Earlier this year I celebrated a decade living in New York City. 10 years just like that. As you can imagine, living in a city like NYC and listening to the amount of music I do (along with my penchant of being overly sentimental and oversharing about the music I enjoy), there have been some songs that have woven themselves within my New York experience.
I picked out 25 songs and arranged them in roughly chronological order, kind of creating a roadmap of some times spent living in the best city in the world.
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1. The Avalanches – “Subways”
Starting off with an easy one, as The Avalanches’ long-awaited second album was released the Friday before I moved to NYC. How perfect is it that a song like “Subways” was right there for me to listen to as soon as I moved to the city? That first day in NYC, after my dad helped me move all my stuff in, I took the train into the city from Bushwick and walked around Central Park, listening to The Avalanches’ Wildflower the whole time, but almost exclusively listening to “Subways” on the train. Very cliche yes, but that album was the soundtrack to my first summer in New York, and it was perfect (the pairing, my first summer was actually very hard, as you could expect).
2. Mr Twin Sister – “Sensitive”
Another early experience was realizing that Mr Twin Sister, one of my favorite groups at the time, were starting off a residency at the Manhattan Inn, a bar in Greenpoint that had a large area in the back where musicians would occasionally perform. In the first installment of the series, Mr Twin Sister performed “stripped-down,” performing a mix of their tracks in kind of a flow-state, kind of jamming along and melting the whole audience down into jelly. They capped off that summer with another performance in the space, with openers Maria Usbeck and Caroline Polachek (!). It was incredible, of course!
3. Jenny Hval – “Conceptual Romance”
The first fall in NYC. This was the album. I was fully, head-over-heels obsessed with Jenny Hval’s Blood Bitch in October of 2016, and had it on nearly whenever I could. I’ve written about this moment on the blog before, but I have a vivid memory of stopping for a piece of pizza at the Joe’s Pizza in Greenwich Village on an unexpectedly cold night, and steam was erupting from people as they eat the molten hot pizza, all huddled up together standing at the counters and tables near the shop. A beautiful, dreamy memory.
4. Nicolas Jaar – “No”
I have a few songs that remind me of my time at my second job in NYC after I moved, which had an office in the Tribeca neighborhood in Manhattan. I was being paid barely anything and had to stretch wherever I can. That meant sneaking more hearty sustenance underneath soup from Gourmet Garage (a flat fee for soup, by the pound for hot food bar), eating the same thing over and over from Trader Joe’s (freezer falafel, hummus, veggies and pita), buying $4 banh mi’s at the convenience store / Vietnamese music shop on Canal and maybe most importantly, quitting drinking. But I also remember that fall being very rainy, and the cobblestone streets of Tribeca looking so magical at night with puddles of light reflections all over the place. Nicolas Jaar’s “No” was a song that all my coworkers seemed to congregate around, including those who I didn’t even get along with, and that became a constant replay in our office. The hours were also very late at this job, so I’d always be leaving at night – perfect environment for listening to this record.
5. Weyes Blood – “Generation Why”
I feel like pretty much everyone has a “post-2016 election” story or personal anecdote that’s has some deep attachment to the place you lived at the time that’s unique to the place. The morning after, the subway was completely quiet. The office was deflated. I remember hearing my roommate sobbing in the room over that evening. The Thursday of election week, I had a ticket to see Weyes Blood perform at a church in Greenpoint, the first show in a series called Ambient Church, which touted handmade visuals and incense during the show. They delivered on both of those promises, with excellent, trippy visuals made on projections with colored oils and filters, and censer-runners bringing white sage and palo santo up and down the aisles. The church was packed to the gills to see Weyes Blood perform tracks off her much-hyped new album Front Row Seat To Earth, and I can assuredly say it was one of the more memorable, emotionally-hitting shows I’ve seen. Everyone was tapped into that moment, and it was beautiful.
6. Julie Byrne – “I Live Now As A Singer”
My first winter in the city, as soundtracked by the sublime Julie Byrne’s Not Even Happiness. I remember going out on the first snow of 2017 listening to this song and being moved to tears. Additionally I was extremely miserable in many aspects of my life, from work, to my relationship, to my living situation, so being surrounded by this beauty really got to me and STUCK. I’ll never forget how those sharp, icy flakes felt on my skin, and how they dusted the sidewalks before quickly melting later that night, and how Julie Byrne lifted me up on a cloud and tucked me in, keeping me safe.
7. The Blue Nile – “Headlights on the Parade”
Any time someone discovers this album it has to be a MOMENT. This is a “walking around New York City feeling like the king of the world, or the most miserable chap on the avenue” type record. It morphs the world around you. Walking around the city at night to this? Are you serious? It’s the best.
