223. Song No. 3,373: “Fire Escape,” Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness
Zombies on Broadway, 2017

No city has my heart like New York City, and songs that make it sound like both a character unto itself and an adventure to undertake almost always endear themselves to me on that virtue alone. Throw in some gottdamn rock piano and catchy hooks and I’m just gonna be an absolute sucker for it.

It’s a charming novelty for Andrew McMahon to be the one invoking NYC, seeing as just about anything he’s ever made feels like California (save for this year’s emotionally shredding Jukebox in the Wilderness tune, a tribute to the freedom of youth and feeling like both the sprawling cityscape and the future are yours for the taking—though NYC is also where McMahon was diagnosed with leukemia in 2005, which does color songs about the city with an acute maturity that adds its own depth and poignancy to the whole shebang).

But no one loves New York like a transplant who has to prove they’re good enough and gritty enough to make it in a city that will just as easily step over someone who’s fallen on their ass in the subway commuter crush as cede their cab to someone who’s clearly having a terrible day and needs a win. And no one can get as caught up in the endless cycle of daytime mechanisms melting uninterruptedly into the immersive escape of after-hours electricity as those same transplants, which is pretty much what sent McMahon back to the West Coast in body for a while but kept him writing about New York from the other side of the country.

California was always more of a feeling in most post-Something Corporate McMahon songs, whether it’s by association or reality; New York, however, is a fully realized, palpable presence in Zombies on Broadway, especially on songs like “Fire Escape” that could just as easily be a love song to the city as the person winding through those rain-damp streets and nighttime bars and locals-only hidey-holes alongside the narrator. And, much like the aforementioned “Wasted,” this particular track is positively radiating what it feels like to be young and in love with everything and everyone in a city that rewards youthful energy and a hunger for adventures with the kind of experiences that make great stories when that fire of your younger years gives way to the peace and patterns of settling down with that partner in crime who makes everywhere feel like home, from an infinite cityscape to the intimacy of domestic warmth.