Tom McGreevy, in Stereogum :

“We had been in Blackpool, which is the town my family’s from in the northwest of England, and we’d gone to the seaside on a grey, typical kind of Blackpool day. That song was pieced together on that tour, and the language of it was based on these things you’re immersed in in the UK. A “Cathedral city” is a historic designation of a type of town — a place that’s big enough to have a cathedral. I started it on the way to Oxford and finished it in Southampton, which is a port town.”