8. Massive Attack – “Risingson”
Listening to this song doing long subway transfers, like at 51st St between the 6 and the E+M, or at Court Square between the E+M and the G – it will make you feel like you’re in a 90s spy movie. I actually had this revelation before I moved here, when I took the former transfer for the first time and was blown away at how seamless the pairing was, but it didn’t feel right to have a song that made me feel cool in the subway system as the first song… even though that’s kind of what I ended up listening.
9. Yo La Tengo – “I Heard You Looking”
A lovely placeholder for a tradition a friend and I began in 2017, and try to keep up to this day: attend at least one show of Yo La Tengo’s Hanukkah shows each year. Truthfully I still haven’t even seen “I Heard You Looking” live yet, but even still, the lead-up to these shows always yields a lot of YLT personal listening. It’s something I look forward to every year and it’s a great excuse to see my friend, who very annoyingly (for our tradition, anyways) has since moved to LA. But either way it’s Yo La Tengo forever.
10. Oneohtrix Point Never – “Age Of”
This was a very serendipitous pairing, but one Saturday in the early summer / late spring of 2018 I decided to check out the Whitney Museum for the first time. I didn’t know what was on exhibition – just wanted to go do something. I had also just got a copy of Oneohtrix Point Never’s Age Of, and planned to listen to it through as I walked around the museum. The museum just so happened to be showing a Grant Wood retrospective, and believe it or not, the album and the art on display synced up perfectly. It was a sublime moment. I don’t have a sonic pairing with it, but later that year I would visit the Guggenheim for the Hilma Af Klint retrospective, a similarly life-changing art moment I had in the city.
11. Badge Époque Ensemble – “Undressed In Solitude”
Really for one specific occurrence: on a sweltering summer day in the city, I had made the trek to Chelsea in Manhattan from Bushwick, Brooklyn to pick up some picture frames from Bed Bath & Beyond. Upon leaving, I discovered that either because of the heat or some other likely heat-related reason, the power had tripped in the subway system and many lines were no longer running, effectively trapping me in Manhattan with two decent-sized picture frames. Lugging around with both groceries and these frames, sweating my butt off, listening to the slinky funky of BÉE… it was a great moment.
12. Dirty Beaches – “Lord Knows Best”
I had a phase while I was prepping for my Best Albums of the Decade (2010-2019) list that I got back into Dirty Beaches’ Badlands, especially “Lord Knows Best.” It conveniently was timed up with when my wife moved to the city, and I’d travel from my work in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to visit her in her apartment in midtown Manhattan via ferry. Standing on the dock in Greenpoint, looking down at the icy waters of the East River, with the glittering Manhattan skyline reflecting off the choppy water, while listening to this song? So much melancholy, so much romance. Nothing like it. In a way it kind of foretold me living in Manhattan later the next year.
13. Charli XCX – “anthems”
The YEARNING I felt listening to Charli XCX’s pandemic album how i’m feeling now at my parents house in Connecticut still creates ripples being felt to this day. So many nights spent up way too late in my room, watching movies or TV shows in bed, or listening to random things I’d downloaded from the internet. But “anthems” was a constant presence, reminding me that being cocooned like this is only temporary: I need to return to the city, return to concerts, see my friends, and live life. As cushy as this life is and how lucky I was to have that period; I was ready to have late nights out on the town again.
14. Tidiane Thiam – “Dannibe”
This track is from a record I bought on a whim on a Bandcamp Friday in 2020. It turned out to be a great purchase, as my wife and I still put it on the turntable with solid consistency. It’s exudes peace, as it’s a pure recording of the guitarist Tidiane playing outside, so much so you can hear the crickets and other wildlife in the recordings behind him. It transformed our little 250sq ft studio with incredible, huge windows into even more of an oasis than it already was in peak pandemic times. Even though the apartment was so small and we had to live in the same hallway as rowdy med students, and there were routine fire drills at 3am, I still had a really hard time leaving, and had a semi-ugly cry once we moved everything out. I think we both knew we’ll never get windows like that ever again, and it was the first place we’d ever lived together. We made it work, and it was our little sanctuary in the sky, with Tidiane serenading us with his meditative-like playing.
