Road Trip: Songs to Drive By

The history of road trip mixtapes is cluttered with tense and muscular songs that act as aural caffeine, especially at night. But nighttime offers its own set of stimuli if we're paying attention. Here are five songs to accompany the throbbing glow of lights in a distant town and tiny futures coming into focus.

Not every road trip is a symbol of celebration and freedom; sometimes you're just wallowing in grief, or perhaps fleeing the soul-shrapnelizing ruin you've created back home. Regardless of your misery's root cause, there's no better place to mourn ostentatiously than alone in a car late at night, when no one's around to witness your pitiful, spluttering sobs.

The songs on this list were made before iTunes was a glimmer in Steve Jobs' eye, so it stands to reason that they sound better bumping out of car speakers. Give these a spin and then track down the CDs, because they deserve to be heard the old-fashioned way. Turn your woofers up and roll down your windows — all of them.

This brutally efficient five-song playlist serves as a soundtrack for when you want to leave your house, hurry to an on-ramp, roar down a short stretch of highway, and abruptly take the next exit to your extremely nearby destination.

All summer long, NPR Music has assembled weekly playlists for those taking road trips, gas prices be damned. When the All Songs Considered blog asked readers to offer up anecdotes about their own favorite road songs, more than 100 provided suggestions. Here are five of the many enlightening and indispensable picks.

There's no better place to listen to music than in the driver's seat, looking out from behind a Cinemascope windshield. These five songs all feature some variation on driving, reaching a destination and, in some form or another, stopping along the way.

Nothing nourishes the road warrior quite like heavy-metal music. It awakens the primitive conqueror within. Epic highway battles can be fought on Black Sabbath and Slayer alone, but here are five more warrior-friendly head-bashers, each set to tear the road apart.

The summer sun is frying the concrete kingdom. Sweltering heat is parboiling millions of psyches around you. It's probably time to flee the city, but like many urbanites, you don't own a car. Book a rental and bring these five songs and crank the factory-installed stereo in your getaway car.

It's summer — time to get out of the city and head for the open road. These five great driving songs from WNYC's John Schaefer provide the right energy to help ease the transition from urban cityscapes to bucolic countrysides, while holding nostalgia for the city at bay.

Crafting the right music mix for your road trip can be as important as printing out directions: Both tasks require advance planning, and both are there to ward off dire consequences, be they getting lost or finding yourself stranded in a wasteland of crummy radio. These five songs should help keep you going just a hair over the speed limit.

You've just embarked on a long-anticipated summer road trip. You're filled with joy and excitement — until you fill your gas tank and are overcome with horror and grief. Here's hoping you brought this road-ready jazz mix to get back into the right frame of mind.

Tired of paying too much for gas? Take a virtual road trip with some of America's greatest composers. Stops include Leonard Bernstein's New York and Charles Ives' New England, Ferde Grofe's Grand Canyon and Virgil Thomson's Great Plains.

When driving long distances, the crushing exhaustion and faceless landscapes can fade from memory in a nanosecond when accompanied by the perfect piece of adrenaline-infused music. These five tracks serve that purpose beautifully, so be sure to put them on for those moments when the landmarks are starting to whiz by in a joyously indistinct blur.

Virtually everyone has heard the siren song of the open road at some point or another. Out of the thousands of great road songs, here are five which provide a soundtrack to that long journey we're all forced to take at least once: to try to figure out what we're supposed to be doing with our lives.

Summer road trips are a time for both celebration and meditation. There's an urgent need to be free and explore, while also blocking out the rest of the world and getting lost in wistful daydreams. For Carrie Brownstein, former guitarist for Sleater-Kinney and host of NPR's Monitor Mix blog, nothing captures those moments better than these five songs.