Travel + Tourism
How To Create A Great Road Trip Play List
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On every vacation, music helps to set the mood while you’re on the road. Music also allows you to relive those amazing memories when you get home. You can sink into the song and remember how great it felt to sing along with your best friends on your cross-country road trip!
How do you create a really amazing road trip play list? There are many ways that a play list can go terribly wrong. An over-played song will kill the mood. A really bad tune can dilute the greatness of your inspired list and get you on your friend’s worst road trip tunes list. To avoid these terrible potential side effects of a bad play list and to compile a song list that will keep you entertained the entire trip, follow these tips to play list perfection!
Where Are You Going?
I love a good themed mix tape, something to inspire and excite the whole carload on a road trip. Using songs to hype up the driver (and passengers) while you’re heading west is a great way to make a stellar play list.
If you’re going to California, the options are endless. There’s a California song for every mood, from Wave’s upbeat one-hit-wonder “California” to Albert Hammond’s classic “It Never Rains In Southern California.” But if you’re travelling anywhere else, you’ll have to get inventive.
Create a trivia game by picking songs that are associated with your destination. How about instead of playing songs about our nation’s capital, look for artists who were born and raised in Ottawa to play on your road trip instead? The sky’s truly the limit on this one.
Who Are You Going With?
If you’re travelling with your best friends, you’ll play different songs than if you’re travelling with your girlfriend and her mom. Context is all important when creating the perfect soundtrack to your trip.
When on the road with your buddies, feel free to throw in songs that you know will get them going: their favourite artist, their favourite bands, that song you sang that one time at karaoke. A song with history in your group will have everyone insisting that it’s time to turn it up and roll the windows down.
That Song
There are classic road trip songs that are just meant for an open road where the wind is in your hair and the miles are flying by. These songs just scream travelling, especially in a car. The road trip is a very American thing and many of great American and North American groups have given us odes to drive by. These songs include Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” “Highway to Hell” by AC/DC, “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman and “Free Ride” by Edgar Winter Group.
Don’t go overboard with these road trip classics. They promote high energy, but they can get a little overdone on a long road trip. On vacation, road trip classics can help you get through the day by lifting your spirits. Think of classic travelling songs as the salt and pepper in your play list mix, too much and you’ll ruin the whole thing!
How Long Should It Be?
If you want to know how many songs make a perfect play list, it depends on a few things. How long will you be on the road? Will you have access to a CD player or an iPod car adaptor set? Are you the only road tripper responsible for the tunes or are you sharing the responsibility of road trip play list master?
It’s better to have too much music than to find yourself scanning through the local radio stations because the whole car (yourself included) is so tired of hearing the same 30 songs again and again. On the other hand, you never want to dilute a road trip play list too much and risk losing the golden mood a good play list can bring to the classic road trip.
If you’ll be on vacation for a few weeks, stock up on music so you don’t get bored of your iPod after just a few days.
Music For The Open Road
A great play list can make a dull moment on the road a little less unbearable and when you’re in the car with the same four people for more than a few hours, conversation can dwindle down to comments on the weather. Your play list will keep you bopping your heads to the music through the prairies until you reach the Pacific ocean for that road trip to the East coast.
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