Music can spark ideas for visual artists, providing a mood for editing and sequencing, or even as inspiration for bodies of work. Each month, Lindsey Eckenroth curates a playlist of music to make art to. 

Windows down and volume up, heading determinedly nowhere. A good road trip obviously requires a good playlist, even if—as in my city-dwelling/non-car-owning case—the road trip is only in your mind. Since I’ve lately been preoccupied with a persistent desire to drive off into the sunset of anywhere else, here’s a playlist about and for The Drive.

We pull out with Kavinsky’s foreboding, electropopish Nightcall (featured in Nicholas Refn’s film Drive), followed by The White Stripes’ brutally dense and damning The Big Three Killed My Baby. Gotta Keep Movin’to the first blues overpass with Detroit proto-punks the MC5, and next with the most mythicized of all bluesmen: Robert Johnson, who s(w)ings the Terraplane Blues (spoiler alert: the car is a metaphor for a woman). We pick up Iggy Pop as The Passenger on a detour back to 70s Detroit, and then we turn onto the synth road: Black Moth Super Rainbow’s Windshield Smasher is a cloudy analog wash of “hairspray, gasoline, and roller skates,” and Gary Numan gives us his weird-dorky-dystopian take on Cars. Retro new-wavers Nation of Language remind us that “the only way out’s not the way you came in” on Automobile, and then we simultaneously float and sink through Aix Em Klemm’s Twin-Peaks-referencing Sparkwood and Twentyone.

Death Cab for Cutie’s Passenger Seat provides a reflective emo interlude (“with my feet on the dash / the world doesn’t matter”), and then we’re back in the riff zone with The Stone Roses’ muddy Drive South and Deep Purple’s heavy (pedal to the) metal Space Truckin. Two Road Runners follow. First is Bo Diddley, who invites us to hop on in with a smoothly sensual declamation and a forever-ascending electric guitar slide. Next, with the radio insistently ON, we head to The Modern Lovers. As Greil Marcus wrote of frontman Jonathan Richman: “his themes were traditional (cars, girls, the radio), but with an overlay of moment-to-moment, quotidian realism that made the traditional odd.” The riffs continue on L.A. WITCH’s Drive Your Car, a grippingly moody garage rock jam perfectly punctuated by Sade Sanchez’s flat-affect vocals. Finally, with Future Islands we disappear around the hazy synthpop bend, “flying and free,” hoping to Hit the Coast. 

Lindsey Eckenroth is a Brooklyn-based musicologist, flutist, and lover of sounds. When she's not teaching at Brooklyn College and working at RILM, she likes thinking and writing about popular music, documentary films, music and/as affective labor, rock stardom and celebrity, and psychogeography.