Design: Dan Streeting
I’ve always liked songs about the road or songs heard while on the road, which is ironic since I don’t drive. But unlike Larry McMurtry, who preferred driving the anonymous interstate—the best way to avoid human contact, he said—I am partial to William Least Heat Moon’s blue highways or Annie Proulx’s dirt roads. The farther off the interstate, the better.
But I am not alone on my road trips: I don’t drive, remember. No, Terry is the driver; I’m the navigator, and most importantly, the DJ. Yes, we still play CDs.
Our musical tastes are catholic. There are many great songs with roads or highways in their titles, of course, especially in country and folk music. (“King of the Road” and “500 Miles” come to mind, but also Hank Williams’ “Lost Highway” and Steve Earle’s “Hillbilly Highway.”)
But a good road-trip song has to be loud enough to hear over the roar of the engine and the rumble of wheels on the tarmac, but not so loud as to be deafening. Some songs or entire albums were made for the open road, perhaps none more than Steve Earle’s “Guitar Town,” which is perfect from start to finish. It is full of great melodies, propulsive rhythms, and lyrics that pop and can be heard no matter how hard the wind is blowing. We never tire of listening to it.
(On the other hand, sometimes lyrics do get lost or distorted when the windows are down. For ages, on Sinéad Lohan’s “Sailing By,” we misheard what sounded like “Golda Meir” when she was actually singing “holding her here”!)
No matter where we go on our road trips, a handful of CDs are among our treasured companions, including “Guitar Town”; Kasey Chambers’ “The Captain”; the Irish compilation, “A Woman’s Heart,” and anything by Shakira.
It’s also a habit on our road trips to play music associated with artists or places, depending on our destination. Driving on the New Jersey Turnpike on the way to Asbury Park, I played Bruce Springsteen’s “Jersey Girl” as we entered the Garden State (Tom Waits may have written it but Springsteen owned it). We have listened to Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of Hollis Brown” riding through the Badlands and, as we crossed the wide Missouri, put on Springsteen’s sublime version of “Shenandoah” from his “Seeger Sessions” album.
Other times the music captures a moment or, more often, a feeling. As I left my native Scotland on one of many visits back home, the gorgeous voice of the Scottish singer Catherine-Ann MacPhee rang out—too beautiful for words. The lyrics may have been in Scots Gaelic but the emotions about leaving people and places behind were universal. I felt the longing and yearning in her voice as we—my friend Eileen and I—drove past the Lomond Hills and I watched bales of hay by the roadside under a late summer sky.
Some places I associate with a particular song because I heard it in a car for the first time: the Killers’ “Mr. Bright Eyes” while Eileen thrillingly raced up and down the winding—and empty–single track roads in the Scottish countryside. Last September, also in Scotland, I couldn’t get the Irish singer Cian Ducrot’s wistful power ballad “All for You” out of my head.
On a road trip to Yellowstone, we went searching for “Brokeback Mountain.” This was just after the movie came out. We knew it was shot mostly in Alberta but Annie Proulx, I reasoned, had to have a particular mountain in Wyoming in mind as an inspiration. But which one? As we rode through small towns and miles and miles of empty road, we occasionally stopped at interesting places. At Dirty Sally’s General Store in the delightfully named Ten Sleep, we savored sweet and tart huckleberry ice cream, with its hint of blueberries. We looked upward at the Bighorn Mountains that dwarfed us, listening to the “Brokeback” soundtrack (Teddy Thompson’s lovely waltz-like “I Don’t Want to Say Goodbye” is my favorite), thinking of Ennis and Jack, and we wondered, which peak was Brokeback?
Whenever we head West, we try to make sure when driving into the sun to play “Western Highway.” Hearing the clarion voice of Maura O’Connell singing, “I am a driver on a Western highway… the sky is fading to the color of the valley” is guaranteed to send a shiver down my spine.
These songs remind me that between daylight and the dark of night, music comes most alive when rolling, rambling, or racing down that long, lost, lonesome highway. With miles to go.
