The Art of the Road Trip Playlist

First some album news:

Earlier this week I uploaded the audio files from my album to the manufacturer in New Jersey and have since Okay’d the audio and graphics proofs.

It was an unexpectedly emotional experience to upload those files. Up until that point I viewed it as just a step in the process but when I hit that send button I felt as though my baby had been taken from my arms, out into the World, never to return. All I had done to create the content of the album was written in stone at that moment.

I was a nervous wreck for the rest of the day and to a smaller extend I still am.

Now I understand why it took me so long to get this done, why I put if off for months at a time. Now I am more sympathetic of folks who mix their projects for years.

It can never be right. There are already things I wish I could still change but I have to accept it as is and take my experience on to the next project and make that one better. When I hit that send button I grew as a person. I’m not sure I can explain it very well, but I feel as though the guy who I was before I hit that big scary send button is, to some small extent, no longer who I am.

To add to my nervousness with delays in the proofing process my CDs may not arrive in time for my first gig; a gig at a record store that requires you have CDs to sell.

Lets all keep our fingers and toes crossed.

Meanwhile I return you to your regularly scheduled blog…

When I was seven, my family took our first trip to Boston to see my Aunt, and Uncle and cousins. On our way home, driving down the then two-lane State Route 2 in our 1966 Dodge station wagon, we saw the same hitchhiker, not once, but three times Between Boston and Williamstown Mass. The third time we saw him my dad decided it was ok to pick him up and we did.

Close to what our car looked like

It was 1972, a different world.

“I can see Clearly Now” by Johnny Nash was playing on the radio.”

The hitchhiker was a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic in Troy, New York. He was a really nice guy as I remember. He sat with my brother and I in the back seat. We shared a box Bugles with him, pretending they were little trumpets before gobbling each one up. It was raining; just hard enough that the windshield wipers kept a steady rhythm along with the music. We took him right to the house he was renting with a bunch of other guys.

I wondered what it would be like when I went to college.

“I can see clearly now the rain is gone

I can see all obstacles in my way

Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind

It’s gonna to be a bright, bright, sun-shiny day…”

The irony that it was raining was completely lost on a seven-year-old.

 “I think I can make it now the pain is gone

All of the bad feelings have disappeared

Here is the rainbow I’ve been praying for

It’s gonna to be a bright, bright, sun-shiny day…”

Even though the song was on the radio for all of two minutes and forty-two seconds, of the half hour or so our hitchhiker friend was with us, in my memory, that song as playing the entire time.

After we dropped the hitchhiker off, we ate lunch at a small diner in Troy. It was the kind that had juke box stations at every table, though they all controlled one big juke box that everyone shared and that played to the whole room. I asked my Dad to have it play the song we had heard in the car. He flipped the little pages and found it. What was likely just a dime or a nickel later, my song was in the cue to play. Later I asked my Dad what happened, why it never played. He told me it already had. I missed it entirely. I was devastated. I guess I was busy being ADD and seven. I asked if we could play it again but I already knew the answer.

Perhaps the diner where we ate.

 I remember we parked next to a brick building

like the one on the left

To this day, every time I hear that song I remember that day vividly.

“Look all around there’s nothing but blue skies

Look straight ahead there nothing blue skies…”

Road music is powerful. It can be at least. Even though it’s the play button we’re hitting on the iPod, the red record light of our memory is lit extra bright when the right music is playing.

That means we can’t just hit ‘shuffle’ and take what we get. Let’s be a little proactive, let’s build our playlists for our upcoming cross-country journey; lay the foundation for some good memories.

Audra and I are both programming music for the trip. I don’t know what she’s got going and she hasn’t seen my playlists either. I’m sure we’ve doubled up on a bunch of tunes but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it…

Get it? ‘Bridge’? C’mon, ya know, because in music after the second chorus… oh, never mind.

By-the-way, James Brown will definitely be ‘taking us to the bridge’ on several occasions during the trip. Funk travels well.

