Get Lyrical: Joanna Burns' "Philadelphia"
posted in: Features
Joanna Burns is pulling a Frank Sinatra on all of us. Like the iconic swing artist, Burns is a native of New Jersey. (Hazlet, New Jersey to be exact, which she notes is also the same town that gave us Jersey Shore’s Sammi Sweetheart. Lucky girl.) But much like Frankie, the songstress isn’t singing about the Garden State from which she hails. While Ol’ Blue Eyes planned to make a brand new start of it in NYC, she looked West, to the city of brotherly love, for inspiration.
Burns wrote the lyrics to Philadelphia as she sat in her high school music theory class. She had applied to the musical theater program at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and was waiting anxiously to hear their response. She makes her impatience clear in the song’s opening lines: I’ve been waiting for an answer/But I’m getting tired/I’ve been waiting for a green light/That says I can start the next four years of my life. If she seems more preoccupied than most high school seniors, she had good reason”a confident Burns had decided to put all of her cheesesteaks in one basket and only applied to the U of the Arts.
During that waiting period, thoughts of Philly consumed her life. Of course, since I was harping and dwelling on hearing from them, everything around started to seem like a sign,” she says. “˜Oh look! A Philadelphia Flyers bumper sticker! That’s a sign. I’m getting in!’ She notes that her obsession is funny in retrospect, but it definitely explains the song’s chorus, where Burns croons, Philadelphia’s everywhere/It’s in my face and draws me near/The city of big brotherly love watching down on me.
Burns delivers lines like, Don’t you pity me, don’t humor me/I know where I’ll end up now, with all the confidence of a high school senior ready to take on the world, but despite her bravado the singer wasn’t accepted to her dream school. Of course, it’s not all bad. Everything happens for a reason, she says. I don’t know that I would have written half the songs I did if I went away to college that year.
Give Philadelphia a listen below, and be sure to check out Burns’ upcoming album The Green Year.
Have an interesting story behind your lyrics? Let us know at pr@ourstage.com!