Dale Earnhardt Jr. on the ‘NASCAR ’26’ soundtrack and the best-written song about his dad

Scour the motorsport world for a more dedicated music fan than Dale Earnhardt Jr. and you’ll likely come up empty handed. 

He’s starred in music videos for Jay-Z, Nickelback, Sheryl Crow, 3 Doors Down and Luke Combs, produced them for other artists through his company Hammerhead Entertainment, and lived the ultimate music fan’s dream of seeing his long-defunct favorite band get back together and managing to convince them to play his house party – except in his case, the party was the Gander Outdoors 400 at Pocono Raceway. Fittingly, he once told Vice’s Noisey that had he not been a racing driver, his dream job would have been as an A&R scout searching the nation’s dive bars for bands to sign.

For the past two years, Earnhardt has gotten to put his scouting skills to work curating the soundtracks of iRacing’s "NASCAR ‘25" and "NASCAR ‘26" games, with the latter set to release on PS5, XBOX and Steam September 18. RACER sat down with Earnhardt to discuss the new soundtrack, how it came together and the songs he loves most from the track list.

What makes a great racing game soundtrack?

“Well, if you ask a thousand people, you might get a thousand different opinions. That's one thing I've learned in doing this: it's difficult to make everyone happy. But I think it's super easy and traditional, maybe cheesy, but easy to go to with any kind of high speed, fast paced, energized music around driving. Or if you have something that maybe reminds you of your childhood or are good road trip songs that aren't even really about driving, but they connect you to a memory, or it's a song that you put on in the car and play while you're driving down the road, those always fit really well.

This whole thing has been super educational. I had no idea what the challenges were to acquiring the rights to music, and I have a little bit of an understanding about licensing and so forth, so I kind of knew what to expect. There were a lot of challenges for some songs because in some music, you're either dealing with the person who actually wrote and sung the song.

In other forms of music or other titles, you've got the person that wrote it, the person that produced it, then there's another person that sang it. And then in other songs, there's music that's sampled, so now you're paying for two different songs. You're paying for the current version, but also, you’ve got to pay the artist for the sampled version as well.

If I had an unlimited budget, I could go in and buy a bunch of Metallica, Rolling Stones. I could buy all of the greatest songs ever and throw them on this soundtrack. But any game title is going to have a budget, so you’ve kind of got to say, ‘OK, let's pick five or two or three really big songs.’ Or maybe it's just one really big title song, one hit, one really hot artist, and then you're gonna have to budget and value shop a little bit to put it together.

Then you get down to the very bottom of the budget to get some unknown or unsigned artist, and that's actually kind of fun because they're getting a chance to be a part of something. They're lining themselves up right next to some ‘big A’ artist that they’re getting to rub shoulders with indirectly. So there's hundreds and hundreds of songs you can sift through to try to find a couple of gems that connect to you or speak to you a little bit.

That whole process was a lot of fun trying to fill the basket up and have a batch of songs that you thought, ‘OK, people are going to wonder why there's not more hits or not more modern megastars.’ They just don't understand the challenges of the budget and fitting in the budget. So trying to put together a bucket of songs that, when you turn the game on, give you the energy and excitement and feel that a NASCAR game should give you, that’s kind of what you're trying to do.”

What's your process for putting a soundtrack together?

“There's a man named Steve Myers that works at iRacing. Me and him start a playlist on Apple Music and just throw songs in, and this playlist will grow to 100 or 200 songs, and I'm listening to what he's adding, he's listening to what I'm adding. Then he might have some friends and relatives and so forth suggest songs, and I'm doing the same with other people. I'll walk around and ask people what they think, or talk to some drivers. It's always great to say you've had input from the NASCAR drivers themselves.

So we end up with this big long playlist, and then we just kind of get honest with each other and say, ‘Man, I didn't like this or like that,’ and it's kind of like, alright, we're gonna pick a handful of yours and a handful of mine. Then we have this person that clears the music and actually goes out and seeks the rights. So maybe we have this really bada** mega hit that we want. We've got to kind of have a plan B and a plan C because they may come back and say, ‘Well, they want $50,000 for this song,’ and that's not realistic. So, our top song needs to be underneath that. I don't know that there's really a number to it, but it can't eat up a giant chunk of the budget.

But me and him will whittle it down to 25 or 30 songs, and then we'll get it to our licensing expert who will go seek out the rights. We'll have to probably get rid of a few songs because either they're too expensive, we couldn't reach the artists and obtain the rights, there was no response, or there was no interest.

Some artists will say, ‘We don't want our song on a video game.’ I actually had to write a personal letter to System of a Down to explain to them why it would be good for them to be part of the game last year. I said, ‘Man, you know, the opening of that song is just perfect for the intensity of NASCAR and what we're trying to map for this video game.’ I thought, you know, the worst thing that they could say is, ‘Man, we're just not interested.’ But they read the letter, they appreciated this sentiment and ended up coming on board.

When we get done, you know, you go through this process and you're listening to these songs and you think you've got this really great pack of songs. Then when it's done and everything's agreed upon and you know that's the soundtrack, there's this very… I don't want to say difficult, but there's a lot of anxiety because you've made your choice of songs. You can't go back and change it. If you keep looking at that list of songs, after a while you go, ‘Man, I don't know about that one. I would take that one off,’ or, ‘I would I want a different song.’ You could sit there and change this playlist a thousand times over.

But once it's in ink and everybody's agreed to the rights, there's no going back. I don't know that I would say ‘regret’ is the right word, but I’ve done this twice, and each time I'm just never really 100% satisfied with it.”

How long does it take to put one of these together from beginning to end?

“Six months, probably. Takes a while. I think the hardest, lengthiest part is chasing the rights.”