One of my life’s great pleasures is listening to music on a
roadtrip. Loud music on a long drive. I’ve spent enough time in a car without a
working stereo to know what it’s like to drive in silence, and I believe that
experience has made me appreciate the travelling tunes even more.
There’s something incredibly satisfying in putting on the
right music for the right moment. Sometimes the song does more than suit the
moment, it is a part of the moment, it creates it. There have been times when
I’ve been driving and I’ve come upon a scene of startling impact – maybe the still
coastline at dawn, or a dripping wet forest in the mist, or a long familiar
street I haven’t driven down for years – and the music is there with me. I know
that from that moment on whenever I hear that song I’ll be taken right back to
this time and place, I’ll feel it, smell it and live it once more...
...in the sun cruising the dusty roads of South
Australia’s Eyre Peninsula with wet salty hair after some long smooth waves at
Granites, listening to that unmistakeable guitar sound of The Cruel Sea, Tex
Perkins growling ‘my heart is a muscle
and it pumps blood like a big old black steam train’, and I’m thinking
about travelling the country and surfing unknown waves and camping under the
stars by a crackling campfire, I was free, alive, on the loose in the world...
...long straight highways in the rain, as roadtrains howled
past with a rumbling gust from their fiery depths, spitting spray onto the
windscreen, listening to Bruce Springsteen’s dark smoky sounds on Nebraska as he sings about death row
inmates and troubled Highway Patrolmen...
...driving down into Prevelly from Margaret River on a warm
Autumn evening and the sun had just set and there was a band of apricot-orange
on the horizon, lines of swell stretched away, there was a purple tinge in the
air, and I’d just quit my job and left Freo and was moving across the country
with all my worldly goods in the car with me and LCD Soundsystem were saying ‘look around you, you’re surrounded, it won’t
get any better’ and I believed it.
On this journey I was moving towards a new chapter of life, and
on the way I had been weaving between optimistic excitement at this new
beginning, and pessimistic apprehension about my chances of finding happiness
on the east coast, or anywhere. Some days it took just a simple song lyric to
tip the balance one way or the other. A word or two could leave me hollow and
shaking, or on the other hand the right song could have me smiling and tapping
the steering wheel, singing along loudly and feeling that living this life is a
damn fine thing to be doing today.
I’m reminded of a great book I read a while back, Vernon God Little, where the main
character is similarly affected. Talking about listening to pop songs and the
psychological impact it had on him, he says ‘...you get all boosted up,
convinced you’re going to win in life, then the song’s over and you discover
you fucken lost.’
My music is precious
to me, it helps shape my days, so when I misplaced a case full of twenty four
of my favourite cds in Denmark in the south of WA, I didn’t hesitate in
reporting it to the local police. The officer took my details and said she’d
ring me if it showed up. She hasn’t called so far but the way I see it, the
song hasn’t ended just yet so maybe I can still win.
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