Friday Music Day

FMD: On The Road

43 Comments

I'll be driving a bunch today. I'll probably mostly just flip radio stations until I get frustrated and turn on MPR News. Wait. It's a member drive. Alright, I'll probably just get frustrated.

What do you listen to when travelling? Let's make a "recommended for the road" playlist?

43 thoughts on “FMD: On The Road”

  1. I have Sirius/XM in the car. If I'm alone, I mostly listen to either The Bridge or sports. If Mrs. A is with me, we'll listen to Willie's Roadhouse part of the time, too.

    1. I wish I could get Sirius/XM to stop sending me junk mail since I bought my car in July. I'm never in my car long enough to consider it, even if I wanted it.

      I usually listen to the local college station; I'm never far enough away to lose signal. Otherwise I suppose I'd use Pandora on my phone and bluetooth.

      1. I had XM for awhile, which I didn't use much. When I was bored with everything, I'd flip on the comedy channel. I love how they would unironically advertise themselves as commercial free radio right after playing 3 minutes of (the exact same) commercials.

  2. I like listening to a bunch of full albums on a road trip, but that's not Linds' cup of tea, so we either channel surf on XM or set our iPods to shuffle and laugh at some of the bizarre garbage that's in each other's libraries or go "wow, I haven't heard this in forever, remember when we were doing that fun thing that one time and heard this song?"

  4. 1. Gang Gang Dance “Adult Goth” Eye Contact
    2. Meat Puppets “Violet Eyes” Too High to Die
    3. Adele “When We Were Young” 25
    4. Patty Griffin feat. Emmylou Harris “Little Fire” Downtown Church
    5. Plastikman “Psyk” Artifakts BC*

    6. The Bottle Rockets “Indianapolis”* 24 Hours a Day
    7. F--- Buttons “Surf Solar (7" Edit)” Surf Solar
    8. Trentemøller “Take Me into Your Skin” The Last Resort
        a. Red-headed Woodpecker “'Tchur' calls, chatter calls, and drum” (Cornell Master Set)
        b. Common Goldeneye “Female calls” (Cornell Essential Set)
    9. Plastikman “Locomotion” Consumed
        c. Long-eared Owl “Alarm call” (Voices of North American Owls)
        d. Red Crossbil “Song from a Type 1” (Cornell Master Set)
    T. Ha Ha Tonka “American Ambition” Lessons
    E. Colin Stetson “The Righteous Wrath of an Honorable Man” New History Warfare Vol.2: Judges

    *Notes:
    5. "BC" = "Before Consumed"
    6. "Got a tow / from a guy named Joe. / Cost $60 / Hope I don't run out of dough.
    Told me about a sex offense put him three days in jail. / Stuck in Indianapolis / Hope I live to tell the tale."

    1. F--- Buttons “Surf Solar (7" Edit)” Surf Solar

      I got the radio station promo CD for that one. Useful when I want to hear one of the best songs of 09, but don't have ten minutes. Still, though, I just like the way the original breathes so much more.

      I need to find Olympians on 7". My goodness, but Tarot Sport a couple of massive highlights.

      1. I think you've paid more attention than I have.
        It's the "7" edit", and it has a b-side ("New Crossbow", which must be about my dad's hunting purchase the year it came out), but it's just digital.

        Here's the Olympians you want.

  5. 1. “Not Gonna Kill You” Angel Olsen My Woman*
    2. “Intern” Angel Olsen My Woman
    3. “King of Carrot Flowers, Pt 1” Neutral Milk Hotel In the Aeroplane over the Sea
    4. “Desperado” Johnny Cash American IV: The Man Come Around**
    5. “Boy Crazy” Lydia Loveless Boy Crazy
    6. “Kim’s Caravan” Courtney Barnet Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit
    7. “To the Workers of the Rock River Valley Region, I Have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament” Sufjan Stevens Illinois
    8. “My Father’s Father” The Civil Wars Barton Hollow
    9. “The Evening” Thao & the Get Down Stay Down A Man Alive
    T. “Mariel’s Brazen Overature” Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s Animal!***

    *The title is listed in all caps on my music playing device, but the Pitchfork review uses standard title casing for it. http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22282-my-woman/
    **Hahahahahahahahahaha
    ***”I wasted time on you”

            1. I think it's more about your minority opinion on Ms. Barnett‡.
              ‡Pepper mis-spelled!, and she's an editor!

              1. As Pepper knows, there are songs of her that I am completely fine with. It would take me some work to name them, since I don't seek them out, but I also wouldn't change the station if they came on.

                1. Oh darlin', don't worry--I'm never deleting that email.

                  You are for sure fine with "Anonymous Club," "Depreston," and "Porcelain."

                2. P.S. Philo, it was very kind of you to jump in here to help distract from my embarrassing misspelling. 😉

    2. *I do not accept artists' capitalization†.
      †I have one exception: HEALTH, where everything on all of their releases has always been all-caps and the titles look weird in lower-case.
      I'd also accept anything where the typography is symbolic or emojic, like if a song were titled "\m/".

  6. I'm gonna nominate "Hit The Road, Jack" for my travelling list. I'd need a kid friendly song, and there's the road reference, and... yeah. That one's my contribution.

    1. my kids absolutely loved that song and would call for the CD in the car on roadtrips. "HIT THE ROAD, JACK! HIT THE ROAD, JACK!"

