The first family road trips I remember as a child were in the family’s bright red Dodge Caravan. Two rows of seats in the back packed full of coolers of food, pillows, suitcases, and siblings. Behind the wheel, my father, who has never driven five miles over the speed limit in his entire life. In the back, my brother, sister, and I all doing everything we could to ignore each other for six hours at a stretch. This meant personal headsets attached to cassette players or, as we got older, Discman’s.
Using personal music players required using loose math of playlist duration, capacity, volume, and the preservation of precious battery life. Cassettes got about an hour per side. Greatest Hits compilations were available at most gas stations (surprisingly, you can still buy them at some convenience stores) or you were left to whatever you managed to record off the radio at home. CDs were more expensive, tended to skip, and CD-RW tech wasn’t as accessible in those days.
A decade later the iPod would arrive on the scene and solve a lot of these problems. Why pick what music came with you when ALL of your music could go along for the ride? Plug it in, hit “shuffle” and start driving. Today there is a whole generation of music-listeners that will never appreciate what they are missing by smashing out the “skip” button on their infinite-music shuffle.
Road trips, for one, are a great way to get lost in a genuinely fantastic playlist and, therein, the art of creating a great playlist is forever on the ropes. For advice on building a great playlist we go to Rob Gordon -famous protagonist of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity – for some background:
“The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch, but you don’t wanna blow your wad, so then you got to cool it off a notch. There are a lot of rules.”
Mixtapes were about ten songs long and were the art form of using songs to convey a certain mood. Admittedly, in our modern age, we have devices that can hold significantly more than ten songs, access to virtually every song ever written, and hundreds of miles until our next stop. We need something grander than a mixtape and more concise than a shuffle: We need a playlist. Something that is both structured enough to be predictable, but sprinkled with enough variety to be surprising. A great playlist walks the line between songs that are as comfortable as a familiar sweater and those tracks you cannot quite believe you have never heard before.
Your end goal is to create something you can press “Play” on once and not think about it again for a thousand miles. There is an art to this. I’m here to help you with it.
No More Pandora
Depending on who you are, it is only a matter of time before Pandora refines you down to the same handful of songs by either The Black Keys, The Beatles, or Taylor Swift. While it feels safe to throw on the old standard playlist, Pandora will only give you more of whatever it was that you haven’t skipped or “thumb downed.” On a road trip, this style can get exhausting, quickly. Pandora is the best at providing a lousy situation, the suggestion tools for Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Music are rather simplistic.
It’s time to turn Pandora back to what it started as: a music discovery tool.
Pick Your Player
If your goal is to get off the grid, your music will need to live offline and on a device. Most paid subscription services offer some off-line option for most of their catalog. Spotify allows for 10,000 offline tracks at a time (this should be enough) and most other services offer something in the several-thousands for a couple of bucks a month. Whatever the case, everything in one place.
Work in Blocks
Start by adding your Top 50 most-listened-to tracks. Weed out any songs you aren’t ready to admit to the other passengers you like listening to. Take your favorite artists and add the entirety of your favorite album. Then add the albums you never really got into.
Find the newest releases for your preferred genres. Find complete albums of bands you have never heard of. Add entire albums.
If you’re like me, you want to hear an entire album end to end. Others will want to break up the track listings. Others still are maniacs with the shuffle button.
Work with Themes
A majority of my long-haul road trips have music festivals at the end of them. With every festival, the tickets are bought because of the biggest names on the poster. As the names go down the spread, the fonts become smaller the bands become more obscure, inspiring curiosity. The festival poster is a gold mine resource when it comes to building new and innovative playlists. Download entire catalogs of bands you’ve never heard of. Mix them with the hits of headliners you love. By the time you have driven 8 hours to the festival grounds, you will either be ready to take in new music or burnt out on the band. Tread carefully.
Geographical Concerns
With a simple search on Google, one can find every single band that calls a particular city “home.” Whether the group hailed from that city, formed there or had their first show in a seedy club that isn’t around anymore, the musical footprint of a geographic location can be somewhat surprising. Some places may seem predictable – New Orleans and their Jazz, Nashville’s Country music, the grunge sounds of the Pacific Northwest. Doing an extended search may reveal entire movements of music buried way beneath the headlines.
Just like the soundtrack for a movie, having local music play for the location you are driving through can have a considerable impact on the mood you experience getting there.
No one can ever tell someone else what to listen to or how to listen to it. Music is the heartbeat of a road trip; it needs to be there serving as the backing track to everything that happens. Like a road trip, though, there needs to be just enough surprise to what you are listening to – familiar enough to feel safe, and open enough to discover something entirely new.
Whatever the case, don’t forget to bring the right charger cable. Otherwise, you’re listening to local AM radio or the wind rushing by an open window.
