The minor fall, the major lift

I talked yesterday about coping mechanisms, and I left one out: music! You can't have a road trip without music. It's a contradiction in terms. So I'm left with the pleasant chore of assembling a list of road songs and love songs from my collection of music. My collection is deep but not broad; I've got everything Suzanne Vega ever sang and a lot of Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon, but ask me to cue up some AC/DC or Hootie and the Blowfish (or for that matter to name any song either band ever produced) and I'll come up empty. Fortunately, Vega, Cohen, and Simon all sing a lot of love songs, and Simon in particular has a lot of songs that intertwine travel and love -- Hearts and Bones, Train in the Distance, the Myth of Fingerprints, Homeward Bound, and Slip Slidin' Away all occur to me without consulting a playlist. (They are all also absolutely first-class songs, with the possible exception of Homeward Bound, which is second-class but catchy and charismatic.)

As I may have mentioned, I don't have a lot of experience of music, but I'm pretty sure you could listen to every platinum record the RIAA ever certified and not do better than Leonard Cohen for the sheer quantity of soulful, lyrical ballads about the melancholy aspects of love. Here I have to consult a playlist just to narrow it down. You have the complexity and rawness of Hallelujah alongside the simple, imagistic, sad velvet of Alexandra Leaving. You have the surreal yet eviscerating pathos of One of Us Cannot Be Wrong alongside the very concrete and oddly refreshing memoir of Chelsea Hotel #2. Not a lot of road songs, though, just love songs. Where Paul Simon treks through Africa to get ideas for his music, you can tell Cohen is a homebody; even his songs about freedom don't usually invoke the imagery of travel.

Suzanne Vega's love songs are maybe a hair less complex than Cohen's but more varied. For all his permutations of flatware and condiments, at times you get the sense Cohen is serving you basically the same steak in nine out of ten of his songs. I've never felt that way about Vega. Her songs have a higher standard deviation of subject and significance and resonance. So you get some songs that are perfect road/love songs (Ludlow Street, Calypso, Penitent, World Before Columbus, and In Liverpool leap to mind, each a five-star song, the latter three almost celestial in their beauty) along with a bunch of songs that I really honestly dislike quite a lot and have nothing to do with my themes.

And then there are the few outliers, the songs by other artists I've been accidentally exposed to. Everything off Anjani Thomas's album is a love song ranging from listenable to almost pull-off-the-highway-till-your-eyes-clear in quality. A couple Feist songs here for letting the mind drift, a few Liz Phair songs there for grit, and in case I get bored of the singer-songwriter stuff I have a little Tokio Hotel and Evanescence and Vertical Horizon (not to mention the entire soundtrack of Avenue Q) to provide a change of pace.

So let me put the question to you, if you're reading this: what's your favorite song that integrates themes of travel and love?