14/06/2010

I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City


Songs about cities often fall into one of two categories. They can be a celebration of the place and most big cities – New York, Chicago, London, Paris, Rome, San Francisco-have such musical tributes. However, they can also cast the place in the role of mammon, leading the virtuous astray and wearing them down till they escape back to a simpler life - Do you Know the Way to San Jose?, Going Back to Country Living, Midnight Train to Georgia.

I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City brings another slant. At face value the song can seem a positive, start-of-a-hopeful journey take on New York. ‘I say goodbye to all my sorrows.... For the first time I’ll be free in New York City’. It appears to paint the historical view of New York as a beacon of opportunity, its Statue of Liberty welcoming the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

However, when you know that the song was written and sung by Harry Nilsson for Midnight Cowboy – though eventually dropped in favour of Everybody’s Talkin’ – it takes on a different meaning. It is not a celebration, neither is it a dream of escape back to a previous world. It is a song of arrival, not departure, but it reflects an optimism that the listener knows is misplaced.

The understanding of it, therefore, is mediated through another experience: knowing how Midnight Cowboy ends. In the same way, any visitor to New York has their view and perspective on it mediated by images received in countless films, TV shows, songs. People think they know what New York is like and, often, look to find what they expect or hope to see. Not just the standard tourist sights of the Empire State Building or Central Park but the smaller everyday sights – a big yellow taxi, a fire hydrant going off in the street, a large traffic cop with an Irish accent, a sign saying ‘Entering Queens’. All things glimpsed countless times in the course of any number of dramas, cop shows and comedies set in New York.

It is even tempting to take that imagery one step further and consciously replay films or songs in your mind as you go round the streets of the city. Wasn’t that Central Park Fountain featured in Enchanted? I am sure I remember seeing Kojak lay out a murder scene just there. Hey, I’m on Jones Street in Greenwich Village - surely Bob Dylan and Suzie Rotolo will be coming into view at any minute.

Because of why I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City was written, and because of its musical similarity to Everybody’s Talkin’, the imagery I remembered  whilst walking through Times Square was drawn not just from Midnight Cowboy itself but from a memory of seeing that film for the first time, a time when I had never been to New York. My impressions were being formed long before I actually arrived there and Times Square thus appeared almost as a movie set come to life.

The song was eventually used in a movie - You’ve Got Mail. For me, however, it was the film it didn’t appear in that was the more significant for the prism through which I viewed New York.

Link to song

11 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Awesome posting man. I played this song in Times Square a few weeks back. It was dusk so the lights were screaming. Someone shouted "Play Freebird" at the the end. Here it is:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBU2NBiDtio

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey, thats a great version-and sung in the perfect setting for it!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Fascinating column!! I always thought the song was just about the grass being greener - everybody seems to want to be somewhere except where he is - so I enjoyed your waaaaay more thoughtful analysis! :):)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Wasn't Dylan originally supposed to write the opening theme for the film? I remember reading that he kept them waiting for so long they gave up and looked for another musician. And then Dylan eventually sent them Lay Lady Lay but it was far too late to include. This might just be an urban legend though. I think as well Nilsson only ever intended Everybody's Talkin' to be used in early, draft / rough-cut screenings of the film, while he finished writing and recording I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City, but they liked it so much they kept it, and buried I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City in the soundtrack somewhere else. I think the whole feel of the film would have been different if they had waited for Dylan or I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City. Although Everybody's Talkin' and I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City are quite musically similar, which I guess is explained by their origins...

    ReplyDelete
  6. I think Lay Lady Lay was considered, as was Randy Newman's Cowboy. I think what happened was that John Schlesinger used Nilsson's version of Fred Neil's Everybody's Talkin' as a guide to the sort of song he wanted-hence the similarity with I Guess the Lord as Nilsson was trying to write a similar song. But in the end Schlesinger went with Everybody's Talkin anyway.

    ReplyDelete
  7. A really interesting blog cannot wait to read more!!

    Andra

    ReplyDelete
  8. Hey Geoff, love the NYC column, hope you do more on my city. Here's a forum I found that lists a ton, more than 50 songs I think, in case any strike a chord with you (pun intended). http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5204

    --Clinton (a New Yorker!)

    ReplyDelete
  9. That is an amazingly comprehensive list on songs about NYC-I hadnt realised there were so many. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  10. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  11. This song has a particular place in my heart because guess who was in New York City, that's right, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. But Lord he was not. I used to be one of his followers. I say used to be, thank God I am not anymore!

    ReplyDelete