you've got a friend in pennsylvania

"The poem declares her transfer of allegiance from dogma to flesh (“So Christ/I’m giving you the good-bye/firing you tonight”), but the song manifests it, moving from recitation to singing, from the abstract to the concrete, from inwardly directed argument to outwardly directed lust. She transforms Van Morrison’s studiously functional teenage-caveman lyrics—his Gloria stands roughly five foot four, comes around at approximately midnight, and makes the singer feel nonspecifically fine—into a narrative that accrues details (“leaning on the parking meter”) and suspense (“crawling up my stair here she comes”) as it passes through increasingly frantic rhythmic sequences like a car shifting up through its gears, landing on the chorus (“G-L-O-R-I-A“) as if it were the top of a mountain."