Lost Highways, Empty Streets

ISSUE #117

Night has the power to change even sound. Waves travel slower through cold air than warm, which drops them in pitch and then sinks them in reverb. Humidity will carry those waves even farther. This change is embedded in the history of road music—long have musicians captured pavement's doppler roar, stretched mountain songs with pedals till they're shaped like blades of highways.

My long night walks have turned into longer night drives. I drive until trees overtake me and I'm swaddled in their camphor breath. Georgia in summer can rain from cloudless skies, the trees always dripping with hanging mist—the devil hiding in coward's smoke. The night bugs hum in mantric rhythm, the bellows of frogs like an E.T. radio.

In a time of ultimate stasis, the drive tricks me into thinking I'm going somewhere. I go out late so I don't have to see anyone. I've come to like it better when no one's around—a bit of Stockholm Syndrome to survive the growing F.O.M.O. So I wait until dark like the last man on Earth, finally purging years of daily traffic from my system.

Here I’ve gathered songs that sound like lost highways—the endless, midnight ones that pass nothing but stardust. Our propulsion comes from music as much as an engine, as heartbeats propel us through perception and feeling, over empty streets with nothing in mind but falling in love and not getting arrested. Let the good times roll.