The iTune In 08.15.08: On the Road
Posted by Ari Berenstein on 08.15.2008
What ITunes musical experiences await on a road trip? Find out inside!
This week ended up becoming a bit of a road trip, as I headed off to Ithaca, New York to help my sister and her husband move back in some of their furniture and such into their apartment (it's the close to the beginning of the next semester for my sister, who is in Vet school). As such, I didn't have the time to give my full attention to the new releases on iTunes this week and thus this column is going to be slightly different.
When going on road trips in the past, the tape player or disc man was in constant usage. Of course, when I received my iPod several years ago, the source of musical accompaniment for my entire road travels switched. The iPod may have many different uses, but its best function may be as the ultimate mix tape playlist. You an play any song on your Pod, you can create an hours (Or months in so cases)-long play list, or shuffle songs and just let it all hang out to see what comes up.
As I knew we would be on the road for sometime, I spent some considerable time before the travel figuring out an all-new road trip playlist. As it would happen, several of the songs that I have downloaded over the course of these last few editions of the column came up in this playlist. Starting with Conor Oberst's "NYC-Gone, Gone" as the ultimate ode to leaving The City and progressing onwards for about two and a half hours of new music. It was especially new to the ears of my travel mates—my sister included. It was very cool to see her ask who this or that artist were. Of course she liked some of them (CSS was "cute") for instance, but on the other hand she wasn't fond of others ("So Much Love" by The Rocket Summer was thought to be done by The Jonas Brothers (and there is your TJB reference of the week). Ultimately the mix was a success, with more songs liked than disliked.
Then there was the problem of how to fill up the other three hours of the trip. With over six thousand songs on my 30GB iPod at my disposal, I could have gone in a ton of directions, but ultimately thought to go with large blocks of music so that I could maximize the musicians we all dug while doing a minimum of switching and busying myself with the Pod. So we listen to extended blocks of Ben Folds, The 80's, Paramore, Feist, etc. We made it to Ithaca with battery power to spare.
It was a good two-day plus break from the grind of the concrete jungle, filled with shopping and good food, including one of the best peanut butter pies I've ever tasted. Kilpatrick's Irish Pub—damned good dessert.
The second day we ended up at the Pyramid Mall—a mall like any other in America really, with all the requisite stores and the like. We settled into a Borders books and music store for some browsing and sampling. They have those "sampling" machines where you can scan and listen to any CD on the rack—well at least thirty seconds apiece. So, really, it was like doing The iTune In on the road!
I settled in there between the K through M rack and strapped on those big honking oversized headphones. For the next half hour or so I took a listen to some recent CDs, including ones by Kaki King (acoustic folk-rock), Mute Math (alt) Tift Merritt (country), The Last of the Shadow Puppets (alt) and other not so recent releases like The Police and Our Lady Peace. I generally liked what I heard from each of these CDs, just not enough to plunk down the cash at that particular time. Damn Borders is overpriced when it comes to music!
On the way back to Brooklyn, I was caught in one hell of a torrential nor'easter. This downpour had drenched the city and the streets were flooding on the West Side Highway. While I had no problem listening to the iPod up until that point, the rain so was loud that it had drowned out the music. All you could hear was the harsh thumps of rain on moving automobile or the crack of thunder, massive and booming.
Sometimes, nature provides its own soundtrack to a road trip.
