The 25 Best Songs About Ohio Ever Made
Photos by Ian Dickson/Barney Britton/Redferns/Rick Diamond/WireImage
As a lifelong Ohioan, I am rather affectionate about the state I was born and raised in. If you’ve read any of my writing before today, you likely already know that—I do my very best to shoehorn anything about Cleveland or Columbus into my stories. This place is a part of me, for better or for worse. Years ago, Paste did a list of the best songs about New York City and it still gets a lot of clicks to this day. It got me thinking: How have I never assembled a list of the best Ohio songs ever? There are certainly enough options to sort through. And, hell, rock ‘n’ roll was invented here, at the Moondog Coronation Ball in 1952. Well, the time feels especially right today, if for no other reason than I am sitting in my Northeast Ohio room and watching my neighbor mow his grass. It’s sunny and green and warm, and in a few months I am sure it will be cold and desolate and disgusting outside. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Ever since we entered the union in 1803, some of the greatest Americans have hailed from Ohio, including eight presidents, the first person to walk on the moon and, perhaps most importantly, LeBron James. But some of the greatest musicians are from here, too, including: Trent Reznor, Doris Day, Bootsy Collins, Tracy Chapman, Dave Grohl, Ohio Players, Dean Martin, Chrissie Hynde, Art Tatum, the Black Keys, Kim and Kelley Deal, Guided By Voices, Devo, Bobby Womack—the list goes on and on and on. I won’t be including Bowling for Soup’s “Ohio (Come Back to Texas),” because it is a pro-Texas song more than it is an Ohio song. Thank you for reading and indulging in my love for America’s Mistake on the Lake. Here are the 25 best songs about Ohio ever written.
25. Kid Cudi: “Cleveland is the Reason” (2008)
When Scott Mescudi released his debut mixtape A Kid Named Cudi in 2008, he wasn’t yet the Kid Cudi who became one of Kanye West’s proteges. But it was that mixtape that captured Ye’s interest, and the rapper signed Cudi to his GOOD Music label. The tape featured one of Cudi’s most beloved hits, “Day ‘n’ Nite,” but it also included “Cleveland is the Reason,” his ode to his hometown. He grew up in Shaker Heights and Solon before decamping to the University of Toledo for a year before dropping out. “Cleveland is the Reason” makes nods to North Coast resident Superman (“Hit ‘em like comic books, kaboom pow-pow”) and roaming the streets in an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Cudi raps about listening to fellow Ohioans the O’Jays while smoking Black & Milds, passing by friends selling CDs and drugs. He’d go on to make more impressive music than what was on his mixtape, but “Cleveland is the Reason” is one of those songs that, if you were a rap fan in Ohio in the late 2000s, you were putting on repeat. When Cleveland had Kid Cudi and Chip Tha Ripper leading the way, it felt like the city could become just as crucial to the rap game as Atlanta.
24. Modest Mouse: “Ohio” (1996)
I don’t know how much Portlandians like Modest Mouse know about the state of Ohio, but that didn’t stop them from singing about us on the This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About cut “Ohio.” Isaac Brock woozily sings the state name 20 times, before getting right to the core of who we are: “Hinges rusting, they swing louder than anything / Truly lonely, this place is flatter than it seems.” I am a staunch Long Drive acolyte, and “Ohio” existing on a tracklist with “Custom Concern” and “Dramamine” is good enough for me. The fact that we are able to claim lines like “Rows of light to illuminate lines, why don’t they turn them off and let us see night?” as our own is the cherry on top.
23. John Denver: “Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio” (1975)
There are no studio versions of the Randy Sparks-penned “Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio” available, as it was largely a live staple for John Denver over the years, but that doesn’t diminish its greatness. An Evening with John Denver is one of my favorite live records ever and “Saturday Night in Toledo, Ohio” gets laughs from the crowds as if it’s the Midwestern “Alice’s Restaurant Massacre.” “Saturday night in Toledo, Ohio is like being nowhere at all,” Denver sings out. “All through the day, how the hours rush by, you sit in the park and you watch the grass die.” Those images of mundanity turn into sidewalks rolling back at 10, homoerotic portraits of Montana truckers sleeping together downtown alone, watching buns rise at the bakery and a “wiv and wet wiv” motto as Denver bids the dogs of Toledo goodbye. It’s the kind of folk tune that’ll get you yapping, and Denver’s softened country vocal is the perfect vehicle for such a rabble-rousing bit.