For my method of creating the perfect road ‘mix’ so far I have gone through my iTunes and selected every tune I think might work in one situation or another and put it into a ‘buffer’ playlist called “Road Maybes”

My selection method at this first stage is simple; I listen to a segment of a tune and try to imagine going down the road listening to it. Does it work on the road? Does this music steer me forward or off into a ditch?

A road tune should have forward momentum and a sense of imagination.

Don’t mistake forward momentum for a fast tempo though the music should have more the feel of the white lines going by than the pistons in the engine. Even the most ethereal  music like Jim Schreck’s “Atmospheres” can have powerful momentum. “Red House”, by Jimi Hendrix, has more forward momentum than just about any other Hendrix tune and it’s nearly the slowest thing he played. Tunes like the up-tempo “Scuttlebuttn” by Stevie Ray Vaughn, and “Sugar Foot Rag” though I love ‘em, feel more like a demolition derby than open highway to me.

We’re trying to avoid those.

“Broke Down South of Dallas” and “Highway Patrol” by Junior Brown are both banned for strictly karmic reasons.

Junior Brown and his stand-mounted 

combination Telecaster/lap steel guitar

The aesthetics of the tune also comes into play. It should match the landscape to a degree. We’ll be passing through Texas, Oklahoma and Arkanas so I have selected a bunch of old and even some not so old country tunes. I’ve got blues too, going all the way back to Robert Johnson recordings made in the 1920s.

Old rhythm and blues and doo wop can turn any cold four-laned interstate into Route 66. No, we won't be playing the song "Route 66" by-the-way. We won't be on it and it's kind of a cliche' anyway.

Progressive rock and jazz, as much as I love them don’t always work as well on the road as I wish they did. Polyrhythms sound a tad too much engine trouble at sixty-five miles an hour and the urban sounds of jazz can seem out of place on the prairie. There exceptions of course: we will be taking some “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane, taking it “Frame by Frame” with King Crimson and of course playing “Road Games” with Alan Holdsworth.

Some tunes I selected for the reason we most often do: simply because I dig them. There are other songs I selected that I had never even heard before that sounded like good road music.

Do you have music in your iTunes, like I do, that you have no idea how it even got there?

I also want to take along my friends on this journey. I have a  lot of music made my friends of mine. They will all be coming along for the ride and playing one or more of their songs for us.

Classical is another tough sell on the road. I’m sure Audra’s lists include some Rachmaninov and Gershwin though. ‘DJ Audee’, as I call her, can somehow make anything work!

I really have no idea what kind of music to have ready for the inevitable being stuck in summer construction traffic. Death Metal might make me more likely to kill, country may make me more likely to kill myself. I'm thinking Micheal Hedges.

After I have all my potential music corralled off in the master playlist, I will take those four hundred some songs and divide them into separate playlists for different times of day and environments: Desert day, desert night, plains day, rain...

I asked Audra about her process of selecting tunes. She said her methods are more intuitive and based on the emotional content of the song. She also plans to have playlists for day and night, and customized for different terrains.

Though I mentioned being proactive and programming playlists, I didn’t mean by that, that we are structuring every minute, far from it.

Both Audra and I are planning to let the moment take us where it will. We may have selected a playlist and even arranged an order of songs but we will be making use of ‘shuffle’ (the iPod random play function) within those playlists as well as manually selecting what the moment calls for.

This is where “DJ Audee” is a master. I may be doing much of the steering of the car, but she will be steering our journey.

I haven’t selected any “Journey”. Don’t know why, just didn’t.

Silence, the sound of the highway itself, as I mention before in a previous blog, is important too. It won’t be coast-to-coast music on our trip, we'll drive for stretches with nothing playing at all until the road has said it's peace.

I didn’t purchase any extra songs for our road trip. I knew I could do plenty with the six thousand I have in my iPod not to mention what Audra has.

There was one exception though; one song I didn’t have that was an absolute must:

“I can see clearly now the rain is gone

I can see all obstacles in my way

Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind

It’s gonna to be a bright, bright, sun-shiny day”

What road tunes do you love? Got any recommendations?