Now playing: road music

Musicians spend a lot of time on the road, and so they often write about it. That experience often forms both direct subject and metaphor for life’s twists and turns. Here are three I like:



Muireann nic Amhlaoibh knows whereof she speaks in singing Gerry O’Beirne’s song Western Highway. Not only does she spend much time on the road, as the lead singer of the irish band Danu, in support of her solo projects, and working with Scottish singer Julie Fowlis, she grew up in the far western most part of Ireland, Dunquin in County Kerry. This song is a fine evocation of travels, changes, and landscape.

Alison Brown doesn’t sing a word on Chicken Road; she speaks with her banjo, leading a high stepping journey that yet has elements of looking back as well as looking forward.


Roads and journeys often find their way into Tish Hinojosa’s music, nowhere more vividly than in By the Rio Grande. Hinojosa is from the southwest, and has traveled all over the world with her music, taking the southwestern landscapes of her imagination, and her understanding won by living across Mexican and American cultures, down many roads.

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