How it starts as “It’s a new soundtrack I can dance to this beat. The lights are so bright but they never blind me.” You can say that’s a very midtown lyric, both in how midtown is where most terminals to new york dump you out, and also the fixation on the bright lights, which is a very Times Square reference. It’s a new, bright, blank slate to reinvent herself and feel free. Loud and exciting in all its newness! And then as she settles in downtown, “Dive bar on the east side” and the “third floor on the west side me and you.” The east and west and the dive bars puts us squarely downtown in the villages, where the intricacy of the winding streets provides her the nooks and crannies she needs to explore this love in secret. The noise and commotion of the city become a cover for furtive meetings, and the city becomes a loyal keeper of her secret as “Late in the night, the city’s asleep. Your love is a secret I’m hoping, dreaming, dying to keep.” The longer she uses the city as a backdrop for her and her lover, the sidewalks and buildings become saturated with memories. Everywhere she goes, New York reflects her lover back to her as “I get mystified by how this city screams your name.” She even laments that their story is so intertwined with the city that in her eyes, to each other, they’ve now become the city as “I’m New York City” and “You’re the west village” and “I’ll never walk Cornelia street again.” The west village is often referred to as the beating heart of New York, and here it serves as just that for their love and quite literally their “heartbeat on the High Line”. And then it falls apart and she leaves, hastily and messily such that she couldn’t extricate herself cleanly and had to tear out a part of herself to get away, with “You know I left a part of me back in New York.” The New York story ends for her. Which brings us to place she currently resides, “I’m on a bench in Coney Island wondering where did my baby go.” Coney Island is such a fascinating, metaphorical juxtaposition choice. While we’ve spent the entire New York story tangled within it’s arteries, Coney Island is on the fringe of New York City geographically. It’s one of the furthest points you can go on the map within the city limits, and it’s even the last stop on the subway lines that go there. In this New York story, she and her lover used to revel in their love in heart of a city so integral to their story that it was written on the pavement and shouted from the rooftops. Now she sits alone on the edge of her world, almost in self-imposed exile. Maybe she chose Coney Island because it’s the furthest she can possibly run from the heart of the city, while she simultaneously can’t bring herself to leave entirely and let it go just yet. Or maybe it’s the closest she can bring herself to get to the city these days, unable to bear the pain of getting too close that she hears the city that still echos their love. Both notions further cementing the grief in that song, mixed with guilt and bitterness, and a fitting close to the ~New York Narrative~.
Coney Island is where she goes to look for her baby she knows is already gone, and to mourn the city that was once a living, breathing projection of her love, but now merely sits in the distance as cold and dead to her as a graveyard.
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