Songfacts®:

• The song title refers to Coney Island, a peninsula in southernmost Brooklyn, New York City, USA, with a beach on the Atlantic Ocean. Between the end of the 19th century and World War II, Coney Island's amusement park area was the largest in the United States, attracting several million visitors per year.
• Frontman James Skelly told BBC's Newsbeat about the song: "It's about a day when we mastered the last album in the US and we just got the train up to Coney Island. There was no one there and I just love stuff like that. We're lucky to see stuff like that, being in a band."
• Other songs that reference Coney Island in their lyrics include:
  
  1. The Franz Ferdinand single Eleanor Put Your Boots On, which features lyrics about a girl in New York, and includes the lines, "But if you run you can run to the Coney Island roller coaster / Ride to the highest points / And leap across the filthy water."
  
  2. David Bowie's Slip Away from his 2002 album Heathen. The song is a homage to New Jersey vaudeville-styled comedian and pianist "Uncle" Floyd Vivino, and it includes the lines, "Sailing over Coney Island / Twinkle twinkle Uncle Floyd / We were dumb but you were fun, boy How I wonder where you are."
  
  3. They Might Be Giants' New York City is a song about a boy and a girl who fall in love in the Big Apple. In the second verse, various landmarks of New York City are referred to - "Statue of Liberty, Staten Island Ferry, Co-op City, Katz's and Tiffany's, Central Park, Brooklyn Bridge, The Empire State where Dylan lived, Coney Island and Times Square, Rockefeller Center ... wish I was there."
  
  4. New York punk band The Ramones' track Oh Oh I Love Her So from their 1977 album Leave Home includes the lines: "Then we went down to Coney Island / On the coaster and around again / And no one's gonna ever tear us apart / Cause she's my sweetheart."
  
  5. The Heavy shot their video for "Sixteen" there.
  
  6. On Taylor Swift's "Coney Island," she is sitting on a bench on the peninsula, reflecting on a relationship gone wrong.