D.C.’s favorite sons The Dismemberment Plan have reunited and will play a series of highly-anticipated concerts this weekend. To mark the occasion, we’ve asked members of our staff to pick their favorite Dismemberment Plan tune and write a post about it. We’ll have an entry every day for the rest of this week. Today: editor-in-chief Aaron Morrissey on “The City.”

Bring up about the Dismemberment Plan’s “The City,” the penultimate cut from the band’s seminal Emergency & I, and many will likely talk about the song’s emotive finale — 73 seconds in which Travis Morrison finds himself admitting “And all I ever say now is good-bye.” (To wit: the always-verbose Brent DiCrescenzo compared the experience of hearing said climax to what it feels like when “angels are spooning out your stomach with ladles and visions of your distant past are punching you in the face.”) Such fondness is not without reason, mind you: the strains of Morrison hitting a high note while repeating “bye” over the dynamic rhythms of Eric Axelson and Joe Easley is certainly one of the Plan’s most memorable musical passages.

But it’s the previous 194 seconds which truly lend “The City” credibility as one of the foremost documents of modern urban malaise.

Two years after the Plan called it a day, give or take a couple months, I lived in a third-floor walkup in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My days were spent mindlessly plugging away at hauling palettes of insanely overpriced textbooks around the dank cement basement of the university bookstore. It was a rather banal life. Minimum wage. Cardboard and ketchup pizza from the terrible joint around the corner: a treat! After work, there was perhaps an Iron City to be sipped on an acquaintance’s couch, more likely than not part of a sixer purchased from the place down the street where all the old-timers — long laid-off from the plants which once ubiquitously dotted the city’s riversides — ritually drank their Imperial whiskey and waxed about the Stillers, ad nauseum.

Perhaps it was appropriate that this was the point, approximately six years after it’s release, that Emergency & I finally appeared on my radar. (Also: cliche. But true!)