The album title is a line taken from the opening lines of the song "Stuck Between Stations" ("There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right/Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together"), which in turn refers to a quote from American novelist and poet Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel On the Road and its narrator, Sal Paradise.
The first song "Stuck Between Stations" by The Hold Steady on the album Boys and Girls in America starts with the lyric, "There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right / Boys and Girls in America, they have such a sad time together."
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The English band The Crookes wrote a song called Sal Paradise, which appears in their second album "Hold Fast" (2012).
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Sal Paradise was also the name of an indie rock band on Tooth & Nail Records in the mid 1990s, and he is mentioned in a song, "The Story of the Blues (part 2)", by singer-songwriter Pete Wylie, who quotes, "The city intellectuals of the world are divorced from the folk-bodied blood of the land and are just rootless fools." (In fact the quotation is from another of Kerouac's characters, Jack Duluoz - also based on Kerouac himself - in his 1968 novel Vanity of Duluoz).
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Salvatore “Sal” Paradise is the narrator and the protagonist in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road.
Paradise Lost | Paradise | Paradise, Nevada | Sal Rei | Sal, Cape Verde | Paradise Kiss | Paradise Valley, Arizona | Paradise Valley | Children of Paradise | Sal | Surfers Paradise | Paradise Beach | Burnout Paradise | Asian Paradise Flycatcher | Sal. Oppenheim | Club Paradise | Welcome to Paradise | Stranger Than Paradise | Sal Salvador | Sal Paradise | Sal Mineo | Paradise, Pennsylvania | Adventures in Paradise (TV series) | Adventures in Paradise | Two Tickets to Paradise | Surfers Paradise, Queensland | Surfers Paradise Meter Maids | Sal Pace | Sal Esquivel | Sal Abbatiello |
Doctor Sax appeared in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier by Alan Moore in a story written by Sal Paradise (from Kerouac's On the Road).
Jack Kerouac, in On the Road, has his protagonist-narrator Sal Paradise compare Dean Moriarity and his second wife Camille to Min and Bill.