Turnpike Travel, Music of Yore

[dlgood]

I've had a thought bouncing about my head, pretty much since the return drive from the AtPO meet in NYC.

Pretty much as soon as I crossed the Verrazano into Staten Island, I put "The Cars/Candy-O" into my CD player for the drive down. There's something about that band that really strikes me as fitting while driving down the Jersey Turnpike. I'm not really sure why.

Perhaps, it's association. In my youth, the bulk of our rather close extended family lived in NYC, on Long Island, or in Connecticut - and so with family events, weddings, Bar-Mitzvahs, and just general travel, we made many trips along the I-95 corridor. And among the many tapes we took (and oh did I hate my mother's love for Manilow and Neil Diamond when trapped in a car) were a few Cars. Perhaps it's that.

And these are albums I've listened to for years. "Candy-O" in particular, is just a really quirky album where the songs flow but sound so different, and just odd. But the beats are just right for Turnpike Travel. And it helps that Benjamin Orr is just about the only singer I can actually sing along to with any degree of competence, so there's extra fun when an Orr song turns up.

So on my four hour trip back, I listened to just four albums ("Cars",
"Candy-O", "Panorama" and "Heartbeat City") all by the same band, and all over twenty years old. And it felt really appropriate, and neat.

Anybody else out there have any particular album/highway associations like that, or is it just me being wacky?

Comments

[graffitiandsara.livejournal.com]

Radio songs from the Late 1977 to 1981 do it for me. I can't remember specific ones because it wasn't what I had in albums or tapes, it's just what played on the radio when I'd be driving to and from SUNY Albany. Every now and then I'll hear one of the songs that would been playing back then and it'll put me right back into that time.

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

Ahh. We never used the radio in the car, except to listen to play-by-play. I didn't start until I had my own car, and really not until I was commuting to work.