Apartment songs to live by and love

Finding the right place to call home is an art. Likewise, music is art — sometimes the… Finding the right place to call home is an art. Likewise, music is art — sometimes the closest many college students ever come to art. Countless songs have been recorded about that good old place you like to call home sweet home: the apartment.

Three months into living in your new place, you might find random holes that have been patched over by your landlord and maybe even a few that you created and had to fix up yourself. Each patched up, a hole has a story and quite possibly could be a song. That’s where the professionals come in. So here are a few songs about apartments that we all wish we could have written, even though we don’t have the record deals necessary to get them out to the public anyway.

The Clarks – “Lock and Key,” “Apartment Song”

Local heroes The Clarks have a few touching songs that deal with this topic. “Lock and Key” is a little more about keeping your love locked behind the closed door of your heart, but they sing about front doors and locks and such, so it resembles an apartment in a way. And the oh-so-originally titled “Apartment Song” is an incredible song to see performed live. As they always do, they add a local touch to the song with the line “Lease it for a year / I got a place in Highland Park.”

Jeff Barry and Ja’net Dubois – “Movin’ On Up”

The kids still living in Towers may not have a clue what this song is, but ask anyone older than you and they’ll tell you that “The fish don’t fry in the kitchen / the beans don’t burn on the grill / It took a whole lotta tryin’ / Just to get up that hill.” The theme song to “The Jeffersons” is one of the classic songs from TV history and can be heard blurted out by anyone who is stuck in a long line that finally starts moving: “Oh, we’re moving on up.”

Barenaked Ladies — “The Old Apartment”

The ladies have a few songs that mention houses and apartments, like “If I Had $1,000,000” in which they sing about the lavish things they would buy if they were millionaires — you know, the good things, like tree-forts and monkeys. But quite possibly the best song about apartments is “The Old Apartment.” It’s a song about breaking into the place that a couple used to live in and finding that everything has changed, but the memories are still there, good and bad. Questions are asked about the neighbor downstairs, about why the hole that was punched into the wall was plastered over and why she kept the mousetrap, all while the memories are slowly fading away: “Broke into the old apartment / Tore the phone out of the wall / Only memories, fading memories / Blending in to dull tableaux / I want them back.”