RACER Radio: Autumn Road Trip

Fall is the best time for driving. The leaves are changing, the summer storms are past, and you can finally drive that old car with the spotty AC. And as the weather cools and the sun shines yet, we begin to dip down into the squishy shallows of melancholy that precurse both barrels of the winter blues. Indeed, this is a sweet spot for long, contemplative drives through gradient landscapes. With autumn comes the heavy holiday season and cold starts. Family road trips, solo mountain retreats, and cool nights in the garage are ripe for the picking when the gales of November come early. 

As perfect as fall driving can be, it is nothing, and I mean, nothing, without the proper tunes. Fall playlists are among some of the most potent playlists ever created. A good fall playlist should give us coziness, wistfulness, nostalgia, hireath, saudade…. A good fall road trip playlist, however, is a bit more difficult because it needs all the same things plus a tempo and bounce that spur us on, even if we do so with a tear or two locked and loaded. Fall road trip playlists also need a certain woodiness, a vibe that is hard to catch and even harder to define, but you know it when you hear it: an errant click of the drumstick, acoustic-guitar-string squeak, reverb that sounds nearly defective but somehow perfect, the hiss and pop of tape, a general lack of refinement that comes as an effort to catch a feeling more than aesthetic. 

Grab your sweater, roll down the windows, crank the heat, and turn up our autumn road trip playlist because the best driving of the year is upon us. Enjoy.