  7. 01. Megadeth - "Vortex", Cryptic Writings
    02. Queen - "Keep Yourself Alive", Classic Queen
    03. Shadows Fall - "Mystery of One Spirit", The Art of Balance
    04. Queensryche - "The Mission", Operation: Mindcrime
    05. Iced Earth - "Anguish of Youth", Dystopia
    06. Primordial - "No Nation on this Earth", To the Nameless Dead
    07. Nile - "Unas The Slayer of Gods", In Their Darkened Shrines
    08. Black Sabbath - "I", Dehumanizer
    09. Force of Evil - "Cabrini Green", Black Empire
    10. Volbeat - "A Moment Forever", Rock the Rebel/Metal the Devil

  8. Most of our trips are around the 2-3 hour mark, but in the last few years we've done long haul drives to the Outer Banks, Kansas City, & Memphis. We most often listen to podcasts in the car (driver's choice) these days. I can see mixing in more music again as the Poissonnier gets older, though it'll have to be streaming.

    As for road music, I made a playlist (spoiler'd below) a few years ago for a music exchange that captures stuff I enjoy in the car.

    '110 Feet per Second' SelectShow

      1. Yes -- Watching the Flags
        There are three roads going in and out of Sacramento
        One goes to the river, the other to the mountains
        The one I take goes to the blue, blue sky

    2. I can see mixing in more music again as the Poissonnier gets older

      Our long trips our 5-hour drives to Iowa. I'd like to say we listen to music and audiobooks and have interesting conversations, but the truth is that we attach a portable DVD player to the seat in front of the jalapeno and let him watch as much as he wants, which means he's watching almost the whole trip. The peperoncino and I did a solo drive from Iowa to the Twin Cities without a DVD player and either because he's younger or because he has a different temperament, we were fine without.

      1. Yeah, we generally limit screen time, especially phones and tablets. However, trips (like, say, a 6.5 hour drive to MN) are pretty much a free-for-all with movies, etc.

        Speaking of, just found out I'm hitting a spring training game in Ft. Myers coming up. Cool.

  9. if we're all listening to music in the car, i generally just throw everything on random and let the boy decide, thumbs up or thumbs down (naturally there's some gate control as far as content goes).

  10. If it's a long trip, it has to be songs I can sing along with to keep me awake/alert. Kenny Rogers, Little River Band, 80s pop, etc. Definitely anti-hipster.

  11. We found out during the trip that newbish is a HUGE 80's fan - the cheesier and dancier, the better. His favorite song at this point may well be "Dancing in the Street".

    Speaking of Bowie, William Basinski's new one is getting a fair bit of play when I need something unobtrusive. I really like the horns that waft around in the first track.

    Also, I'm getting pretty excited about the upcoming New Pornographers album. I know it's just shiny indie pop-rock, but it's sounding like really well done indie pop-rock.

  12. On the road, as at home, I listen to full albums and not mixes. Road music is usually livelier, with Sleater-Kinney getting heavy airplay there. Others would be Deep Purple, The Who, Baroness, Anthrax, Skyclad, Kendrick Lamar, Rush and James Bay.

  14. Regarding Johnny Cash's American Recordings albums,
    Philo seemed to sterotype the series with "[t]he dark tone, the high school goth dramatics..."
    While that may be true of some of the songs that were most popular ("Hurt" in particular, but also "I See a Darkness", "One"), there's a lot more to be found.
    However, Unchained in particular is quite varied. Consider such rocking tracks as "Mean Eyed Cat", "I Never Picked Cotton", and the cover of Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage". Overall, the few dark, broody, mortality-considering tracks on that album give it depth and variety. He does not sound near as old as he does two albums later (when he was much nearer death). If you want to give him another chance and avoid the sameness, try Unchained.

    As an aside...
    I've seen it suggested that the titles for the first two albums should have been reversed. American Recordings, with Cash stripped down, recording solo and acoustically in his living room (and two cuts live in what sounds like a small club), recording with Rick Rubin for the first time, on an independent label, etc. reflects him being "Unchained" from commercial Nashville expectations (where, I assume, he was sort of a "dinosaur" act playing out the string with all his old hits and ignoring the new subpar material... Hag gave me a bit of this feel, the Meat Puppets really did when I last saw them).
    Meanwhile, with the covers of Beck, Soundgarden, Tom Petty, "I've Been Everywhere", and two of himself, and with only one new song (the title song), Unchained reflects a bit of a songbook take of "American Recordings".

    Back to Phil's opinions...
    At the same time, I understand avoiding and not going back to music that's critically and/or popularly acclaimed if you've found it lacking in the past. I've given up trying to like the Beatles, Radiohead, and Dirty Projectors (among others), and I wish I'd done so earlier. Can't squeeze water from stones, no use beating a dead horse, there's no accounting for taste, and all that. You're under no moral obligation to listen to the music that others are sure you would like or feel is important, etc.

    At the same time, criticizing Cash's voice (which wasn't cleaned up like a lot of pop music) and the "High School Goth" quip came across as ill-informed and/or below-the-belt ad hominem. I think that's where the conversation between you and HJ went south.

    Finally, I don't know a lick about "Two Broke Girls" (How are they broken? Who broke them? Was it Anthony Kiedis*?). Given context, I'll assume that the equivalent is LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem". Or maybe more appropriately, their follow-up singles because at least the first had novelty. (Oh wow, they had a whole album before Sorry for Party Rocking... and they've been on indefinite hiatus for 4 1/2 years. Since then, they're released three solo albums, two from SkyBlu and one from RedFoo. I think I'm stupider having learned that.)

    * SelectShow

    3. At the same time, criticizing Cash's voice (which wasn't cleaned up like a lot of pop music) and the "High School Goth" quip came across as ill-informed and/or below-the-belt ad hominem. I think that's where the conversation between you and HJ went south.

      I would say replying with an eye roll gif was when it first went south. Philo was guilty of retaliation.

        1. I'd add that my tone on the high school goth thing didn't either. It was meant to be shorthand for the "dark" stereotype mentioned, not simply a shot below the belt. I could have explained my position better, but I wasn't super inclined to do so at the time.

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