22. The Band: “Look Out Cleveland” (1969)
Any song written by Robbie Roberston and sung by Rick Danko is an ace in my book. There are debates about whether or not “Look Out Cleveland” is about Cleveland, Ohio or Cleveland, Texas, but I say that the Buckeye State ought to get dibs on this boogie-woogie gem. The Band reckons with an incoming storm so powerful it can’t “be mistaken for just another dream.” Meteorologist Ben Pike even said “this old town’s gonna blow away.” “The storm is comin’ through, and it’s runnin’ right up on you,” Danko cries out, while Garth Hudson’s Lowrey organ whistles beneath his battered vocal. Robertson’s lead guitar snakes and screams, while Danko and Helm turn their rhythm into a waltz. “Look Out Cleveland” gets overshadowed by other songs on The Band, like “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” but I’d say it’s just as good—all Ohio biases aside.
21. Hawthorne Heights: “Ohio is For Lovers” (2004)
I actually don’t like this song, but I love the message it sends. “Because my heart is in Ohio” is practically my life’s purpose. I have never been a Hawthorne Heights fan, but any band from Dayton is a band I want nothing but the best for. Their emo and post-hardcore debut The Silence in Black and White went triple-Platinum in my hometown, even if the “so cut my wrists and black my eyes, so I can fall asleep tonight or die” lines are a bit too melodramatic for my liking. Either way, if you wrote a song that is so beloved that non-Ohioans know the “Ohio is For Lovers” slogan by heart, then your place on this list is more than earned. Virginia can kiss my ass.
20. The Mountain Goats: “Going to Cleveland” (1993/1999)
The first 25 seconds of “Going to Cleveland” are consumed by piercing tape static, until John Darnielle’s acoustic guitar and nasally lilt come crashing in. An unnamed antagonist tortures him with “those big eyes” and punishes him with pity. So, naturally, he’s going to Cleveland—just as he’s gone to Georgia, Bolivia, Bristol, Port Washington and about 40 other places over the last 30 years. Originally released on the cassette-only album Transmissions to Horace in 1993, “Going to Cleveland” wound up with a proper life on Bitter Melon Farm in 1999. “I hear the Cuyahoga calling, now I know what I was born for,” Darnielle yelps. Any Ohioan can relate to such a truth.
19. Counting Crows: “Four Days” (2002)
The Counting Crows’ third album, This Desert Life, sold a lot of copies (2 million in 2002 alone) and sported a #1 alternative hit in “Hanginaround.” But let’s not overlook “Four Days,” a non-single packed into the depths of the record’s A-side. “Time fades into the night, they descend and then they climb,” Adam Duritz cries out. “Feathers falling through the night, have you seen Ohio rise?” I am not the biggest Counting Crows fan in the world, though I am a big practitioner of game-recognizes-game, so not only do I have the utmost respect for Duritz’s 1990s dating history, but I am a lover of “Four Days” and its Ohio-bound beauty. “Take a breath, take your time, spread your wings and rise into the black Ohio skies” is something everyone should practice at least once.
18. Guided By Voices: “Dayton, Ohio/19 Something & 5” (1996)
When Robert Pollard earnestly asks “Isn’t it great to exist at this point in time…” you feel hopeful. Then he hits you with a tough scene: “…where the produce is rotten but no one is forgotten, on strawberry Philadelphia Drive.” “Dayton, Ohio/19 Something & 5” is canonically a song about imperfections, as Pollard and Guided By Voices juxtapose “children in the sprinkler” with “junkies on the corner” and “the smell of fried foods” with “pure hot tar.” But then, in pure Robert Pollard fashion, he gives us a beautiful couplet to chew on: “Man, you needn’t travel far,” he reckons, “to feel completely alive.” Possibly a response to Randy Newman’s “Dayton, Ohio – 1903,” “Dayton, Ohio/19 Something & 5” is a sub-two-minute song—like many of the best GBV songs are—and it’s sublime from start to end.
