As parts of the country begin re-opening, with many national parks allowing vehicular traffic again, we thought it an excellent time for this guide to picking the perfect playlist. – Ed.
In Killing Yourself to Live, his 2005 book about a 6,557-mile road trip visiting places where death had played an important role in music – where musicians died or committed suicide, where fatal concert disasters had happened, where Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the devil – Chuck Klosterman discussed the number of CDs he would take with him.
It will take three hours to decide which compact discs to put in the backseat of my Tauntaun. This is the kind of quandary that keeps people like me from sleeping…I have 2,233 CDs. Right now, my eyes are scanning their alphabetized titles and I’m wondering how many will make the cut for my drive across America. This decision will dictate everything. Space will be limited, so I can only select those albums that will be undeniably essential.
I elect to bring 600.
I feel this. The more road trips I take, the more pressure I put on myself: People will be riding in your car for three, four, seven hours. You are responsible for their memories. Which means you are responsible for the soundtrack to their trip. What kind of memories do you want them to have? The music must feel right for the drive. Don’t blow it.
iTunes says I have 75 days of music on my computer right now, 27,346 songs, 130+ GB of everything. Actually, check that – I just deleted the soundtrack from The English Patient, which I believe was my ex-wife’s. Nothing personal; this is a mound of audio to sort through at the beginning of any cross-country or regional journey, on top of packing, ensuring that the car is ready, trying to figure out what to eat, and everything else. You can forget tent stakes, stove fuel, a map to the area, your national parks pass – all those things are replaceable when you arrive wherever it is you’re going. But the music is not. It is important. I mean, come on, do you want to listen to Harvard Business Review podcasts all the way to the desert? (No offense if you do.)
I have meditated at length about the proper amount of music, a la Klosterman, and settled on this equation:
Round-trip Length of Road Trip (in hours and minutes) = Length of Road Trip Playlist x ½
Driving to Moab from Denver? I need a minimum six-hour playlist. We’ll hear some of the same songs on the way back, but twice isn’t too much in one week, or even a three-day weekend. That’s 360 minutes of music, which is roughly 100 songs. Not as daunting. All I have to do is pick my favorite 100 songs of all time, right?
Actually, not so simple. I have made mistakes. There is a certain type of music that fits the road. Ask anyone what kind of music they listen to, and they’ll doubtlessly say “everything,” or “everything but contemporary country music.” Of course they mean that they’re open to most kinds of music, but they don’t listen to classical that often. Or operas. Everyone listens to “everything.” So what is proper road trip music?
Jazz, to me, is coffee-drinking music, or for the morning, or in airports, trying to remain the calm center of the universe as the world melts down around me in the TSA line or the ticket counter. Hip hop is maybe America’s greatest true organic music, but its rhythm is more suited for walking on sidewalks with headphones on or cruising around cities than it is for long stretches of open road.
Guitars and other stringed instruments are the backbone of road music. Think driving into the sunset, or from the sunrise, endless highway, wheels spinning, 70 mph (or 55 on curvy mountain roads). Contemplative lyrics. Acoustic guitars, slide guitars, banjos. Storytelling. Lyrics about life, traveling, knowing, not knowing, going, leaving. Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” while a great song, is not exactly right for this. Bob Dylan’s “Isis” is. Fleet Foxes’ “Montezuma.” My Morning Jacket, “Golden.” Lord Huron, “The Stranger.” Waylon Jennings, Neil Young, Willie Nelson, The National, Springsteen and Springsteen covers, Tallest Man on Earth, people who know how to strum and pluck and tell a good story and/or make you want to stare out the window and scratch your chin.
I have found no true formula, no real list of hard rules. Even when you really get it, it’s only for a few minutes: A feeling when you’re driving somewhere maybe with a good friend, often in the last hours of a day, and the first few seconds of the perfect song come on, and if you turn up the volume loud enough, you are able to create a music video in your mind, and it becomes a memory. If you nail it, every time you hear that song for the rest of your life, you’ll say to yourself, This song always reminds me of that afternoon Nick and I drove into Zion for the first time, or This song takes me back to that week in the desert with my friends. And if you do it right, it doesn’t even matter what the song is about.
Photo: Diego Jimenez
Hear, hear.
