Come Fly With Me
Musical Time Travel at the JFK Airport
When you have a flight out of JFK at an inconvenient time and a few hundred dollars burning a hole in your pocket, indulge yourself with a room at the TWA Hotel at Terminal 5. Built around the historic 1962 terminal architected by Eero Saarinen, it serves as a mini theme park for the 60s with incredible attention to detail.
However, it is the music that holds everything together. Stepping out of the AirTrain that connects JFK to the city, we followed the signs guiding us to the hotel, traversing an unglamorous path over a parking lot. Then, a sheltered walkway awaits –very welcomed because it was raining cats and dogs– with hidden speakers. "Up, Up and Away,” a ‘67 song by 5th Dimension, fills the air, and the time travel begins.
The entrance to the old Terminal 5 building – now the expansive hotel lobby – is flanked by vintage cars, plus a coincidentally parked Tesla that nicely visualizes how technology has changed in the last 60 years. Inside the 60s airport theme continues in every detail, from phone booths to split-flap departure time displays. And when you sit down in the sunken lounge, look at the restored Lockheed Constellation on a piece of retired tarmac and listen to Sinatra’s “Come Fly With Me,” nostalgia for simpler times comes in thickly.
The feeling is so intense that you want the music to continue in your room. Unfortunately, it doesn’t, so we had to improvise with a Sinatra Greatest Hits album from our own Bluetooth speaker.
That made me envision what a soundtrack for a 2020s theme hotel would sound like in 50 years or so. It would probably be much harder to pull off in such a consistent way because culture got so much more global and diverse. Additionally, there are so many high-definition recordings of about everything that it would be challenging to create the nostalgic blur necessary for a good illusion.
To get it right, you would need dozens of theme hotels that narrowly focus on specific genres and sub-genres. So, for example, a glamglare hotel might look like Rockwood Music Hall with multiple small stages celebrating the era when commercial gatekeepers no longer restricted artists’ creativity. And the soundtrack… well, you can listen to it already today. ⬇
Song Picks of the Day
Listen/watch all seven songs on YouTube. Follow our daily updated playlists on YouTube and Spotify for the 50 latest Song Picks of the Day.
Four friends from North Carolina formed a band, called it OCNS (not their initials!), and started to put out wonderful chill music like “How Late It Was.” Next up, new music from UK singer/songwriter Fenne Lily. The first single from her upcoming third album, “Lights Light Up,” reflects on the complexities of a breakup. We are also happy to welcome Fenne as a fellow New Yorker!
“When Love Goes Dark” is the latest single from Tommy Ashby's upcoming debut album Lamplighter. The title is not meant as literal as it sounds: the song is about staying course despite second guessing. Emm Gryner is a Canadian musician who has already come around a lot in her life: among others, she played keyboards for David Bowie. Her new song “Burn the Boats” could be a soundtrack of a late 70s theme hotel – but there is a lot more going on the more than six minutes long track.
“Love Is Such a Hard Thing” is a realization that comes to Canadian singer/songwriter Noah Derksen after a hard breakup. But for a musician, everything is inspiration: “For me, songwriting gives meaning to the suffering,” he says. Nashville-based musician Madison Steinbruck just released a superb debut album Australia’s Lonelier. “This song is how I came to terms with my life not going the way I thought it would,” she says about the title song.
Yvonne Ambrée is an NYC-based singer, songwriter, and producer. Her new song “Anyone Someone” deals with the feeling of longing. “Sometimes it is nice to remember that patience and learning from failure goes a long way in understanding who you are and who you might want to be,” she says.
New Albums of the Week
Last Friday brought us four hotly anticipated albums:
- King Tuff - Smalltown Stardust
- Madison Steinbruck - Australia’s Lonelier
- Sam Himself - Never Let Me Go
- Sara Noelle - Do I Have to Feel Everything
Nine Photos of the TWA Hotel