17. The Beach Boys: “Back Home” (1976)
Who’d have thought a couple of Californians could make a real barnburner like “Back Home,” an ode to rural Ohio summers. Written by Brian Wilson and Bob Norberg, the song is a feel-good gem with origins as far back as 1970, during the Sunflower and Surf’s Up sessions, before its eventual “official” release in 1976 on 15 Big Ones. “I’m gonna get up every morning before the roosters, I’ll run downstairs, fix my breakfast all alone,” Wilson sings. “I’ll milk those cows, feed the chickens and the horses.” It’s a farmer’s dream of sorts, one that you could probably plug into any Midwestern state, but the fact that the Beach Boys had their eyes on Ohio means a lot to me, specifically. “Hey, woo, feels okay back home!” Brian cries out, as Steve Douglas’s saxophone rings out with a coterie of backing voices from Mike Love, Carl Wilson and Al Jardine. “Back Home” is as splendid as any of the Beach Boys’ best cuts from the ‘70s.
16. Phil Ochs: “Boy in Ohio” (1970)
Phil Ochs died far too young, but he was so crucial to the anti-Vietnam War movement and the counterculture era that his legacy is forever enshrined in folk history. Before his passing in 1976, he wrote a song called “Boy in Ohio,” and it’s one of the prettiest depictions of Columbus you’ll ever find. “The Buckeye sun was a-shinin’, I rode my bike down Alum Creek Drive when I was a boy in Ohio,” he reckons. He nods to Burger Boy and honky tonk bars that contrast the summers of swimming and picking berries. There’s a freeway covering a field Ochs’s narrator once rambled across, the girls would “shine like the engines” and “the radio was always loud.” It’s a poem personified into a hymnal written in gorgeous, loving blood. “Boy in Ohio” is the kind of song that sounds like my DNA. “Soon I was grown and I had to leave, but I don’t believe I’ve had more fun than when I was a boy in Ohio,” Ochs concludes, and retrospect has never sounded so beautiful.
15. Damian Jurado: “Ohio” (1999)
One of the best and most underrated singer-songwriters of the last 30 years, Damian Jurado has conquered Sub Pop and Secretly Canadian and worked with everyone from Ken Stringfellow to David Bazan. On his second album in 1999, Rehearsals for Departure, he penned the opening track “Ohio,” an affecting, arresting lament of a break-up. “I ask where she’s headed, she tells me, ‘Ohio, I’ve not seen my mother in ages. It’s been a long time, a real long time,’” Jurado sings. “Out from my window, ‘How far is Ohio?’ She laughed and pointed out east. She said, ‘I grew up there with my dear mother and I haven’t seen her since 13.’” With a Dylan-esque harmonica in tow, Jurado lets the ache in his voice reverberate. While softly plucking away at his six-string, he bemoans one last heartbreak: “She belongs to her mother and the state of Ohio, I wish she belonged to me.”
14. Ian Hunter/The Presidents of the United States of America: “Cleveland Rocks” (1979)
Written by Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter (and produced by Bowie’s right-hand-man Mick Ronson) for his 1979 album You’re Never Alone with a Schizophrenic, “Cleveland Rocks” can be heard throughout the city at least once a week, perhaps more. That same year, WMMS would play “Cleveland Rocks” every Friday at 5 PM. It’s become an anthem cranked loud every time the Guardians, Cavaliers or Browns win at home, and the Presidents of the United States of America even covered the track for The Drew Carey Show’s theme song in the 1990s. Cleveland has embraced the song so warmly that Hunter was given the key to the city by mayor Dennis Kucinich in June 1979, and some of my fondest memories include walking up the Jacob’s Field aisles after an Indians win, banging my head to that sugar-sweet glam-rock chorus.
