This song protesting a new Starbucks in North Adams will get stuck in your head

Don't say we didn't warn you.

After city officials in North Adams greenlit a developer’s plans to turn an empty lot into a commercial complex with multiple drive-throughs, Audrey Aristeo pulled out her ukulele, sat down in her bedroom, and began to write.

The end result — “they’re building a starbucks” — is a frustrated anthem about missed opportunities, wasted potential, and a general culture that values cars and corporate chains over local communities.

And fair warning, it’s incredibly catchy.

Aristeo, a 24-year-old North Adams resident who uses she/they pronouns, said she wrote the song out of anger about the multi-tenant retail development, which will plant a Starbucks directly across from existing Dunkin’ and McDonald’s outposts.

The property is located on Route 2 at the corner of Union and Eagle streets, a busy thoroughfare “that’s already comically horrible,” Aristeo pointed out in an interview. She said she felt frustrated about “the general momentum here and in other places toward big business and car-centric infrastructure and away from local economies and walkable cities.”

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

She expands on that thought in the song, offering a few suggestions: “There’s a hundred thousand things we could have done with that weird little corner, like green space, or housing, or anything other than another gigantic conglomerate swallowing, stifling, eating our city whole.”

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

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

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

A conversation starter

A graduate of Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Aristeo holds a bachelor’s degree in book arts and dabbles in various media. Music is a new foray, and “they’re building a starbucks” is the first original song Aristeo has shared publicly.

“I wrote the lyrics and the melody by myself, in my bedroom, kind of a frenzied state, in about an hour,” she explained. “I just really felt something in me that needed to get out. And I did that, and then I listened to it back, and I was like, ‘I can do something with this.’ It needed to be that kind of quick and dirty sort of process in order for me to avoid my perfectionist tendencies.”

Aristeo’s partner helped her film scenes for the music video around North Adams earlier this month, and the song was up on YouTube within a week. The lyrics are full of comical, quotable, and earworm-worthy lines such as “bigwig Springfield chucklef***ks” and “we’re doing backflips just to tongue-kiss the devil.”

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

She said the feedback thus far has been overwhelmingly positive, and the song’s message seems to have struck a nerve among people who live and work in North Adams.

“Overall, it started a lot of conversations with people in the community that I might not necessarily have connected 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 what I want people to take away from it, if they take something away, is maybe a desire to be more aware of what’s happening in their town or city, and maybe feel empowered to advocate for change in planning or zoning meetings,” Aristeo said. “For example, get involved with local community efforts to make things better, or boycott big businesses that threaten to swallow up smaller ones.”