How Music Travels With Me

The Travel Mix

Once we’re safely at our destination (as we always are), my wife and I start to compile the songs for our travel mix. This is a collection of the songs that we hear on our vacations, as a kind of memento from the trip. It’s usually only applicable when we travel internationally, since here in America all the radio stations are ClearChannel and play the same songs no matter where you go.

Pacha Nightclub in Ibiza
(not that I’ve ever been there, either)

Most of the time the mix starts on the plane, since we get to listen to the in-flight entertainment (once I have been sufficiently calmed by application of the five-star mix—see above). They’re usually playing the big hits, but they’re European big hits, and therefore unknown to us. If we’re lucky they’ll also show some music videos so that we get a good introduction to what’s hot.

Most of the exposure we get to the local music comes from the TV: if we’re lucky the city or country will have its own music video channel or at least a regular video show. Sometimes we’re stuck with German MTV, which isn’t our favorite as the Germans seem to enjoy rap/R & B almost as much as Americans, and you can only see so many Chris Brown videos in a lifetime.

If we’re renting a car, we can listen to the radio, which is pretty cool since you’re getting local DJs and more recent music than you’ll see on TV. The downside is that if you don’t speak the language, it’s really really hard to figure out what the song is called or who the artist is. The best you can do is to write down chunks of what the lyrics sound like and hope you can Google it later. Of course, if you’re in a country with its own alphabet like Greece, you’re pretty much out of luck.

We’ll also pick up songs that are playing in shops and cafés from time to time, usually whatever is a big smash hit (or perhaps a “summerhit”). As annoying as they can be, we’ll always include them in the mix because they will remind us of the trip when we heard that damn song over and over. During one trip to Krakow, Poland it seemed as though every street musician was playing “Besame Mucho,” so of course that had to go onto the mix (and in various versions).

You can always visit local record shops and check out the featured artists at the listening stations (or just get a CD sight unseen if you’re a risk-taker). Oftentimes you’ll find good stuff that they don’t play on the radio, but I rarely put that stuff on the mixes, since we won’t have heard it during the trip and it won’t really be a memory we’d have. Most of the places we visit will have several “hits” collections for the year or even the season, and those are always fun to get.

And last but not least are the songs that just get stuck in our heads from nowhere. Maybe it was the song that played when the alarm went off at oh-dark-thirty to wake us for the drive to the airport (King, “Love And Pride”). Maybe it was the song you couldn’t stop quoting during the vacation (Rihanna,”Umbrella” Ella. Eh. Eh.). Or the song that kept popping up because it reminded you of where you were (Three Dog Night ,”Never Been To Spain”). These all tend to show up on the mixes because like it or not, they were a part of the experience. And they’re fun.

I’m sure that we tend to go a little more overboard about music than normal people. Songs are like snapshots—they bring back the sensations of the time and place you heard them. So like snapshots, we like to collect them and put them in an album so that we can revisit and re-experience the places we’ve been. And they take up a lot less room than a photo album.

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