13. The Jayhawks: “Somewhere in Ohio” (2000)
The Jayhawks were formed in Minnesota, but the Americana four-piece know a thing or two about the North Coast. On their Bob Ezrin-prduced 2000 album Smile, the Jayhawks added a bit of pop and electronica to their twang, entering the same headspace Wilco had the year prior on Summerteeth. A standout from Smile also happens to be a Buckeye State track: “Somewhere in Ohio.” That chorus, where Gary Louris sings “Look out, Joe, I think the sky is fallin’” to the high-heavens, still lingers inside me, and I hum it more often than I’d have ever expected to. When Louris tells Joe that he’s “callin’ you from somewhere deep in Ohio,” there’s a bit of woundedness in his voice as the track kicks into another gear and the guitars punch upwards.
12. Pretenders: “My City Was Gone” (1984)
The song from the Pretenders’ third album, Learning to Crawl, that I return to most is “My City Was Gone,” Chrissie Hynde’s autobiographical lament of her native Akron, Ohio, which, by the time the band had found success, had eroded as the Rust Belt’s industrial triumphs evaporated. “I was stunned and amazed, my childhood memories slowly swirled past like the wind through the trees,” she sings with an ache in her swagger. Throw in a bassline from Tony Butler that’ll shake your skeleton, and it’s the exclamation point on a near-perfect record from one of the best British-American outfits to ever tumble out of our stereos. “My City Was Gone” is an honest portrayal of what Northeast Ohio turned into 40 years ago. Sometimes, it still feels hauntingly timeless.
11. Harry Nilsson: “Dayton, Ohio – 1903” (1970)
Written by Randy Newman, “Dayton, Ohio – 1903” didn’t appear on one of his records until Sail Away in 1972. Two years earlier, Harry Nilsson released an entire album of Newman covers, including the aforementioned, then-unreleased track. Nilsson’s version blows Newman’s out of the water, particularly because his vocal feels far more apt for the mood. He sings about the pleasantries, the clean air, niceties shared over tea and married couples enjoying a slow, loving day. “It’s a real nice way to spend the day in Dayton, Ohio,” Nilsson sings, “on a lazy Sunday afternoon in 1903. Sing a song of long ago when things could grow and days flowed quietly.” Newman plays piano on the song, and you can hear Nilsson break the fourth-wall by asking the control room to add more echo to his voice. “Dayton, Ohio – 1903” is a splendid tune that I hum all the time.
10. Bone Thugs-n-Harmony ft. Avant: “Cleveland is the City” (2002)
While Cleveland, Ohio has produced one of the most intolerable rappers of the last 20 years—who got his shit rocked so hard by Eminem that he started making pop-punk music—the North Coast is also responsible for one of the greatest rap groups of all time, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. Discovering their music as a kid cracked open my entire music taste; learning they were from Cleveland completely rewired my understanding of how historically rich the city’s music culture has been for the last 60 years. Bizzy Bone, Flesh-n-Bone, Krayzie Bone, Wish Bone and Layzie Bone hail from Glenville, and on their fifth album, Thug World Order, they gave Northeast Ohio a new anthem: “Cleveland is the City.” When Krayzie raps “Don’t think I forgot where I come from, dog, ‘cause I know Cleveland, Ohio fo’ sho where we slang dope in the slo,’” you feel it in your soul. When Avant and the group harmonize on “Cleveland Rocks” over and over again, no city has ever been greater. Bizzy shouts out Buck, Fred Warr, Rod J, Tye, Troy and his crew in the Hough neighborhood. Kinsman, Breman, 145th on St. Claire, 152nd on St. Claire, 88th, 92nd, 95th, 96th, B’s nest, the Indians and the Browns all get props, too. It’s a communal epic, a proclamation of birthplace beloved a hundred times over by Ohioans near and far.