In February I drove about 8000 miles in 2 weeks through BC and the Yukon and Alaska. That translates to a LOT of time in the car! Imagine my horror when my co-driver (who’s car we were using) announced he wasn’t into music and had only brought a single CD of some bizarre bluegrass. AHHHHH!!! I nearly drove off the first mountain we came to.
I’m in the middle of crafting a playlist for a drive from New Hampshire to Colorado at the beginning of January, and while going through my music I discovered I have enough Bruce Springsteen to last the whole way…is this a problem? Absolutely not.
Does this playlist exist on Spotify?
I was going to ask the same question
I recommend “The West” on Spotify. A great playlist that captures a lot of the above-mentioned tunes and others. Made for long road trips.
There is only ONE RULE: First song of the trip is always a ZZ Top classic like LaGrange, Tush or Cheap Sunglasses. Need to pump the blood pulling out of the driveway.
Other than that, I will mix Lucinda Williams with the Stones, Tracy Chapman with Guns and Roses and Sinatra with AC/DC. Oh, and always have that Golden Earring one hit wonder waiting for when you hit the wall at 3AM!
For extra long raid trips, I like to make a play list of entire albums. In the age of iTunes and MP3s, the joy of listening to a solid album start to finish can be lost. Road trips are the perfect time to rediscover that art. Some of my favorites are U2 Joshua Tree and Jim Morrison’s American Prayer for the deserts, Eddie Vedder’s Into the Wild for forested mountain passes, and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon for the twilight hours.
Steve, et al — brilliant idea….AJ Spotify playlist!!
From Oceanside CA with two friends to visit another in Reno NV. Two AM, full moon with the windows open, streaking through the night and Iron Butterfly “Inna Gadda Da Vida” full version comes over a crystal clear radio station from somewhere–I cannot hear it now without thinking of then.
Brand X – Unorthodox Behaviour
Pink Floyd – Wish you were Here
Bill Buford – One Of A Kind
Macy Gray – The Id
David Bowie – David Live
King Crimson – Absent Lovers
Lou Reed – New York
Haircut 100 – Pelican West
Frank Zappa – One size fits all
Rolling Stones – Rarities
Jean Luc Ponty – Mystical Adventures
Abandoned Pools – Humanistic
Soul Coughing – Lust in Phaze
Led Zeppelin – Presence
Jack Johnson – Brushfire Fairytales
RTF – Romantic Warrior
Black Sabbath – Paranoid
Meshell Ndegeocello – Plantation Lullabies
Son of Dave – Shake a bone
Dixie Dregs – Freefall
Peter Gabriel – Melt
Prince – Hits
Snoop
Ella
LCD
Frank
Jimi…
“If you nail it, every time you hear that song for the rest of your life, you’ll say to yourself…”
Nothing but facts here.
I once ran out of CDs on a trip and resorted to scanning the local radio during the summer of Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off”.
Whenever that song pops up in a commercial or somewhere I think of Bison and The Badlands.
Probably the imagery she had in mind.
Literally anything by fIREHOSE makes great road trip music. Neil Young of course. The entire soundtrack to Volcom’s “The Garden.” But I cannot stress fIREHOSE enough.
I have a satellite receiver connected to one of my several computers and my dish (my uncle’s big old 8′ Channel Master dualbander from the 80s) is frequently pointed at a certain couple satellites that have good coverage of all of North America. These satellites are used by commercial backround music services which both broadcast in the clear. I have some software that lets one “download” the MPEG2 audio stream (format is similar to MP3 and compatible with most MP3 players, but older) directly to a large file on the hard drive, which is basically the same thing most DVRs do. I can then run the file through some other software (okay… is it not obvious enough that I’m a nerd?) that lets me break it up into individual songs that can be loaded onto an audio player and played in random order, or it can just be loaded and played as one long continuous linear block.
What am I getting at? You can never, ever go wrong with lift music on your car stereo or playing quietly in the backcountry!
(Remember; for your own personal listening only. Please don’t fuck it up it for the rest of us by pirating background music on the Internet! (“Insert P.C. disclaimer here”.))
he’s a freakin nerrrrrd, he he he!!
– Max headroom, or was it?
sunday morning, especially after a rowdy Saturday night, and your on the road, nothin’ beats hank Williams……