Songfacts®:

• This dustbowl blues melodrama is named after the town in California where American author John Steinbeck lived and, according to the lyric, "where the women go forever." Marling told NME she wrote the song after picking up Steinbeck's retelling of the Arthurian legend, The Acts Of King Arthur And His Noble Knights. She said: "I didn't read the book because it was boring. But there was a forward written by his second wife… and the way his wife was wrote was kind of like hero worship. It was the weirdest thing, saying how he used to sit in his room and write for hours and hours and hours and she'd just bring him tea. And it was like, 'I don't know if he sounds like that nice a dude."
• The song's refrain of "I am from Salinas, where the women go forever" is an indirect reference to a friend of Marling's girlfriend who died when their baby was just a year old. "She was an amazing woman," said Marling, "this tall, beautiful woman. And it has no relevance to the song really, but when I was writing it I was thinking about this idea of the heroic mother."