Here at Gadling we’ll be highlighting some of our favorite sounds from the road and giving you a sample of each — maybe you’ll find the same inspiration that we did, but at the very least, hopefully you’ll think that they’re good songs. Got a favorite of your own? Leave it in the comments below and we’ll post it at the end of the series.
“Do you like American music? I like American music. Don’t you like American music? Baby-yyyyyy…” –The Violent Femmes, American Music
For those who are gearing up to travel the vast roadways of America by car, we have here a list of appropriate music to make you feel relaxed, at peace with the road, and good’n American. Though you may be traveling for the holidays, we’ll exclude holiday music. You’ll hear it at every gas station.
Even the street on which you live looks a little more ripe with possibility when that song plays.
Once you head out into the amber waves of grain and the fruited plains, it’s a great time for expansive music like that from accidentally Canadian Joni Mitchell. I recommend Urge for Going, Heijira, and You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio. And those are just a couple of her travel-themed hits.
Going through the purple mountains’ majesty? Forests? (Yeah, “America the Beautiful” totally skipped the forests.) Try the soundtrack to Field of Dreams, composed by James Horner. It will fill you with wonder. Here, watch somebody on YouTube play The Drive Home. Want lyrics?
Next, get out some Bob Dylan and play Tangled Up in Blue. Make sure you dig through your classic rock collection. Especially as you pass through strange towns and cities, The Eagles, Guns and Roses, Jimi Hendrix, and Journey all take on a strange, retro-poignance.
Lastly, though it’s downright un-American, The Beatles are great for road trips. Everyone sings along, and if you’re really up in arms about the Britishness, you can get the soundtrack to Across the Universewith all the new covers.
Here at Gadling we’ll be highlighting some of our favorite sounds from the road and giving you a sample of each — maybe you’ll find the same inspiration that we did, but at the very least, hopefully you’ll think that they’re good songs.
Got a favorite of your own? Leave it in the Comments and we’ll post it at the end of the series.
France. This is a country known for its music. The stereotypical accordion tunes from atop Montmartre embodied in the soundtrack of Amélie, the ballads of Edith Piaf, and the intense lyrics of adopted icon Jacques Brel (he was actually Belgian, but the French like him so much they seem to forget). But beyond those symbolic melodies that scream French roots, there’s another side to French music. One that is much more urban, cosmopolitan and chic. It’s the smooth, electro-jazz, slightly funky sounds of contemporary bands like St. Germain.
I was spending a semester in France in college and had fortunately been placed in a very cool attic apartment with an equally cool Frenchman; one who had a penchant for red wine, dinner parties and top of the line background music to complement the food and company. St. Germain’s Tourist album was played at one of the first of these dinner parties that I ever experienced.
It was a quintessential French evening: a bottle of regional Muscat to start the night, a whole chicken, cooked in butter and herbs fresh out of the oven, a salad with fresh greens and a homemade vinaigrette, a Burgundy to go with the chicken and a cacophony of French voices all giving their politically charged opinions on everything from GMOs to the American President. The upbeat sound of the saxophone in “So Flute” hung in the air, dancing around in the vibrant ambiance.
All of a sudden I felt instantly chic and European. Just listening to “So Flute” let me shed my hippie college roots and automatically develop into that classy, cultured young adult I’d always wanted to be. From that night on I couldn’t stop listening to St. Germain.
When I returned home after my semester abroad I would try and recreate these dinner parties. I would tell people that we would eat at nine, they looked at me as if I was crazy and sad they would come at six; Americans unlike the French are not trained for late night dinner parties. I got frustrated that the only white wine I could find for an aperitif was a Californian Chardonnay; trust me, after wine of Alsace, it’s not the same. But thanks to my pre-departure stop at FNAC (the French Borders) at least I could have “So Flute” play in the background. Maybe I didn’t feel so chic in my shared college house, but at least I could import the French urban vibe. At least it was better than drowning my sorrows in a bottle of bad red.
Returning home, especially after extended stays when you have completely immersed yourself in your host culture, can be hard. Sometimes, to get over that culture shock — no matter how long you’ve been back — all it takes is a melody reminiscent of your time there. Instantly you are taken back to a certain moment, a certain feeling and for a second all that cultural confusion just slips away. “So Flute” is that song for me and whenever I play it I am whisked away to my favorite vibes of France. Click here for previous Sounds of Travel.
