Steve Earle and Steve Buscemi Celebrate New York’s Diversity With ‘City of Immigrants’ Video

Veteran singer-songwriter-actor Steve Earle and veteran actor-director Steve Buscemi are two people who would seem to have known each other for ages. Their work, whether it’s Earle’s vast catalog of songs (“Copperhead Road,” “Guitar Town”) and acting roles (“The Wire,” “Treme,” “Leaves of Grass”), or Buscemi’s formidable history of acting and directing (“Fargo,” “Reservoir Dogs,” “The Big Lebowski,” “The Sopranos,” “Boardwalk Empire”), shares a certain humanity, sensitivity and sensibilities.

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Yet the two actually met for the first time earlier this year, after Buscemi was suggested as a director for a new video for Earle’s 2007 song “City of Immigrants,” from his New York-themed album “Washington Square Serenade.” The video is a heartfelt, lively celebration of the polyglot melting pot that New York City has always been, created by two longtime residents.

Earle and Buscemi, together with a small cast of extras and technicians, were together in the East Village one sunny spring afternoon in April to shoot footage for the clip, which features people from the city’s countless ethnic groups, along with shots of Earle walking the streets and singing the in several different neighborhoods — also including Jackson Heights in Queens, which the singer describes as “easily the most diverse neighborhood in the country” — and performing a concert at the Gramercy Theater.

“I don’t need to go travelin’/ Open my door and the world walks in
“Livin’ in a city that never sleeps / My heart keepin’ time to a thousand beats
“Singin’ in languages I don’t speak
“Livin’ in a city of immigrants”

While the song was written around a year after Texas-born Earle first moved to the city, and it would have been topical at virtually any point in the past four centuries, its message is exceptionally resonant now. The inspiration for the video came last fall.

“I was walking through Chinatown on my way to drop my son off at school that morning last fall when ICE came into those court buildings downtown,” Earle, seated at Lucinda Williams’ bar in the East Village, recalls. “Activists got wind of it, and all these people in the neighborhood just kept blocking ICE out, blocking them out, until they finally gave up,” he says.

“The idea came about because [New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani basically said the words of this song in his [inauguration] speech: ‘New York will always be a city of immigrants.’ And I just thought, I need to try to get this song back out there.”

Further inspiration came a few weeks later. “I was texting with Bruce [Springsteen], who joined Tom Morello onstage at First Avenue in Minneapolis when all that shit was going down with ICE there [in January],” he recalls. “So to a certain extent, I was shamed into it by Bruce and Morello,” he laughs. “Bruce released ‘Streets of Minneapolis,’ Tom Morello went to Minneapolis and Bruce showed up there, and I’m home in New York, like, ‘Get off your ass, Earle!’” 

He originally asked his friend Ethan Hawke to direct, who was interested but deep in the Oscar campaign for the Lorenz Hart biographical film “Blue Moon,” and then went straight into filming a series (he and Earle are collaborating on a different project, “I think out of guilt because he couldn’t direct the video,” Earle laughs).

While neither Steve is totally clear on how they were first connected for “City of Immigrants” video, the initial contact came about through a different friend, actor Bobby Cannavale, who starred in “Blue Moon” with Hawke and in “Boardwalk Empire” with Buscemi.

“I’m not sure exactly how it happened,” Buscemi laughs, “except that I got a text from Bobby, who knows Steve and I think knows Steve’s manager. He said, ‘They’re looking for a director for this video — I don’t know why, but I think you’d be good for it.’”

The Steves and manager Danny Goldberg got on a Zoom the next night, shared some ideas, and Buscemi said, “OK, if it’s more of a documentary-style, guerrilla-style shoot, yeah, I can do that.”

And that is exactly the mood of the video, a collection of images of the city that will be familiar to nearly anyone who lives here: dozens of shots of people from every walk of life, all across the city, working, playing, smiling, and marching in parades and, of course, a pro-immigration demonstration earlier this year.

“It’s his love letter to New York,” Buscemi says. “But to hear it now, with mass deportations and ICE — I think the meaning is even more potent. And I think this is a time where people need to support each other and to speak out, speak up and do what we can.

“I think anybody can appreciate that song,” he concludes. “It doesn’t even need to be political. It’s just human.”