Phil Christman

In about an hour I’m headed to Durham, thence to Michigan. In honor of the traveling season, here are four songs best heard in cars.

This video for Yo La Tengo’s classic buzzsaw jam “Sugarcube” is justly well-regarded for its cutely self-deprecating indie-kids-sent-to-rawk-star-school motif. (Nostalgia, faux-childishness, self-mockery, commentary on consumerism: that’s four indie tropes neatly conflated.) Still, it doesn’t do justice to the happy mania of the original track, which once got me yelled at by an ex-girlfriend because I was paying more attention to the divine noise it made, coming out of the car speakers, than to whatever she was saying.

This bouncy Blackalicious bit gives rise to my favorite YouTube comment of all time: “i found this record in an abandoned crack house ..unopened 2002 ben harper jarassic 5 freakn awsm the cops boarded it up shortly after but there are still 100s of records in the house”

Ben Harper albums aside (how I loathe being told how to vote by a pair of adenoids), that’s some seriously tasteful crack smokers right there. I love this song, and this album, to pieces.

Good road songs tend to have place names in them. Great road songs have place names of places I’ve never been. Really great road songs have Emmylou Harris. Best of all, there’s this clip of a song Harris performs on her epochal Wrecking Ball cover album (1995), written (and here co-performed) by a gaggle of McGarrigles.

To hell with Kerouac, and to hell with rock music. This is the ultimate road song. It’s easy to sing, has a nice banjo part, and involves punishingly terrible visual puns (“fork in the road?”).