Here at Gadling we’ll be highlighting some of our favorite sounds from the road and giving you a sample of each — maybe you’ll find the same inspiration that we did, but at the very least, hopefully you’ll think that they’re good songs.
Got a favorite of your own? Leave it in the Comments and we’ll post it at the end of the series.
“Oh My Sweet Carolina” by Ryan Adams
Nick Hornby, a favorite author of mine, first tipped me off to this amazing Ryan Adams song in this essay on the McSweeney’s website. “Oh My Sweet Carolina,” which Hornby describes as “so quiet that you don’t want to breathe throughout its duration,” might seem to be an odd choice for a series celebrating great travel songs. After all, it’s about the unfulfilling, disappointing journeys– to Vegas, Cleveland, San Antonio– that we take because we’re looking for something that we can’t find at home:
Oh my sweet Carolina What compels me to go Oh my sweet disposition May you one day carry me home
This is a lesson many travelers, including myself, have had to learn first-hand: that travel is not a panacea for all your problems. Running away from life is only a quick, temporary fix, and sooner or later everything you fear must be faced head-on.
Another thing the song addresses is this: once we’ve been away from our friends and family for a while, sometimes home starts to look, well, not so bad. In his Pulitzer-prize winning novel American Pastoral, Philip Roth writes that when people die, their imperfections tend to disappear, or even to become appealing: “This can happen when people die– the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration.”
In my experience, the same transformation happens to your hometown and your friends and family when you’ve been away for a while.
Lyrics here; awesome Elton John cover here; Nick Hornby essay here. Listen to the song, it’s good.
Here at Gadling we’ll be highlighting some of our favorite sounds from the road and giving you a sample of each — maybe you’ll find the same inspiration that we did, but at the very least, hopefully you’ll think that they’re good songs. Got a favorite of your own? Leave it in the comments below and we’ll post it at the end of the series.
WEEK 4: Colder – One Night In Tokyo
Japan has a reputation of creating bewilderment and a sense of wonder for visitors from the Western world. For anyone who has ever gotten lost in the “fiction” of Japan created by movies like Lost in Translation or anime series like Gundam, there is a perception created of a place that looks strangely familiar yet somehow slightly askew, like your friend was hiding around the corner, waiting to jump out and scare the crap out of you. You’re left constantly on edge, ready to be surprised, shocked and amused by a constant barrage of stimuli.
It was with these thoughts in mind as I landed in Tokyo for my first trip to Japan earlier this year. My home base for the next 10 days was a high rise in the Shinjuku neighborhood – a bustling, neon-lit business district in central Tokyo. As I unpacked my things in my room, I flipped on my iPod to a song by Colder, a French electronic artist known for his moody, atmospheric compositions, fittingly selecting one of my favorite tracks called “One Night in Tokyo.”
As the track slowly kicked in, I took in my surroundings. Dusk was beginning to settle over this massive metropolis. Thousands of office towers lay before me – giant monoliths of concrete and glass glistening quietly, silhouetted against the quickly darkening sky. Each pulsated at the top with the intermittent blink of tiny red light, creating a vision of thousands of tiny insects flashing alone in the dark, performing a giant light show for an unknown audience that rushed by, oblivious. The scene was punctuated by the clackety-clack of endless subway cars as they rumbled into the gigantic Shinjuku rail station down below.
“One Night in Tokyo” was the perfect complement to my overwhelming sense of vertigo at the scene before me. The song builds slowly, adding layer upon layer of warm keyboard synths, dub echoes and handclaps, while lead singer Marc Tan sings in a detached, mysterious monotone. The sound effects fade in and out of the song chaotically, much like the intermittent trains that pierced the silence of my quiet hotel room.
As isolating as this all may sound, One Night in Tokyo was absolutely perfect for setting the right Tokyo mood. It captured what I found so intriguing about Tokyo at night – the air feels thick with excitement and potential. The dark alleyways, the searing neon, the bustle and the activity all created a sense of mystery and excitement. There was a constant sense that at any moment I would be thrust into my own movie plot, filled with strange characters and shady villans darting onto subway platforms and down sidestreets.
