From the album Big Flower Light Go Boom
This is about someone who keeps running from what they know they shouldn't turn back to see, but they keep looking anyway. The Biblical reference isn't decoration. Lot's wife looked back at Sodom and turned to salt, and Jamison is naming the compulsion to revisit what destroys you, the way trauma or nostalgia or regret makes you freeze mid-escape.
Drive down the west coast (I will) / To San Francisco (I will) / Look over your shoulder (I will) / You're a pillar of salt
The parenthetical 'I will' functions like a mantra or a promise made to himself. But the promise isn't 'I won't look back.' It's the opposite. He's announcing he will do the thing that turns you into salt.
Well I mean nothing by it no / But we're a snowy island / Over which ten suns are shining
The image is physically impossible. Ten suns would scorch anything, but he calls it snowy. This is what being with someone feels like when the relationship generates its own weather that makes no sense from the outside.
And all the conversations I had / With my confidantes in the Sprinter van / Talking 'bout the Moloch of America
Moloch is the Old Testament demon of child sacrifice, later used by Allen Ginsberg to mean capitalism's appetite for human souls. Jamison drops it casually, like tour-van intellectual talk, but it reframes the whole song. America itself might be Sodom, the thing you're supposed to escape but can't stop turning toward.
(I will) / (I will) / (I will) / (I will)
The vow repeats without any action attached. Just the willingness, stripped of destination. He's not promising to go somewhere anymore. He's promising to keep doing the thing that freezes him.
The song never resolves whether he's talking to a lover or to himself or to the country. That might be the point. The pillar of salt is anyone who looked back when they were supposed to keep moving, and Jamison keeps doing it anyway, because the alternative is never turning around at all.