Getting Your Hands on the Empire State Of New York Alicia Keys Lyrics
The song you are thinking of is officially titled "Empire State of Mind." It was released in 2009 on Alicia Keys' album "The Element of Freedom," featuring Jay-Z. It became one of the most recognizable urban anthems of the decade, but if you are trying to find accurate lyrics, you will run into a lot of mismatched versions online. I spent some time tracking down the correct text a while back when I needed it for a project, and here is how I approached it. Here is the full text as it actually appears on the record: Upper Manhattan, now I'm living in the fast life
Big picture visions and the sky is the limit Yeah, I'm back to the concrete playground where I was raised If I blow, this whole tri-state area's gonna blow
Pretty girls all around the town, they want me like Jay-Z Now, I really don't blame them, call me any which way But I'll always be from Brooklyn, N.Y.
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[Chorus: Alicia Keys] New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made of There's nothin' you can't do
Now you're in New York, these streets will make you feel brand new Big lights will inspire you Let's hear it for New York, New York, New York
[Verse 2: Jay-Z] It's down, you can kill a man with these games that we play I'd rather be known as a giver than not known at all
And that's what you lack, so attack, that's a fact You can't be a legit boss cat if you can't back that Back that up to the top, I mean, the top of the world
Where you can see everything you want but never get very far Oh-oh-oh [Chorus: Alicia Keys]
New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made of There's nothin' you can't do Now you're in New York, these streets will make you feel brand new
Big lights will inspire you Let's hear it for New York, New York, New York [Outro: Alicia Keys & Jay-Z]
Oh, oh, oh New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made of There's nothin' you can't do
Now you're in New York, these streets will make you feel brand new Big lights will inspire you Let's hear it for New York, New York, New York
Sometimes I would pull lyrics from licensed databases like LyricFind or Musixmatch. The problem is that user-generated sites like AZLyrics or Genius often have errors that go uncorrected. I once found a version online that had "pretty girls all around the town" changed to something completely different in the second verse, and it looked official enough to fool someone quickly. I ended up cross-referencing the audio directly against the official music video lyrics card and the studio album version. That is the only reliable method. Listening to the track yourself while reading matters more than trusting any single website. If you need the lyrics for performance rights or synchronization licensing purposes, you should go through a proper licensing agency like ASCAP or BMI. The song is registered under Sony/ATV Music Publishing, and the writers are Alicia Keys, Shawn Carter, Angela Hunte, Jane Quintal, and Starrah. Trying to skip the licensing step by just using the lyrics somewhere public will come back to bite you. For casual use like learning the words or writing about the song, most major lyric sites will work fine. Just verify the chorus, since that is the part most commonly butchered. The opening lines are usually correct across the board. I wish I could say the same for the second verse, but Jay-Z's delivery can trip up transcription software, and a lot of amateur transcribers just guess at the mumbled parts.
The track samples Clyde Carroll's 1970s recording "New York, U.S.A." and the instrumental contains elements of Bob Dylan's "Forever Young." Those details show up in some lyric sites but not others. If a page does not mention the sample, it is probably not a thorough source. That alone is a decent indicator of whether the rest of the content on that page is worth trusting. I stopped looking for one perfect site years ago. My current process is simple: find the official video on YouTube with the lyrics displayed, pause where I need it, and write it down. It takes about three minutes for a song this length. It is faster and more accurate than scrolling through whatever random site pops up first on a search engine. You already know how unreliable those are.
