11 Perfect Road Tripping Playlists

By Beth Campbell, Staff Writer

Few actions are more holy than playing songs while driving. Though music has been evolving for thousands of years, bouncy traveling songs are a relatively new construct.

Music innovation follows human movement innovation, as humans travel ever faster. Classical and romantic music had some moderato tempos, similar to skiing, ice skating, and sailing. But it wasn’t until after the Great War, the Spanish Flu, and the manufacturing assembly line did music mimic the speed and sound of combustion engines. The roaring 1920s' prosperity fostered a renaissance of machines. Cars were suddenly affordable and faster than horses, trains, and paddle wheels. Then radios were added to cars. You must rock while you roam.

You’re dying to get out. Just drive anywhere. Just one concert. Prithee please. You want to support independent venues, speakeasies, crashable bedrooms. What if they go out of business before you get there? They must not.

Last year you settled for memories of exhilarating performances and sublime locations, maybe a few live streams, but you yearn to expand your world. You will travel again. When you're ready, here are the tunes.

Chances are many of these songs will be new to you, yet they are the absolute best traveling songs in the English language across diverse genres and eras. They’re not just good songs about movement, they are rockets igniting your soul.

Cherish them. You can’t go back in time and ask Johnny Cash for one more train song. Johnny Cash and his band mastered the percussive sound of a moving engine, the secret being the tempo at about 100 syncopated beats per minute. The best driving songs spin at this speed.

These songs are your new best friends to keep you going, feed your energy, and keep you awake while driving. Learn them so you can sing along, and reserve them for traveling so you save their spark. Don’t play them outside the car. You need them to work their magic when you’re en route. Would you get a root canal to Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On? No.

This playlist gives you different groups to get in the mood for those kinds of concerts.

How far are you driving? There’s 90 minutes of music in each group. For Manifest Destiny (not a band), traveling songs before Johnny Cash. For a Sock Hop, you have mid 20th century. For the Dead & Company, hippie songs. For Willie Nelson, twang and fiddle. For Don Henley, baby booms. For Dierks Bentley, country AND western. For Khalid, African-American influenced. For Katy Perry, pop and grunge. And for Passenger, the last decade. The happy songs are for returning satisfied.

The Manifest Destiny list (because music growing more diverse is both righteous and inevitable) is like time travel for you. Listen, and feel like you ’re walking, skating, or riding horses, trains, dirigibles, and early cars. Trot them out on a night when you can drive removed from anything modern, preferably in an antique car. You can hear how those singers were reaching for more, not knowing the power of invention awaiting them. But this is true for every successive playlist: the faster people travel, the bolder they get with music.

Now. Many trips will be longer than an hour. If you listen to all the playlists, that’s fourteen hours of music. Even if you want to skip songs outside your type, in the interest of travel and discovery, give songs more than one listen before you personalize this list. These songs will enrich your trip even if you listen while jogging, biking, or tunneling a high-speed rail.

*Warning: Do not listen to the sad return songs in one sitting, especially while driving. Don’t! First, they are slow, they will not propel you home. Second, THEY ARE SAD. Depressing. Painful, even in their perfection. However, if you find yourself dreading returning home, or unprepared to relinquish the concert experience, these sad songs call out those emotions. You may want to spend some time in that space.

Dedicated to the memory of Charley Pride, Joe Diffie, and John Prine.