There's a certain kind of listener who believes music can only be experienced properly from a very expensive chair, in a room with the curtains shut, at exactly the right distance from two loudspeakers that cost more than my apartment. Preferably without anyone so much as breathing.
I love those people. We sell records to those people. But I also have a motorcycle, a helmet, and several days of motorways and mountain passes ahead of me, and I refuse to accept that those hours have to be soundtracked by whatever the radio thinks I want at eight in the morning.
So here's six albums I actually do listen to on the road, in two lists. Riding a motorcycle and driving a car are not the same kind of activity, and pretending otherwise is how you end up in a ditch with excellent taste.
On a motorcycle
On a bike, music is a passenger (or, as we bikers call them, a pillion). Anything with giant dynamic swings, sudden entries, or a bass drop that makes even the biggest and baddest biker flinch is an absolutely terrible idea when you're leaning into a corner at speed. You want something that keeps you company and never once makes you turn your head and think, "wait, what was that?"
So that pretty much rules out any Mahler symphony.
Dark Cinder Veneer - In Suspended Animation
This here is my default. If I ever got on my bike without a plan, this is what's playing on my intercom. It's ambient in the serious sense of the word, with actual weight to it, and it's a deeply personal record for the composer. You can hear that without anyone having to explain it to you in a liner note. What makes it work at speed is that it tends to move at the same pace the road does. You ride into a tunnel, come out the other side, and the music has travelled somewhere too.
I've listened to this album on Belgian backroads, on the Dutch motorway, and once for eight straight hours through Denmark, in a torrential downpour that left me wondering whether my heated grips were actually working.
Listen to In Suspended Animation
Gayle Skidmore - The New York EP
Songs with melodies you'll catch yourself humming inside your helmet. Or singing on top of your lungs, I'm not judging. It's an EP, so it's rather short, which is either a downside or an excuse to just play it three times in a row. I go with the second option. This is the one for the stretch where you've stopped concentrating on getting out of the city and started actually enjoying yourself.
And it's not just for traveling through New York either. I've tested it, and it still works on Norwegian country roads.
Listen to The New York EP
Marion von Tilzer & Maya Fridman - Ten Songs of Change
One of my all-time favourites, not just for roadtrips. Marion wrote the album around poetry from the I Ching (the Book of Changes), and what came out of her pen is piano and cello music I can only describe as unreasonably beautiful. Then Maya starts singing in the Epilogue... Anyway, I would like to formally apologise to anyone who has ever watched me pull into a petrol station and just sit there for a minute.
Yes, it's a concept album built on ancient Chinese philosophy. No, you don't need to be Chinese, ride through China, or even read a word of the language to enjoy the album.
Listen to Ten Songs of Change
From the car, the van, or anything with or without a roof
Different rules apply here. You've got a proper stereo, you've got passengers who can and will judge you, and you can afford to pay a bit more attention to what's playing without endangering your life. This music is allowed to be a little bit more demanding.
Mēla Guitar Quartet - Overtures & Dances
This album is such a fun one. I'm putting that in writing on a classical music label's website and I stand by it.
The playing is absolutely extraordinary and the arrangements themselves deserve a longer article than this one. But the honest reason it's on the list is that it makes a car full of people happy, and the My Neighbour Totoro Suite at the end turns everyone who grew up with the movie into a slightly nostalgic mess.
If someone in the car tells you a guitar quartet isn't serious music, yank the aux cable from their hands, play this album, and watch them go quiet.
Listen to Overtures & Dances
Alexandra Kaptein - Liszt: Lebenswanderung
Twenty-four songs. Twelve by Franz Schubert, twelve by Robert Franz, arranged for solo piano by Franz Liszt, who apparently could not walk past a good song without wanting to rewrite it for ten fingers.
Alexandra's performance on this album is stunning, and the shape of the album makes it work even better on a long drive. Twenty-four short pieces means you're never more than a few minutes from something new, but it never feels like shuffling either. It's a walk through life, which is roughly what the title promises and roughly what a long drive feels like anyway. Robert Franz, meanwhile, is one of those composers everyone nods knowingly about and almost nobody has actually sat down with, so consider this your chance to become insufferable at parties with some justification behind it.
Listen to Liszt: Lebenswanderung
Maya Fridman & Maarten van Veen - Nuït
Improvisations, recorded across a single night, inspired by the night itself. Look, I know how that sounds. There's a version of that sentence that gets you laughed out of a record shop. But they actually did it, and the album that came out of it leaves you somewhere between being awake and dreaming.
Save this one for the last leg. Dark outside, headlights, motorway lines going past, nobody in the car talking. That one friend in the back snoring, maybe. This music does something to a drive that I've had years to find the right words for, and still haven't managed.
Listen to Nuït
Enjoy the drive!
Nothing here was auditioned against a reference setup. Some of it was heard through a helmet intercom at 130 km/h, which I'm told is not how any of this is meant to work. It worked anyway.
Ride safe, and if you're on a bike, keep the volume low enough so that you can still hear the white Audi tailgating you.
