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20 Songs for an Empire State of Mind
New York City doesn’t have a single soundtrack.
It has thousands of them.
Jazz drifting out of a club. Hip-hop born from neighbourhood streets. Punk rattling the walls of a tiny venue. Broadway spilling onto the sidewalk. Disco after midnight. A singer at a piano wondering when they’ll get back to Manhattan.
For my Empire State Building and New York City Bucket List, I wanted twenty songs that could travel with us.
This isn’t intended to be a definitive collection of the greatest New York songs. How could twenty tracks possibly accomplish that?
Instead, this is a journey.
We’ll begin with the enormous cinematic New York of Frank Sinatra, wander through Manhattan with Billy Joel, visit Broadway with The Drifters, head toward Rockaway Beach with the Ramones, walk downtown with Lou Reed, hear New York through hip-hop, rock and indie music, and eventually watch the city lights come on with Odyssey.
Grab the headphones.
We’re going to New York.
🗽 Frank Sinatra – “Theme from New York, New York”
There are subtler ways to begin.
We’re ignoring all of them.
Those opening notes practically raise a theatre curtain over Manhattan.
Frank Sinatra’s recording transformed the song into one of the great musical declarations associated with New York City. It’s enormous, optimistic and gloriously theatrical.
So imagine we’ve just arrived.
The skyline is ahead.
The Empire State Building is somewhere above us.
And Sinatra has started singing.
Our New York adventure is officially underway.
🎹 Billy Joel – “New York State of Mind”
Now the city becomes personal.
Billy Joel doesn’t need flashing signs or famous landmarks to explain his relationship with New York.
He simply wants to come home.
“New York State of Mind” has the atmosphere of returning to somewhere that has become part of you.
That’s an interesting companion for a bucket-list journey.
We may be visiting New York.
Joel reminds us that millions of people call it home.
🌃 Ella Fitzgerald – “Manhattan”
Time to dress things up.
“Manhattan” predates Ella Fitzgerald’s recording by decades, but in her hands it becomes an elegant stroll through an earlier musical version of New York.
This is the soundtrack for looking at Art Deco architecture, wandering Fifth Avenue or imagining Manhattan when many of its now-famous skyscrapers were still relatively new additions to the skyline.
A little old New York belongs on our journey.
Especially when Ella is providing it.
🚕 Bobby Womack – “Across 110th Street”
New York changes.
So does our soundtrack.
Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street” brings us into a harder urban landscape. Written for the 1972 film of the same name, the song became inseparable from images of New York during a complicated period in the city’s history.
It reminds us that New York isn’t simply skyscrapers, Broadway lights and observation decks.
Cities contain struggle as well as spectacle.
And great city music tells both stories.
🌆 Simon & Garfunkel – “The Only Living Boy in New York”
Millions of people can surround you and somehow you can still feel alone.
Perhaps that’s why this song fits New York so beautifully.
“The Only Living Boy in New York” gives us a quieter pause in the journey.
Maybe we’re sitting in Bryant Park.
Maybe we’re looking through a library window.
Maybe we’re simply walking while everybody else seems to know exactly where they’re going.
For a few minutes, New York becomes wonderfully introspective.
🎭 The Drifters – “On Broadway”
Now someone has switched the lights back on.
“On Broadway” captures both the promise and difficulty contained within one of the most famous streets in entertainment.
Dreams live here.
So do disappointments.
That’s part of what gives the song its enduring pull.
As we make our way toward Times Square and the theatre district, The Drifters provide exactly the right soundtrack.
Keep walking.
The lights are getting brighter.
Technically, “The Wanderer” isn’t a song about New York.
I’m claiming it for our walk anyway.
Dion grew up in the Bronx, and there is something irresistible about putting one of New York’s own voices into a playlist designed for wandering.
And wandering is exactly what a good city bucket list should encourage.
Take the wrong turn.
Follow an interesting street.
Notice something that wasn’t on the itinerary.
New York rewards detours.
We’re leaving Manhattan.
Briefly.
The Ramones take us to Queens and Rockaway Beach, proving that New York City can occasionally involve sand rather than concrete.
The song races along with the wonderfully uncomplicated goal of getting to the beach.
After museums, skyscrapers and city blocks, a blast of punk-rock sea air seems entirely appropriate.
Everybody aboard.
Rockaway is calling.
🖤 Lou Reed – “Walk on the Wild Side”
Now we’re heading downtown.
Lou Reed’s New York isn’t polished for visitors.
It’s populated by characters.
“Walk on the Wild Side” emerged from the artistic and countercultural world surrounding Andy Warhol and the Factory, giving us another version of the city entirely.
This is one of the things I love about building a New York playlist.
Every few tracks, we’re somewhere else.
Same city.
Different universe.
❄️ The Pogues – “Fairytale of New York”
Few Christmas songs arrive carrying this many emotional bruises.
“Fairytale of New York” is messy, sad, romantic, argumentative and strangely beautiful.
In other words, it behaves rather more like real life than most holiday songs.
New York here isn’t a glittering Christmas-card backdrop.
It’s a place where hope and disappointment occupy the same room.
And somehow, through all of it, the city keeps glowing.
📬 Beastie Boys – “An Open Letter to NYC”
Now the locals are writing directly to the city.