My next 10 days in Japan presented me with an experience I will never forget. The Japan of reality is surprisingly not like the one portrayed in my imagination – in fact it’s far weirder. But for those first few hours in Tokyo, as the day began to dim and One Night in Tokyo slowly dissipated from my speakers, my fantasy vision of Japan was alive and well.
Here at Gadling we’ll be highlighting some of our favorite sounds from the road and giving you a sample of each — maybe you’ll find the same inspiration that we did, but at the very least, hopefully you’ll think that they’re good songs.
Got a favorite of your own? Leave it in the Comments and we’ll post it at the end of the series.
WEEK 4: “King of the Road” sung by Roger Miller
When my brother and I were young, our parents gave us Hummel figurine music boxes. His figurine was a small boy sitting on a fence with a bundle tied on a stick that rested on his shoulder. When the key was wound, the melody “King of the Road” played while the boy turned.
My figurine was a girl feeding chickens. Although, I dearly loved my music box– the girl looked like Heidi, that independent lass who lived in the Alps with her grandfather, I was drawn to my brother’s more. There it sat on his chest of drawers in a spot within reach.
Even before I knew the lyrics, the title of the song was enough. King of the Road. What could sound more grand?
The lyrics, though, said it all. Hitting the road without cares or worries–the thrill of being in control with each step towards the horizon. A life spent enjoying simple pleasures as long as a person can keep moving and make connections with folks along the way.
Never mind that I happened to be female–and at the time, one of the only known female travelers who got much press was Amelia Earhart–and we know how that turned out. I come from a line of women who have wandered.
Those women carried the aura of far away places, particularly Aunt Clarissa. It wasn’t the stories my great aunt told me of her time in Japan as an Army major after World War II that captured my interest–I don’t specifically remember any– it was the feeling I surmised that traveling gave her. The zippidy do dah.
When Roger Miller wrote King of the Road in 1965, he was telling the tale of a carefree traveler at the same time Miller was on the road seeking out his dreams as a singer-songwriter. After he sings in the video, Miller recalls that the song was inspired somewhere between Dayton, Des Moines or Chicago when he saw a road sign that said, “Trailers for Sale or Rent.”
What caught my attention about this version is Miller’s utter exuberance, both in his voice and his body, particularly when he belts out the third chorus and throws that fast crook in his elbow–and how the song stuck with me all day once I listened to it again.
When I think of my King of the Road experiences, the ones where this song played in my head, I am:
by myself on a bus heading to Maine from New Paltz, New York to work at a summer camp after my senior year in high school, the possibilities endless. This summer was late nights doing laundry so I could head out every weekend to places like Boothbay Harbor,Camden and Ogunquit, eating lobster and clams dripped in butter and skinny dipping in a lake with the moon shimmering across the water;
I’m walking down the streets of Arhus, Denmark, my arms swinging in stride with my legs as I head to the Viking ship museum, my entire body feeling in sync with the sidewalk beneath my feet and the breeze through my hair. I’d come alone–or if I was with someone, I can’t recall because the memory of being so in touch with my body on that day and the sense of adventure has eclipsed a companion;
I am walking away from my village into the Gambian bush to hang out under a tree for a few hours drinking tea, writing and listening to music, soaking up a bit of R&R from being the village Peace Corps volunteer. As cows grazed nearby and finch flitted and darted between the scrub brush, I regained balance;
and I am taking a friend of mine on a road trip through New Mexico so he can see how the landscape changes. As the hues of reds and browns change with each turn past Jemez as we get closer to Bandelier National Monument, we marvel at the wonder of us and our good fortune to have a car and all the time we need.
Whenever I hear that song, my feet start tappin’ and I want to head out–see new places, make new friends, visit old ones and know that the world is my oyster. What better feeling is there than being a king of the road?
Despite the lyrics, I’ve never smoked a pack of cigarettes in my life. I do, however, look at trailers with great affection.
Here’s a bit of King of the Road trivia: It’s been used in the movies: Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Swingers, Into the Wild, Im Lauf der Zeit (In Due Time), and if you saw Brokeback Mountain, who can forget the scene where Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack, confident and full of energy, is heading in his truck to see Ennis? King of the Road was playing on the radio. Of course, that was before Jack’s hopes were dashed.
Still, the song for me is an optimistic all will work out.