This song about a Starbucks in North Adams will stick in your head

After the North Adams City Council gave the green light to a developer’s plans to transform a vacant lot into a commercial complex with multiple drive-ins, Audrey Aristeo pulled out her ukulele, sat in her bedroom and started writing.

The end result – “They’re Building a Starbucks” – is an anthem of frustration over missed opportunities, wasted potential and a general culture that values ​​cars and corporate chains more than the local community.

And a warning: It’s incredibly catchy.

Aristeo, a 24-year-old North Adams resident who uses the pronouns “she” and “them,” said she wrote the song out of anger over the multi-tenant retail project that will see a Starbucks cafe built directly across the street from existing Dunkin’ and McDonald’s stores.

The property is located on Route 2 at the corner of Union and Eagle streets, a busy thoroughfare “that is already ridiculously awful,” Aristeo said in an interview. She said she was frustrated by “the general trend here and elsewhere toward big business and auto-centric infrastructure and away from local economies and walkable cities.”

“You know, we could do something good there,” Aristeo added.

In her song, she expands on this idea and makes a few suggestions: “There are a hundred thousand things we could have done with this strange little corner, like green space or housing or anything other than another giant corporation swallowing, suffocating and devouring our city.”

According to local news site iBerkshires.com, North Adams planners have long been concerned about traffic at the intersection, which is caused in part by drivers entering and exiting the McDonald’s and Dunkin’ parking lots directly across the street.

“It really seems like you’re taking the worst intersection in town and making it a little bit worse,” planner Jesse Lee Egan Poirier said last month, according to iBerkshires.com. “Can this project be an opportunity to make this bad intersection better instead of worse?”

A representative for the developer, The Colvest Group, did not respond to a request for comment.

A conversation starter

Aristeo is a graduate of the Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, holds a bachelor’s degree in book arts, and works in a variety of media. Music is a new foray, and “they’re building a starbucks” is Aristeo’s first original song to be released publicly.

“I wrote the lyrics and the melody in about an hour by myself in my bedroom, in a pretty frenzied state,” she explained. “I just felt something inside me needed to come out. And I did, and then I listened to it again and thought, ‘I can do something with this.’ It had to be such a quick and easy process so I could avoid my perfectionist tendencies.”

Aristeo’s partner helped her film scenes for the music video in North Adams earlier this month, and within a week the song was on YouTube. The lyrics are full of hilarious, quotable and catchy lines like “Bigwig Springfield chucklef***ks” and “We do backflips just to tongue kiss the devil.”

“When I write something, I try to challenge myself to do something new and different each time, and sometimes it’s rhythms in a phrase,” Aristeo explained.

She said the feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive and the song’s message seems to have struck a chord with people who live and work in North Adams.

“Overall, it’s sparked a lot of conversations with people in the community that I might not have necessarily had contact with otherwise,” Aristeo explained. “And that’s the most valuable part of it for me.”

Ultimately, the song is more an expression of emotion than a call to action, she said.

“But I want people to take away from this – if they take anything away at all – maybe a desire to be more informed about what’s happening in their city and maybe feel encouraged to advocate for change at planning or zoning meetings,” Aristeo said. “Like getting involved in local community initiatives to make things better or boycotting big companies that threaten to swallow up smaller ones.”

Is loading…