9. The National: “Bloodbuzz Ohio” (2010)
The National’s fifth album, High Violet, is my favorite. It leans into the softer palette the Cincinnati five-piece teased perfectly on Boxer three years earlier, with tracks like “Anyone’s Ghost,” “England,” “Lemonworld” and “Terrible Love” making the record a kindred, poetic masterpiece. But it was lead single “Bloodbuzz Ohio” that set the tone, and it has become one of the greatest 21st century songs about the Buckeye State. The National have become more of a New York band since blowing up 15 years ago, but their roots remain fully in Ohio (their annual Homecoming Festival takes place here, after all), where “Bloodbuzz Ohio” aches and bruises. “I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees,” Matt Berninger sings out. “I never married, but Ohio don’t remember me.” For a band so tethered to this place, it’s a shock that “Bloodbuzz Ohio” is, really, their only track about their birthplace (“Day I Die” has a great “Girlfriends call from Cleveland, they will meet me anytime and anywhere” couplet, though). Nevertheless, it’s an all-timer.
8. R.E.M.: “Cuyahoga” (1986)
Depending on who you ask (our editor-in-chief), Life’s Rich Pageant is the best R.E.M. Depending on who you ask (me), “Cuyahoga” is one of their very best songs. Written about the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River, Michael Stipe does some of his best storytelling work on the track, singing about him and an old friend putting their “heads together and start[ing] a new country up.” “This land is the land of ours, this river runs red over it,” he reckons. “We knee-skinned it, you an dme, we knee-skinned that river red.” But perhaps the most rattling of the verses comes in the chorus, before the jangle-pop ramps up and Stipe cries out: “This is where they walked, this is where they swam. Take a picture here, take a souvenir.” An ecologically-minded song that merges fantasy with worn-down sentimentality, “Cuyahoga” is full of hope yet terrifyingly brutal.
7. Sun Kil Moon: “Carry Me Ohio” (2003)
The best song from Sun Kil Moon’s debut album, Ghosts of the Great Highway, is not “Glenn Tipton” or “Salvador Sanchez” or “Pancho Villa.” No, it’s “Carry Me Ohio,” a beautiful, six-minute wonder at the top of the record’s first side. I am a sucker for songs about my home state that position it as its own character. In Sun Kil Moon’s vision, Ohio is an angel healing the narrator’s soul. “Wadin’ through warm canals and pools clear blue, the Tuscarawas flowed into the Great Lakes,” Mark Kozelek sings. “Ridin’ back where the highway met dead tracks, the ground is now cement and glass, so far away.” On this list, “Carry Me Ohio” wins the award for the prettiest song about the Buckeye State. It also may very well be the saddest, as the lines “The touch of mist felt soft, felt warm on my face / Grey, vague dreams, a million miles ago you seem” feel like a wheelbarrow full of bricks being dumped on your chest.
6. Randy Newman: “Burn On” (1972)
Maybe you are familiar with “Burn On” thanks to the opening scene from the film Major League, which came out in 1989 and satirized the Cleveland Indians’ 30-year streak of losing seasons. Randy Newman’s 1972 song soundtracks a montage of clips filmed around the city, including stops at the city’s Moses Cleveland statue, the freight ports, the Cuyahoga River and construction workers repairing the streets. Written in reference to the Cuyahoga River catching on fire multiple times, Newman’s song is endearing and beautiful. “Cleveland, city of light, city of magic,” he sings. “Cleveland, even now I can remember, ‘cause the Cuyahoga River goes smokn’ through my dreams.” It’s got that typical Randy Newman panache of waltzing piano and his cartoonish vocal. Even through vignettes of oil barges and red moons, Newman singing “burn on, big river, burn on” sounds more like a warm embrace than a knock-down roast.
5. Bruce Springsteen: “Youngstown” (1995)
I grew up relatively close to Youngstown, Ohio, so Bruce Springsteen’s portrait of Northeast Ohio’s steel industry decline in the 1970s is one of the most heartbreaking songs of its kind. It’s the Boss’s “With God on Our Side,” detailing Youngstown’s history of making canonballs in the Civil War, making bombs and tanks in World War II and, then, the city sending its boys off to fight and die in the Vietnam War. “From the Monongaleh Valley to the Mesabi iron range to the coal mines of Appalachia, the story’s always the same,” Bruce sings. “700 tons of metal a day, now, sir, you tell me the world’s changed—once I made you rich enough to forget my name.” It’s one of Springsteen’s greatest-ever tracks, and has become so beloved by Ohioans that a now-defunct literary journal at Youngstown State University once named itself Jenny after it. I still see that “I pray the devil comes and takes me to stand in the fiery furnaces of hell” line in the stars; the song’s sparse melody sounds as hollow as the economic decline of Youngstown left the city’s imperfections.
