A record store at night under a glowing red neon Records sign, with shelves of vinyl albums and a coffee grinder full of beans on the counter

The 10 Best Songs About Coffee, Ranked

Ranked

The most important song ever written about coffee helped invent the MP3. That is not a stretch. When German engineers were teaching computers to shrink music files, the track they kept testing against was a woman singing alone about a diner and a cup of coffee. Coffee has been inspiring songwriters for nearly three centuries, from a Leipzig coffeehouse in the 1730s to the biggest streaming hit on the planet in 2024, and the results range from comic opera to quiet heartbreak.

We ranked the ten best songs about coffee, weighing how much each still matters, how good it really is, and whether coffee does real work in it.

10

“The Coffee Song,” Frank Sinatra

1946

Sinatra recorded this one in Hollywood on July 24, 1946, with Axel Stordahl arranging, and it is pure fun: a bouncy novelty number by Bob Hilliard and Dick Miles about a country with so much coffee that nobody can drink anything else. Its famous refrain says they’ve got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil.

It ranks tenth because it is more joke than song, but it proved early that coffee could carry a whole tune.

09

“Black Coffee in Bed,” Squeeze

1982

Squeeze built a breakup song around one small domestic detail: a coffee stain on a notebook, left by someone who is no longer around. It appeared on Sweets from a Stranger, and the backing vocals came from two people who were stars in their own right, Elvis Costello and Paul Young.

It is the most grown up entry on the list. No caffeine buzz, no romance of the cafe, just the leftover proof that someone used to share your mornings.

08

“Cigarettes and Coffee,” Otis Redding

1966

Released on The Soul Album in April 1966 and written by Jerry Butler, Eddie Thomas and Jay Walker, this is coffee as the soundtrack to a conversation that has run long past midnight. Redding sings it slow and tender, and the coffee is just there on the table, keeping two people awake so they can keep talking.

Plenty of songs use coffee to mean morning. This one uses it to mean the hours nobody wants to end.

07

“Java Jive,” The Ink Spots

1940

Written in 1940 by Ben Oakland and Milton Drake, “Java Jive” is a swinging love letter to a cup of java, and The Ink Spots took it to No. 17 on the US pop chart. It even has a famous mistake baked in. The lyric was meant to say “cheery beery bean,” a pun on the old tune “Ciribiribin,” but Deek Watson heard it as “cheery cheery bean,” and that is how it was sung.

The Manhattan Transfer revived it on their 1975 self titled album. Either version is the musical equivalent of a second cup.

06

Coffee Cantata, Johann Sebastian Bach

Around 1734

Yes, Bach wrote a comic opera about coffee addiction. Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht, catalogued as BWV 211, was written for the Collegium Musicum that performed at Gottfried Zimmermann’s coffeehouse in Leipzig, with a libretto by Picander. The plot is a father trying everything to get his daughter to give up coffee. She is not interested.

It is the oldest song on this list by about two centuries, and the joke still works. If you want more on the composer’s own habits, he turns up in our look at famous coffee drinkers in history.

05

“Black Coffee,” Sarah Vaughan and Peggy Lee

1949 and 1953

Sonny Burke and Paul Francis Webster wrote “Black Coffee” in 1948, and it became one of the great torch songs of the era. Sarah Vaughan recorded it first, in May 1949. Peggy Lee recorded her version on May 4, 1953, and made it the title track of her album Black Coffee.

This is coffee as loneliness: a pot on the stove, a long night, someone who has not come home.

04

“One More Cup of Coffee,” Bob Dylan

1976

Dylan recorded it on July 30, 1975, and released it on Desire in January 1976. The spark was a Romani celebration in a small town in the south of France, which Dylan attended on his 34th birthday that May. The song’s plea is one more cup of coffee for the road before heading down into the valley below.

The session has its own legends. Emmylou Harris sang harmony without knowing the songs, with Dylan nudging her when to come in, and the opening bass part happened because violinist Scarlet Rivera was not ready yet. The White Stripes, Robert Plant and Tom Jones have all covered it.

03

“Coffee & TV,” Blur

1999

Graham Coxon wrote and sang this 13 single, released June 28, 1999, and it is about wanting a quieter, sober life after giving up alcohol. Coffee and television are the simple comforts he would rather have. Underneath the sweetness is a real struggle, which is why it hits harder than it first appears to.

Then there is the video. Directed by Hammer & Tongs, it follows Milky, a milk carton built by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, on a search for the band’s missing guitarist. It won Best Video at the 1999 MTV Europe Music Awards and at the 2000 NME Awards, and at Blur’s 2012 Hyde Park show fans were handed replica Milky cartons.

02

“Espresso,” Sabrina Carpenter

2024

Released on April 11, 2024, just before Coachella, “Espresso” turned a coffee order into the defining brag of the year. It climbed to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, became Spotify’s most streamed song in the world for 2024 with about 1.6 billion streams, and won Best Pop Solo Performance at the 2025 Grammys.

The conceit is simple and very funny: she is so irresistible that she keeps people up at night, the way a shot of espresso does. It is the first coffee song in decades that actually changed how people talk, and it made ordering an espresso feel like a punchline everyone was in on.

01

“Tom’s Diner,” Suzanne Vega

1987

Suzanne Vega wrote it about Tom’s Restaurant, at Broadway and West 112th Street in Manhattan, where she used to stop for coffee while she was a student at Barnard in the early 1980s. The song is just a narrator at a counter, waiting for her coffee and watching the morning happen around her. If the diner looks familiar, it is because the same building played the outside of Monk’s Café on Seinfeld.

The a cappella original appeared on Solitude Standing in 1987. In 1990 the British producers DNA put a beat under it, and that remix reached No. 5 on the Hot 100, No. 2 in the UK and No. 1 in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

But its strangest legacy is technical. Karlheinz Brandenburg, working at the Fraunhofer institute in Germany, used Vega’s bare voice as a test while developing MP3 compression. “I knew it would be nearly impossible to compress this warm a cappella voice,” he later said. Vega became known as the Mother of the MP3. Every song you have ever streamed owes a small debt to a woman waiting for a cup of coffee.

Every song you have ever streamed owes a small debt to a woman waiting for a cup of coffee.

Why coffee keeps ending up in songs

Line the list up and a pattern shows. Almost none of these songs care what the coffee tastes like. Coffee is a clock, marking the early morning or the late night. It is a companion when someone is missing. It is the one more cup that buys a few minutes before you have to leave. Songwriters reach for it because everybody knows exactly what that cup feels like.

The playlist, in order

1. “Tom’s Diner,” Suzanne Vega
2. “Espresso,” Sabrina Carpenter
3. “Coffee & TV,” Blur
4. “One More Cup of Coffee,” Bob Dylan
5. “Black Coffee,” Sarah Vaughan and Peggy Lee
6. Coffee Cantata, Johann Sebastian Bach
7. “Java Jive,” The Ink Spots
8. “Cigarettes and Coffee,” Otis Redding
9. “Black Coffee in Bed,” Squeeze
10. “The Coffee Song,” Frank Sinatra

Put it on shuffle with a fresh cup and see which one sticks. And if you like your coffee culture on screen as well as on record, our ranking of the most famous coffee scenes in movies and TV is the natural next stop.

Sources

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