My mother nearly fell down laughing the first time she heard Little Boxes, and rushed me over to hear it. We'd just come back to Ireland after living in America, and the description of the Hitler-Youth-like 'little boxes' marching across the hillsides of Los Angeles in lockstep, made of cheap, nasty materials with people inside living identical lives seemed very funny, back in Dublin with its mix of Georgian houses, 3-bed semis, Queen Anne 'fisherman's cottages' by the sea, Corporation houses generally lacking in style but built with materials and workmanship so superb that it enraged private sector builders - well…

It's a song about privilege - the doctors and lawyers and business executives - and about how people are fooled by that privilege into accepting an inferior life. It's funny, but it's wise.