4. The Michael Stanley Band: “My Town” (1983)
No band in the history of rock ‘n’ roll has sung about Cleveland more than the Michael Stanley Band. Stanley, who was a celebrity in Chagrin Falls and graduated from my alma mater, Hiram College, was Ohio’s Bruce Springsteen and as crucial to the successes of heartland rock as Tom Petty and John Mellencamp were. MSB named their 1981 album North Coast after Cleveland, but their 1983 track “My Town” has endured as something of an anthem for the city. Released just a handful of years after Cleveland was deemed “Bomb City” and its industrial flourishes were all but squashed, “My Town” is Stanley’s ode to the place where he learned about love and hate. “This town is my town, she’s got her ups and downs,” Stanley cries out to the heavens, “but love or hate it, it don’t matter, ‘cause this is my town.” Other MSB songs, like “Lover,” are Ohio songs, too, but “My Town” is so beloved in Cleveland that you might hear it at Browns Stadium or on the radio after a ballgame win. Stanley’s passing in 2021 left a hole in Northeast Ohio that, for my money, will never get patched up.
3. Gillian Welch: “Look at Miss Ohio” (2003)
Gillian Welch, ever one of our most important folk troubadours, wrote one of the greatest Ohio songs in 2003, on her fourth album Soul Journey—the crucial and very, very good follow-up to Time (The Revelator). “Look at Miss Ohio” includes a great resonator part from Greg Leisz, as Welch sings about a beautiful girl “running around with her rag-top down.” Miss Ohio has a fantasy of living wild in Atlanta rather than getting married—which is what her mother wants. “I know all about it, so you don’t have to shout it,” Welch laments. “I’m gonna straighten it out somehow. Yeah, I want to do right but not right now.” With her longtime partner David Rawlings playing guitar alongside her, Gillian Welch is at her best on “Look at Miss Ohio,” a story that wraps you up without forcing an entire lifetime onto you. “Oh me, oh my oh, would ya look at Miss Ohio?” is still one of my favorite refrains in all of music.
2. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: “Ohio” (1970)
Likely the most popular song about Ohio ever written, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young spoke out about the Kent State Shooting in 1970 with one of the greatest protest anthems ever written. From the moment we hear that opening riff come screaming into focus, there’s nothing quite like “Ohio.” Performed with an anger that can be felt when David Crosby yells out “How many more?” in the track’s breakdown, “Ohio” isn’t just one of the greatest songs about the Buckeye State—it’s possibly CSNY’s greatest song, too. And “Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming, we’re finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio” was the opening verse heard around the world.
1. The McCoys: “Hang On Sloopy” (1965)
While CSNY’s “Ohio” remains one of the most affecting songs from the counterculture era, there’s no denying that my state’s greatest tune belongs to a little band from Union City, Indiana called the McCoys. “Hang On Sloopy” was penned by Wes Farrell and Bert Berns in 1964 and originally recorded by the Vibrations, charting at #26 on the Hot 100. After becoming a standard among garage bands, the McCoys struck gold when their 1965 rendition of the track soared to #1. Inspired by Dorothy Sloop, a jazz singer from Steubenville, “Hang On Sloopy” is one of the most iconic Ohio songs ever released—it doesn’t hurt that, at every Cleveland Guardians home game, the crowd sings it together just as Bostonians sing “Sweet Caroline” at Red Sox games. And, “Hang On Sloopy” is so beloved in Ohio that the state deemed it its “official rock song.” Shouting “O-H-I-O” with your fellow Buckeyes always sounds so, so sweet.
Listen to a playlist of these 25 songs below.