Road Trip
Mile Marker Mixtape
Every song here has an exit number attached to it, whether it wants one or not.
Some songs get permanently attached to a place, whether you want them to or not. This playlist is what happens when the place is a stretch of highway I've driven more times than I can count, and the songs are the ones that now come with their own exit numbers attached.
I didn't build this one so much as accumulate it, one drive at a time, over a couple of years. A song would come on at a certain mile marker enough times that the two became inseparable, and eventually I had a playlist that was less a curated experience than a kind of accidental map — proof that repetition can do the work that intention usually gets credit for.
I don't know if it will mean anything to someone who hasn't driven that road. That's fine. Most mile marker mixtapes are like that: intensely specific, barely transferable, and exactly right for the one stretch of highway they were made for.