Travels are one of music’s great sources of inspiration, and there are too many songs featuring cities and countries in their titles to count. If you’d like to know some, though, you can explore the music that has celebrated the United States with a new map of the country featuring only song titles.
On the U.S.A. Song Map, Alabama is “Sweet Home Alabama” and Washington is “Washington Bullets”, while Detroit is “Broken City” and New York City is “Empire State of Mind”. Every state and city is marked on the map by a song that celebrates it. Some cities have more (New York City wouldn’t be complete without “New York, New York”, “Rockaway Beach”, and “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down”).
Some cities have only one title, but all together they form a “musical journey throughout the United States” that you’re sure to enjoy if you are a music fan, a geography enthusiast or a bit of both.
The U.S.A. Song Map is a creation of UK-based studio We Are Dorothy, who has already created a World Song Map in 2016. “The idea came from the response we had to the World Song Map,” studio representatives told Lonely Planet. “After taking a little bit of time off to recover, we started to work on the U.S.A. Song Map in early 2018.” Since these projects take at least nine months to research and design, as We Are Dorothy explained, it’s no wonder they launched it just now, at the beginning of November.
Of course, every song was carefully placed on the map. While some connections are immediate, others might not be that obvious and will need some thinking – and those are exactly the map’s creators’ favourites. They love “the ones which make a ‘creative connection to a place.” Some examples? David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” for Cape Canaveral and Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” for Sutter’s Mill.
If you’d like to see more about the map, you can check out the official website here.
