Melding Music and the Road

I have the kind of job where you walk out of a meeting at 9 p.m. and you're often two hours from home. Fortunately, I like the road and I like to drive. Last night was one of those nights, and I was embarking from a township hall somewhere south of Lima, Ohio, after spending two hours with a wonderful (snap judgment but perhaps Malcolm Gladwell would back me up), newly formed planning advisory committee.

I hit the road home, a trip of just about 100 miles, give or take, up I-75 and then a hard right at U.S. 30 just north of Lima. I had saved that "one for the road" blend of Diet Pepsi and Doctor Pepper, poured on my way out of an Arby's dinner, and the chilly air had refrigerated it just right during the two-hour meeting, so I was good to go.

30 is an old road with a new alignment in those parts. Two brand new concrete ribbons cut a swath across some of Ohio's most desolate farmland, bisecting the cornfields and soybean fields. This is such a new road that no one's advertising yet, the intersections just contain stop signs and roads - no gas stations, truck stops, or other roadside accommodations - and I'm not sure that the truckers have all found it or trust it yet. That, or ODOT has just wasted beaucoups millions of hard-earned, teeming workers' tax dollars on a road to nowhere.

But it goes somewhere; it takes me halfway home, spitting me out at the Route 53 exit approaching Upper Sandusky, which, while actually south a good ways from Sandusky proper, is in fact up the Sandusky River from its northerly terminus into the Sandusky Bay and Lake Erie.
Moonlit trips on extraordinary roads like the wonderfully smooth, sparsely traveled, and remarkably surreal and featureless U.S. 30 cry out, at least to me, for a soundtrack, and if I am in my car, I am always prepared. My car is my number one listening post for music, even if the acoustics are so-so and the ambient sound can be distracting. For this drive, I pop in a hitherto unheard CD burned from an emusic mp3 of Andrew Bird's nearly year-old Armchair Apocrypha, and it is one of those perfect blends of scenery (full-moonlit rural America) and sound (the massed violins and plaintive whistling that brand Bird's work). The trip home becomes a travelogue, a documentary, and the drudgery of the drive home becomes top-notch entertainment.

It rarely happens this well. One other excellent blend I remember was a trip home from Cleveland Hopkins Airport, watching fleeting suburbia beyond the shoulders while cranking a CD by Univers Zero, a Belgian outfit whose music can take on the entire weight of the human condition. It can be great stuff in the right context.

My guess is that Phillip Glass would work for any road trip, even just down to the corner store.

I need to plot my selections more strategically, because when the synergy of sight and sound hit just right, that ho-hum commute becomes a transcending experience, even at $3.05 a gallon. Since tomorrow's a Friday, I think I'll cue up my new purchase of Stevie Wonder's greatest hits for the trip to work. I recommend something upbeat for a Friday. I would not start my weekend with Univers Zero.