Julie's Blog

New York, I love you (click here to listen to the playlist on Spotify)

For my city stories assignment I compiled a playlist of songs that are about New York City. I grew up in the suburbs of New York City so the city was always glorified for me. It was somewhere fun and exciting I got to go to on the weekends, to go to museums or events. Once I was in high school, my friends and I started being able to go to the city on our own. All of the songs in my playlist have special, beautiful, poignant memories associated with them for me. I was inspired to make a playlist because my friends and I used to make playlists for each other often in high school. We would often burn them to CDs so we could play them in the car.

BKNY by Fat Tony reminds me of a very specific day when my best friend Anna and I drove out to Midwood, Brooklyn to work on a carnival we were preparing for Purim (a Jewish holiday where you get to drink alcohol and dress up!) and then we hung out for one of the first times with a friend of mine who I’m now really good friends with of who lives in Park Slope. It was a great day and it felt exciting and magical to be in Brooklyn. Anna’s dad had let her borrow the car and we were driving through Gowanus to go back home and listening to BKNY with the windows wide open. The song talks about doing different things in different neighborhoods in Brooklyn. It’s so cool when you can hear a song and be in the same place that the artists is singing about. Very cheesy, but very peak high school moment.

NEW DORP. NEW YORK by SBTRKT is a really fun song featuring Ezra Koenig who is the lead singer of a band I used to really like. I just casually knew it and I was at a music festival where the band was playing but I didn’t really know their music so I didn’t go to their set. But then all of a sudden the one song I knew started playing and Erza Koenig was on stage performing with them. My friends and I couldn’t believe it, we started dancing and singing along and it was so nice actually to not be squished up in the front and just be able to wiggle around. The song mentions New Dorp, a place in Staten Island where I have never been, but I really like maps and I recognized the name from looking at a map and thinking it was a funny toponym.

Summer in the City reminds me of being young, specifically the summer after Freshman year and going into the city with my friends and walking around and hanging out in Central Park. I feel like I glorified moments like these more than they actually happened and I remember listening to this song all of the time and getting goosebumps. One of my favorite lyrics is: “and I went to a protest just to rub up against strangers.” I always thought Regina Spektor was a great lyricist and I used to want to get one of her lyrics tattooed. Silly me.

Brooklyn by Theo Katzman is another song that reminds me of being in like Freshman or Sophomore year. I used to work for a birthday party service for kids and sometimes we would do parties in city which was really fun. I remember one party we did was the day of a show I was going to near Saint Marks Place. It was really cool because it was the first small basement type show I had ever been to. And I got to see this very special song live!

It was so much fun creating this playlist. I love create a physical song lists because you can make them cute with little doodles. I haven’t made one in a while but this one was like a love letter to New York City and inspired me to start making these again.