Mink Coat At The Bus Stop

Album: The Evening Of My Best Day (2003)
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Songfacts®:

  • When Rickie Lee Jones would take her daughter to school in Los Angeles, they would often see a woman at the bus stop wearing a mink coat despite the warm weather. She would look upward in a fixed gaze - it was clear she had nowhere to go.

    Meanwhile, folks with expensive cars were always driving by, and didn't even notice this woman. "You do really start to feel an incredible class division - the people with the cars and not with the cars," Jones said in More Songwriters On Songwriting. "It just made me go, 'Hey, I'm that girl at that bus stop. She's not different than me.' And in the end how can you look and not extend compassion? And expect compassion to be extended to you from everyone you meet?"

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