The Beastie Boys’ “An Open Letter to NYC” is exactly what its title promises: a musical love letter to their hometown.
New York isn’t merely scenery here.
It’s identity.
Boroughs, people, streets and cultures collide within the song.
After several tracks observing New York from different angles, this one feels like somebody turning toward the city and saying:
This one’s for you.
🌙 Bruce Springsteen – “New York City Serenade”
Night has arrived.
And suddenly everything slows down.
Bruce Springsteen’s “New York City Serenade” is expansive, cinematic and dreamlike, unfolding more like a nighttime journey than a conventional rock song.
This is New York after the daytime crowds begin thinning.
Streetlights reflect from pavement.
Windows glow several floors above us.
Somewhere a taxi disappears around a corner.
For nearly ten minutes, Springsteen lets us wander.
No checklist.
No rush.
Just the city.
🎸 The Strokes – “New York City Cops”
Morning arrives with guitars.
The Strokes became one of the bands most closely associated with New York’s early-2000s rock revival, and “New York City Cops” carries that scruffy downtown energy.
This isn’t elegant Fifth Avenue New York.
It’s clubs, amplifiers, late nights and slightly questionable decisions.
Our playlist needed some of that.
Every great city has music that sounds considerably better after midnight.
💔 Ryan Adams – “New York, New York”
Recorded shortly before September 11, 2001, and released later that year, “New York, New York” became connected to the city in ways its recording could never have anticipated.
At its heart, though, it remains a relationship song wrapped around a place.
New York becomes the geography of memory.
Streets remember people.
Buildings remember moments.
Sometimes when we miss someone, we miss the places where we knew them too.
🌙 Norah Jones – “Back to Manhattan”
Another quiet turn.
Norah Jones gives us a New York that feels intimate rather than enormous.
“Back to Manhattan” sounds particularly appropriate late in the day, when the bucket-list pace has slowed and we’re no longer trying to see everything.
Perhaps we’re returning from our downtown excursion.
The subway emerges back into Manhattan.
The familiar skyline reappears.
We’re back.
✨ Taylor Swift – “Welcome to New York”
Time to turn every light on.
“Welcome to New York” captures the exhilaration of arriving somewhere enormous and believing, at least temporarily, that absolutely anything could happen.
This is our Times Square song.
Neon.
Billboards.
Crowds.
Broadway marquees.
Taxi horns.
People photographing absolutely everything.
Subtle?
Not remotely.
Perfect for the moment?
Absolutely.
🏙️ Jay-Z feat. Alicia Keys – “Empire State of Mind”
There was never any question about whether this would make the playlist.
Not when our entire adventure began at the Empire State Building.
Jay-Z’s verses move through New York while Alicia Keys supplies the towering chorus that helped turn “Empire State of Mind” into a modern city anthem.
This is where I want to return to the building that started our journey.
Take the elevator up.
Step onto the observation deck.
Look across Manhattan.
Press play.
Some soundtrack choices don’t require much debate.
❤️ LCD Soundsystem – “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down”
Now comes one of my favourite kinds of love song.
The complicated one.
LCD Soundsystem’s song acknowledges something that glossy travel advertising rarely does.
You can love a place and still be frustrated by it.
Cities change.
Favourite places disappear.
Neighbourhoods evolve.
Things become expensive.
Memories collide with whatever replaced them.
And still you love the place.
That’s a much more interesting relationship than perfection.
By now our journey is nearing its end.
St. Vincent gives us a beautifully restrained song about New York, absence and change.
The city feels enormous when someone you care about is inside it.
It can feel even larger when they’re gone.
After all our skyscrapers, museums, neighbourhoods and lights, this song brings everything back to something very small.
Human connection.
Maybe that’s what cities ultimately are.
Millions of individual stories happening beside one another.
🪩 Odyssey – “Native New Yorker”
And now we dance our way out.
“Native New Yorker” gives us disco-era Manhattan with enough sophistication and sparkle to illuminate several city blocks.
It’s a perfect closing song because it feels like New York after dark.
The day is over.
The observation decks are glowing.
Times Square is blazing.
Restaurant windows are full.
Subway trains are still moving beneath us.
Somewhere music is playing.
And New York is nowhere near finished for the night.
Neither is our playlist.
🎧 Twenty Songs, One Extraordinary City
Twenty songs barely scratch the surface.
We haven’t exhausted New York jazz, salsa, punk, disco, Broadway, folk, hip-hop, rock, soul or pop.
We couldn’t.
New York has been producing, inspiring and absorbing music for generations.
But that’s precisely why a playlist belongs beside a bucket list.
The landmarks tell us where we are.
The music tells us something about how being there might feel.
So take this playlist with you while exploring the Empire State Building, New York Public Library, Bryant Park, Grand Central Terminal, Chrysler Building, Fifth Avenue, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, MoMA, The Plaza, Central Park, Times Square, Little Italy, Chinatown and Tribeca.
Or put on your headphones without leaving home.
Music has always been rather good at ignoring geography.
Twenty songs. One city. Millions of stories.
Eileen Call doesn’t just write about where to go—she writes about why it matters when you do.
As USA Travel Writer at Go Cybernaut, Eileen brings depth, nostalgia, and a love of layered landscapes to every road trip, small town, and city stroll she covers.
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