Car-Tunes: Things I Learned Today

Made the 8-hour trip from Washington, D.C. to the home of rock n' roll today with Neats and the boys. That would be basically six hours of driving with prerequisite stops for dough and gas and the requisite stops at Bob Evans for lunch (lest we have a children riot on our hands) and the Latte Mocha stop in the afternoon (lest we have a parental riot). Here is what we learned about music from this trip.

1. After nearly twenty years of marriage, Neats is still amazed that it takes me longer to decide what music to take with me than to pack my clothes (or do anything else related to the trip).
2. Hearing Lucinda Williams sing AC/DC's "Long Way to the Top" is fun, but not as fun as hearing The Engineer singing it from the back of the van afterwards.
   
3. Traveling through the hills and mountains of Pennsylvania was a good time to listen to Charlie Haden's new bluegrass disc.
4. Forty-five minutes of live Phish jams will, in fact, drive my wife to take control of the music.
5. The Artist is perfectly happy to ignore the music being played to sing his own songs that he is making up as he goes along.
6. Fortunately, we have discovered that if you play REM's album Accelerate very loud, you can drown out three boys screaming nonsense--yes that would be four middle aged men screaming nonsense drowning out three small children, and that is not fair, but this was before the requisite coffee stop.
7. Despite heading home for multiple holiday gatherings, we are musically done with the holidays as nary a single holiday disc made it into the player today.