Music for the Road...

For most of my life, I've been essentially obsessed with travel. The road. I don't know if it has to do with the trips my mother and I took when I was a child. I can still hear these songs and they elicit the emotions of running away or taking off somewhere new and unknown. I still can't listen to Willie Nelson's "On The Road Again" without conjuring the thoughts of my mother and I tearing down the highway. Not to mention, I always kick myself for not starting my own band where I could tour around and make music with my friends.

When I got to high school, I remember hearing acquaintances at school discuss their upcoming spring break plans. Most of these plans involved keg beer and beach houses. This didn't interest me in high school, but I rather took annual spring break trips to places in the midwest and northeast. For most of these years, I took a trip to Chicago to visit my sister, while also stopping along the way. During college, we expanded- often taking a road trip all the way up to Montreal, while spending a couple of days here and there (New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Rhode Island, Bar Harbor, Maine). Each trip seemed to grow in length and stops. The road always held a special place in my heart- and the further I went, the less and less I wanted to return home.

Of course, the proper music for the trip is of utmost importance. Beyond the road trip mix, there are also "road" songs that seem to inspire the feeling of being on the road and travel. As mentioned above, Willie Nelson...but there are many others.

When Tim and I left for Nashville to put a down payment on our new apartment, we left Myrtle Beach around 5:00am. It was still dark outside. Before we pulled out of the drive, he searched around for a cd. Before I knew it, Tom Petty started playing. It was the Wildflowers cd. I haven't heard this album for years, but in the first few measures, I knew how perfect it was for the beginning of this journey. It not only provided memories of another time in my life of change, but it became the accidental soundtrack to this new phase of life. And I love that, with our memories that we attach to songs- at times, it happens so accidentally. You don't create the perfect mix tape for the trip, but rather it randomly finds you.

From "Wildflowers," "...sail away, kill off the hours, you belong somewhere you feel free...go somewhere all bright and new" to "You Don't Know How It Feels," "...turn the radio loud...you don't know how it feels to be me...people come and people go, some grow young, some grow cold, i woke up between a memory and a dream..." to "Time to Move On," "...its time to move on, its time to get going...under my feet, grass is growing...broken skylines...which way to something better, which way to forgiveness, which way do i go?"

I'll always remember these songs as associated with this latest move though still connected to earlier memories. Last night, I watched a movie called Wanderlust, which is a documentary about road movies and their impact on American culture. The documentary was interesting as it traversed through road movies starting roughly with John Ford movies to recent ones like Smoke Signals. Throughout the documentary, you come very clearly to the conclusion that the destination is never what is of concern, but rather the journey.

Of particular interest to me in the documentary and the more I think about the idea of "the road" was the idea that as American people, our culture provides us with the impulse of the nomad. And it reminds me of a new Conor Oberst song entitled, "Moab" where he sings, "There is nothing that the road cannot heal, washed under the blacktop, gone beneath my wheels, there is nothing that the road cannot heal."