How to Enter a Shamanic Trance while Driving

I’m da king of da highway

Every red-blooded American loves the freedom of the highway. But with a long enough drive, even the wide open road can grow a little stale. How do you pass the time?

I recently spent two years working at a job where I had to make the same two-hour drive, two times a week. This wasn’t a problem; it’s a beautiful drive. But after the first dozen runs it got a little old, so I started working on ways to help pass the time. 

The sad truth is that I’m not much of a podcast or an audiobook guy, so my main tool was music. At first I thought I would be able to just listen to my usual catalogue. But I was surprised to find that many songs I love under normal conditions are a total drag on the highway — while other songs, that I might not usually appreciate, are mesmerizing on a long drive.

Soon I realized that I had accidentally developed a new theory of the best songs for highway driving. Today, I share that theory with all of you.

Long Time

My first discovery is simple: highway songs should be as long as possible. 

On a long drive, you want to pass the time and keep the seconds from dragging. Longer songs make the drive feel shorter and tend to be more pleasantly hypnotic. 

Clock time passes in minutes, but your perception of time isn’t strictly bound to reality. The mind measures things in intervals. This is why, other things being equal, six 10-minute meetings feels more frantic than one 60-minute meeting. You had to do six things in an hour instead of just one! And it’s related to why 200 words is an easier read when it’s presented as five paragraphs than when it’s dropped on you as one great big wall of text.

When you’re listening to 3-minute pop songs, a two-hour drive is 40 songs long. But if you’re listening to 6-minute ballads, the same drive is only 20 songs long. This will make it feel about half as long, or at least makes it feel like it took half as many songs. 

The songs still have to be good, of course. But good & long songs pass the time better than songs that are good & short. Based on extensive empirical testing, I’ve found that highway songs should ideally be 4 or 5 minutes long, though longer songs are better. 

I think there must be diminishing returns at some point. A single 120-minute jam won’t make your drive feel like it was “one song long”, no matter how much of a banger it might be. But in general, listening to longer songs makes the drive feel shorter. You enjoy a few of your favorite tracks, and before you know it, you’ve arrived. If you’re listening to shorter songs, you burn through dozens of tracks in an hour, move from album to album, you have to switch playlists, it’s a hassle.

So while it is a masterpiece, on a road trip I can’t recommend that you listen to Pet Sounds, which has an average track length of less than three minutes. The longest track, “I Just Wasn't Made for These Times,” runs a mere 3 minutes 12 seconds.

It’s Good, But It’s Not Driving Music

The Roadtrip

Ok, longer songs better. On top of that, I noticed two other features that great highway songs tend to have in common.

The best highway songs have, no pun intended, a real driving beat. The beat needs to be fast enough that you feel like you’re truly rolling, but not quite so thumping that you want to constantly accelerate. 

The right tempo seems to be close to 100 BPM, plus or minus ten. Any slower and things start to get boring. Any faster and you’ll want to floor it, and soon you’re going 95 on MA Route 2, which is a problem.

Finally, almost all the best driving songs have a long instrumental prelude. In the best songs, there’s as much as a full minute of run-up before you hit the lyrics. 

Why do preludes make for such good highway driving? If I had to guess, I’d say that the prelude is hypnotic. It helps ease you into things. Without lyrics, the prelude doesn’t measure time so much, so it passes the time more quickly. You do tend to lose yourself in these songs.

In some ways, the goal of a highway song is to enter something like a shamanic trance. Think about what defines the highway experience: you’re not making turns, you’re not making decisions. You’re on a constant journey. You’re going somewhere far away.

Highway: The Playlist

Right now I have 81 songs on my “Highway” playlist, giving me 6 hours and 25 minutes of driving jams. I won’t bore you with the full playlist today — just the hits. Here are the top 10 tracks, take a look: