Songfacts®:

• Amy MacDonald's parents traveled around the US in their younger days during the 1970s. This song was inspired by stories the singer's father told her about him and her mother in New York (and the Hudson River that runs alongside the city). She recalled to The Sun: "They stayed in an awful place, there were three huge bolts across the inside of the door to keep them safe. I just found it mad thinking of my parents being such risk takers."
• The day after her father told her the New York bolt story, Macdonald was writing with her Human Demands songwriting partner Matt Jones in her dining room. Inspired by her dad's tale and a huge painting of New York's George Washington Bridge hanging on her wall, they came up with a song where a woman is remembering their time in New York with her husband when they "lived like a king and queen." However, now her life is full of "fear and doubt" and she wonders if she's made the right decisions. MacDonald explained to Wonderland:
  
  "You'll never know if you've done the right thing or made the right choices in life. We'll never know if there's something better for us. We'll never know if things would be different and that's OK and it's part of being human. We reminisce, we look back, we think what could have been and then we carry on."
• Amy MacDonald has sung about New York before. Her 2012 Life In A Beautiful Light album contains the track "4th of July" about a childhood trip to the Big Apple with her family on Independence Day.
• Amy Macdonald released "The Hudson" as the lead single from Human Demands on August 27, 2020. She recorded the album with Kasabian and Arctic Monkeys producer Jim Abbiss.