartland rock became sort of hip within a lot of indie rock in the new millennium. We have bands like The War on Drugs and The Gaslight Anthem and Titus Andronicus and even heartland or Americana artists like Margo Price and Jason Isbell picking up kind of the instrumental side of the movement.

And so I think between those two things, it’s had a long tail, and I think it will be eternal for those reasons.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.