Confession: I’m not sure I totally understand today’s #30DaySongChallenge prompt. I don’t drive very much anymore. In fact, I only filled my gas tank up once a month in that last year. But even when I do drive, I never drive without music. So, by transitive property, every song is “a song to drive to” in some way or another for me.
At a dinner party last night, I put this #30DaySongChallenge question to some of my friends: what would you name as your favorite song to drive to? All of them, almost immediately, offered up songs that fell into one of three categories:
- Songs about driving (“Drive My Car” by The Beatles, “Drive” by The Cars, “Low Rider” by War)
- Songs about “the road” (“Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver, “Road Trippin'” by Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Road To Nowhere” by Talking Heads, “King of The Road” by Eddie Miller), or
- Songs about “travelling” in some way, aided by automobile or not (“I’ve Been Everywhere” by Johnny Cash, “Life Is A Highway” by Rascal Flatts, “Homeward Bound” by Simon & Garfunkel, “Born To Run” by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band).
I suppose those are all good ways of interpreting the prompt, but none of them seemed quite right to me. When I think of “a song to drive to,” I don’t immediately think of a song that’s about driving, or about the road, or about travelling. Rather, I think about songs that I want to hear while I’m in the car.
Maybe I’m not the best judge for this, since I am in the car only fraction of the time that most Americans are, but the one song I looooove to hear in the car (which, ironically, is also about a “road”) is Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited.”
Here’s the thing, Dylan starts off with “Once upon a time…”, and then goes on to pontificate for a full SIX stanzas, so it probably doesn’t hurt to be trapped in a car if you’re interested in appreciating the whole measure of this song. It also doesn’t hurt that “Highway 61 Revisited” has a fantastic sing-along chorus– how does it feeeeeeeeeel?— which is always good for alone time in the car. And, to be honest, I can’t think of another song that is so riddled with riddles and shibboleths, all of them of the sort that can/will make you reevaluate your place in the Universe if you have one.
So, here’s my song to drive to: