You are here: home » blogs » A Knife, a Fork, a Bottle, and a Cork
A Knife, a Fork, a Bottle, and a Cork
by Tom Southam | 12/04/10
It has taken a while, about 10 years I think, but finally I have got myself onto a racing trip that will take me somewhere I’ve wanted to go for quite a while. New York has always loomed large on my horizon. As a music fan, should I need to face my Mecca and pray at any stage then it would have to be the five boroughs I turned to.
I first started making my ‘New York’ play-list back in Nantes in 2001 when I got my copy of PJ Harvey’s incredible ‘Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea’ (two tracks of which appear here). There is of course a lot of tracks that haven’t survived since 2001 and a lot of new ones that have been added to the various revisions of this play-list I’ve jotted down in notebooks and diaries since then.
I had no particular rules in mind when I started putting this together, songs could be to, about, or simply by some of the sons of New York. I did avoid the very obvious, sorry Frank, and there are some in there with a fairly tenuous link to the city. I could have chosen whole lists of songs by some artists, Ryan Adams for example; I could also have chosen pretty much anything by Lou Reed or the Velvet Underground, but we’ll all just have to accept that there is no right or wrong in these things. These are just simply my favourite tracks that I personally associate with the city, albeit without ever having set foot in it; I hope I have done it some justice.
- Angel of Harlem – U2
- New York, New York – Ryan Adams
- Brooklyn – Mos Def
- Tenth Avenue Freeze Out – Bruce Springsteen
- Riding the subway – Jesse Malin
- Daughters of the Soho riots – The National
- Romeo had Juliet – Lou Reed
- New York telephone conversation – Lou Reed
- Cocaine in my Brain – Dillinger
- New York – Richard Ashcroft
- New York City cops – The Strokes
- 53rd and 3rd – The Ramones
- Balham to Brooklyn – Turin Brakes
- A rainy night in Soho – The Pogues
- This mess we’re in – PJ Harvey
- Dam Sam, I love a woman that rains – Ryan Adams
- Lua – Bright Eyes
- Summer in the city – The Lovin’ Spoonful
- Wake up in New York – Craig Armstrong
- You Said Something – PJ Harvey
- Chelsea Bridge – Duke Ellington
- Chelsea – Counting Crows
- East Harlem – Beirut
- I and Love and You – The Avett Brothers
See this playlist on Last.fm »
< The Music Follows Me · New Amsterdam - so good, they named it twice >