15. Shabason, Krgovich & Harris – “Friday Afternoon”
Another one of my all-time favorite songs and a perfect example of my sentimental nostalgia for late 2020, and again another song that was augmented by our apartment’s beautiful windows. In 2020 before we got vaccinated, my wife and I didn’t ride the subway anywhere, opting to instead take the ferry or walk everywhere. This lead to a lot of beautiful sunset walks, early morning ferry rides and isolated listening in the work office. I remember actually crying at my desk listening to this on the office speakers on fall afternoon, sitting along in the office as beautiful sun poured in through the windows. Maybe because we were all serious about keeping each other safe, and were more intentional about most things period, I just felt more keyed in on the emotional weight we were all carrying, and the love that I had for the things around me. So many beautiful fall moments to this in the city.
16. Cassandra Jenkins – “Crosshairs”
Much like Julie Byrne in 2017, Cassandra Jenkins’ 2021 landmark album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature became THE first winter album, only this time in Manhattan. Also of course it came with the re-opening of the world with vaccines, and one of the most jubilant springs I’ve ever lived through in 2021. But that winter in 2021 was one of the snowiest we’d had in a while, and looking down onto the snowy park below my apartment and seeing kids have snowball fights, or even a wheelchair scooter grandma pulling her grandson on a sled on the sidewalks below reignited my hope in humanity.
17. Doss – “On Your Mind”
Once I find an easy-to-repeat electronic record, that’s IT for my commutes. Doss’ “On Your Mind” was fully RINSED in the summers of 2021 and 2022, sounding amazing on the subway, while walking downtown on the avenues, on a run – you name it. The rubbery synths paired with the sturdy, pounding beat is just another comparison of our soft, fleshy bodies hitting the concrete of this crazy city ayyy am I right??
18. Evan J Cartwright – “impossibly blue”
This is also just one of my favorite songs from the decade so far, but there was a little section of my old neighborhood in Kip’s Bay that kind of reminded me of this song and this album’s cover. There was a little neighborhood church that didn’t have bells, but I’d walk by around this time and see pink, flowering trees and kids getting let out of school playing. 2022 spring was a beautiful time, and this track always reminds me of the sunny days I got to experience around in that area.
19. Television – “Marquee Moon”
The death of Tom Verlaine in early 2023 got me to come back to Television’s Marquee Moon, which of course is one of the best albums ever. Seeing all the New York folks congregate around him / his memory solidified his legend status, and listening to this album around the uncharacteristically warm and damp winter of 2023 in midtown felt right.
20. Miles Davis – “Black Satin”
Likewise had a BIG Miles Davis phase in early 2023, listening to many of his albums for the first time. I found that his 70s period is likely my favorite, and listening to On The Corner for the first time really did make me feel like I was on a busy NYC street corner, surging my way through busy packs of people and seeing folks from all walks of life converge together. Beautiful chaos.
21. Patti Smith – “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo”
Finally read Just Kids in 2023 once my commute started demanding more downtime reading. Of course I loved it. It’s a classic. And damn do I love New York. Not much else to say here. I’ve read Just Kids, you’ve read Just Kids, we’ve all read Just Kids.
22. The Velvet Underground – “I’m Waiting For The Man”
Kind of paired alongside Patti Smith is The Velvet Underground. While I didn’t read any books about them nor the making of this record around in 2023 or so, just listening to this record makes me feel very New Yorker, yknow? Maybe the most basic, most “NY State of Mind” type choice I think I put on this list.
23. Dinosaur L – “#5 Go Bang! (Francois K Mix)”
In 2023 and 2024 I read an exhaustive history of NYC club culture in the early 80s, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983 by Tim Lawrence, which gave me so much insight into the history and characters of New York’s electric past. I’ve been a fan of Arthur Russell for a long time, but getting to appreciate his dance music side was really rewarding, despite the slog of a book it was woven within. I wanna see all my friends at once.
24. Sofia Kourtesis – “Funkhaus”
Kind of a silly one, since who knows how many times I’ve ridden the subway since I’ve lived in the city, but something about hurtling down the downtown Q line with “Funkhaus” blasting in my ears just felt natural. The chugging, panned-channel drums imitate motion and overall dynamics of the song lend itself to motion, so when you’re heading downtown for a show and you need a song that helps you meld into the long train ride ahead (thankfully I can ride the Q all the way to Brooklyn Paramount, or Public Records from where I live), and it brought me a great deal of peace.
25. Fcukers – “Homie Don’t Shake”
And finally, the most recent entry in this playlist kind of encompasses the pride and excitement that came with the wave of new bands that sprung up from NYC around 2023 to now, whether that be Fcukers, YHWH Nailgun, L’Rain, Chanel Beads or whatever. Fcukers, to me, felt like a portal into another reality; of 20-somethings that live in the East Village or Bushwick making music and finding footholds here, and additionally feels very New York. It’s HERE.
