Road Music

The trip from Wichita to where my children live is 14 hours, and because of that, I pick out and take along a small but eclectic selection of CDs to listen to--this time, I took 8. In the post below I mentioned the Coltrane and Tori Amos discs; the others that I WON'T be writing about at length here were Neneh Cherry, Raw Like Sushi; Geri Allen, Dave Holland, and Jack DeJohnette, The Life of a Song; Yes, Fragile; and Robbie Robertson, Contact from the Underworld of Redboy.
These aren't bad discs by any means, but as I listened to two albums in particular, listed below, it struck me that certain albums just work better as the soundtrack for long road trips.
First, some words about what doesn't work well. I long ago gave up taking classical music with me; my car isn't nearly quiet enough for it. Most jazz doesn't work well, I've found--Geri Allen's piano playing on her CD, as one example, seemed to demand more of my attention than the drive permitted (though that wasn't the case with McCoy Tyner's sparer playing on A Love Supreme). You'd also think that your typical rock or country album would work well; but for me, two obvious candidates, AC/DC's Back in Black and Johnny Cash's Live at Folsom Prison, don't hold my attention enough due to their rather same-y sound throughout the albums. Cash's album has the added disadvantage of being a rather poignant listening experience.
So: what does work well? For me, what works best is a mix of styles within the album. But more precisely, I like for the music I listen to to fit the cultural landscape I'm passing through, and since my route takes me through the Deep South, I'm especially fond of music from or influenced by music from that region: the blues, Cajun and zydeco, of course, but also that blurry genre straddling rock and country we call "roots music." Also, I like to take music from African groups to listen to when I head South.
But what follows are the two albums I especially looked forward to hearing as I drove this time around.
Son Volt's first album, Trace (go here for a look at the album) is a frequent companion of mine on my trips south. Band leader Jay Farrar's lyrics' obsessive themes are the road, time, mutability, and a kind of populist existentialism; his musical styles range from straight country to, on "Drown," one of those Shoulda-Been-A-Hit kind of songs, garage-band crunch. He plows the same sort of territory as Neil Young, even sounding a bit like a lower-register Young, though without the hippy vibe. A great soundtrack for the impovrished but proud land I drive through.
Little Feat's live 1978 album, Waiting for Columbus (reissued and expanded in 2002 by Rhino, God love 'em), grows larger in my estimation every time I hear it. It is difficult to describe the Little Feat sound: imagine a middle ground between the Allman Brothers, the Meters, and a jazz band like Weather Report, and that might be it. It rocks, but the funkiness and jazziness keep this music melodically agile and rhythmically complex. And, once again, this band's musical roots have their origin in the very land I drive through.
I invite readers so inclined to list other albums they prefer listening to while driving or travelling. And to my European and Asian readers: do your respective homelands have a tradition of "road music," songs about the act of overland travelling? Or is that an American tradition? I ask this because, a few months ago in an NPR story about Chinese truckers, the reporter was surprised to learn that they had no such music. But when he played Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again" for them, they liked it.

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