While Lily Allen isn’t the first musician to weave design details into their work, her new album West End Girl may just be one of the most literal examples yet. The record explicitly chronicles her Brooklyn brownstone purchase with specifics like designer names, mortgage anxiety, and floor counts. Allen joins a rich tradition of artists who’ve made real-life houses, streets, and architectural spaces central to their music. Below, we rounded up 10 tracks where the address matters just as much as the melody.
“West End Girl” — Lily Allen
The title track of Allen’s 2025 divorce album transforms a specific Carroll Gardens townhouse into a study of relationship dissolution. Allen sings about the “four or five floors” of a real brownstone she purchased with then-husband David Harbour. The Carroll Gardens property, which the couple listed for $18 million after their separation, features tiger-striped carpets climbing the stairs, a double-sided olive suede sofa, and powder rooms with hand-painted wallpaper depicting mythological creatures. The lyrics capture Allen’s complex view of the home, with references to mortgage payments and walking through rooms designed with someone she no longer recognizes. Allen has described the album as “autofiction”—a genre that combines autobiography and fiction.Related
“The Last Great American Dynasty” — Taylor Swift
Swift purchased her Watch Hill, Rhode Island estate known as Holiday House for $17.75 million in 2013, but it wasn’t until her 2020 album Folklore that she fully excavated its history. The song chronicles the life of Rebekah West Harkness, the Standard Oil heiress and ballet patron who previously owned the seaside property with her husband William (Bill) Hale Harkness in the 1940s. Swift’s lyrics document specific, researched details: Rebekah’s marriage to Bill, their purchase and naming of Holiday House, and their “tasteful, if a little loud” parties that reportedly scandalized Watch Hill’s old-money residents. Built in 1930, the 11,000-square-foot waterfront house sits on 5.23 acres with eight bedrooms and ten-and-a-half bathrooms. Swift draws parallels between Rebekah’s reputation as Watch Hill’s “loudest woman” and her own headline-making Fourth of July parties and paparazzi-filled beach walks with Tom Hiddleston in 2016. The song documents how neighbors allegedly criticized Swift’s security team’s presence on the public beach, and how Rhode Island’s governor proposed what became known as a “Taylor Swift tax” on second homes valued over a million dollars.
“Wuthering Heights” — Kate Bush
Bush’s 1978 debut single doesn’t just reference Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel—it’s narrated from the perspective of the ghost Catherine Earnshaw haunting the Yorkshire moors estate that gives the book its name. Bush reportedly wrote the song after watching a 1967 BBC adaptation late one night, immediately sitting down to compose. The fictional Wuthering Heights farmhouse is widely believed to be based on Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse near Haworth in West Yorkshire, where the Brontë sisters lived and wrote. Bush’s connection to the material deepened in 2018 when she contributed a rare public work: an inscription for a memorial stone dedicated to Emily Brontë on the Yorkshire moors between Haworth and Thornton, the sisters’ birthplace. The inscription reads: “No coward soul is mine, No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere”—a line from Brontë’s poem “No Coward Soul Is Mine.”
“Our House” — Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Graham Nash reportedly wrote this 1970 ode to domestic bliss in under an hour, capturing the cozy intimacy of his Laurel Canyon home with Joni Mitchell. The song immortalizes what Nash has described as a single morning: breakfast at Art’s Deli on Ventura Boulevard, buying an inexpensive vase at a nearby antique shop, then returning to their Los Angeles canyon hideaway where Nash lit a fire while Mitchell arranged flowers. With imagery of illuminated windows, “fiery gems” of light, and “two cats in the yard,” it became the defining anthem of countercultural domesticity in the Laurel Canyon music scene. Nash has said the entire song documents a real day, a real house, and a real relationship. The modest canyon home that he and Mitchell lived in epitomized the back-to-the-land style of late-1960s Los Angeles folk-rock circles. Nash later described it as one of the most honest songs he’d ever written.
House of Balloons — The Weeknd
The Weeknd’s career-defining 2011 debut mixtape takes its name from an actual address: 65 Spencer Avenue in Toronto’s Parkdale neighborhood, just blocks from the intersection of King Street and Dufferin Street. Abel Tesfaye, as the Weeknd is legally known, confirmed the address on Reddit in 2013, explaining to Rolling Stone in 2015 that he and his roommates lived in the loft space where they’d also throw parties. “We’d try to make it celebratory, so we’d have balloons,” he said. The house sat in a densely populated block filled with high-rise apartments, and Tesfaye told Rolling Stone, “We kind of put that part of the city on. We were legends on that street. If you go there now, it’s all these little 18-year-old kids that look like me.” The location appeared briefly in a 2017 Puma commercial starring the Weeknd, and more than a decade after the mixtape’s release, the modest house still stands looking much the same—though recent photos show a large cat tree positioned outside the front door.
“So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” — Simon & Garfunkel
Paul Simon’s 1970 ballad from Bridge Over Troubled Water ostensibly pays tribute to the legendary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who had a seven-decade career that produced over 1,000 designs, including the famed Fallingwater house and New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Art Garfunkel, who studied architecture at Columbia University before earning degrees in art history and mathematics, reportedly requested that Simon write a song about Wright. However, Simon later admitted he knew little about the architect and instead wrote a cryptic farewell to his musical partner, using Wright’s name as a substitute.
“Visions of Johanna” — Bob Dylan
While Dylan has never confirmed the song’s setting, music historians and Dylan scholars have long associated “Visions of Johanna” with New York’s Chelsea Hotel, the artists’ residence at 222 West 23rd Street that housed everyone from Leonard Cohen to Patti Smith. The 1966 track captures late-night insomnia and romantic longing in a cramped hotel room, with Dylan describing “the heat pipes coughing” and “the country music station plays soft.” The Chelsea Hotel, built between 1883 and 1884 and operating as a hotel from 1905, became synonymous with bohemian New York—a place where artists lived for extended periods in small rooms with shared bathrooms down the hall. Dylan lived at the Chelsea in the mid-1960s, the same period he wrote “Visions of Johanna.” The hotel underwent an extensive 11-year renovation after closing in 2011, reopening in 2022 as a luxury property with preserved apartments for some remaining tenants. While the song never explicitly names the hotel, its atmospheric details of cramped quarters, all-night introspection, and artistic anxiety map onto the Chelsea’s mythology as a space where creativity and chaos coexisted in narrow rooms with high ceilings.
“Malibu” — Miley Cyrus
Cyrus’ 2017 single from her album Younger Now documented a specific place and relationship at the peak of contentment: the Malibu home she shared with then-fiancé Liam Hemsworth. The singer purchased the contemporary two-story residence east of Paradise Cove in 2016 for $2.525 million, a four-bedroom, three-bathroom house accessible by a bridged driveway and nestled among a canopy of trees. The property featured bi-folding glass doors opening to a trellis-topped patio, fountains, rolling lawns, and a gazebo with a spa. Cyrus wrote the track in her home studio, later describing it as “a song about a place and person that at the time I loved very much.” The following year, in November 2018, the Woolsey Fire destroyed the home along with hundreds of other structures in the area. She returned to Malibu in 2022 and purchased a $7.9 million Mediterranean-style mansion in the gated Sea View Estates community above Zuma Beach.
