On a Pitchfork article on which Katie Crutchfield broke down each song of the album, she said about St. Cloud:

Pitchfork: How did you know the title track belonged at the end?

Just like “Oxbow” was always first, “St. Cloud” was always last. It was a gut instinct. My songwriting jumps around on a spectrum from very literal to very abstract or poetic, and this one is more poetic. It takes more of a macro looking-down-at-the-world perspective, and is not hyper-focused on my own experience.

The first part flashes back to my time in New York. That was the longest time in my life that I’ve truly been single and solitary, and it was a formative time. It’s when I wrote Cerulean Salt, and when I was struggling with a lot of the stuff I’m working through now.

For the second part of the song, I wanted to find a place in America that wasn’t totally Small Town, USA, but also wasn’t super recognizable. “St. Cloud” comes from my dad’s hometown in Florida. It’s a suburb right outside of Orlando. I always liked the name, and I thought it would be a nice way to honor my dad. Then I got so attached to the name that I named the record after it.

The first part of [‘St. Cloud’] is about New York. So I needed a city that was sort of the opposite of New York, in my head. I wasn’t going to do like middle-of-nowhere somewhere; I really did want it to be a place that felt like a city. But it just wasn’t cosmopolitan. Just anywhere America, and not in a bad way—in a salt-of-the-earth kind of way. As soon as the idea to just call the whole record Saint Cloud entered my brain, it didn’t leave. It had been the name for six months or something, and I had been calling it Saint Cloud, but then David Berman died and I was like, ‘Wow, that feels really kismet or something,’ because he changed his middle name to Cloud. He went by David Cloud Berman. I’m a fan; it feels like a nice way to [pay tribute].

–via Apple Music