10 best travel songs of all time
Music and travel have always gone together.
But if you were to name 10 great travel-inspired tracks from the last 20 years, where would you start?
No, putting Enya on shuffle to transform 11 hours of ass-numbing economy class tedium into a "spiritual journey" doesn't count.
You would probably find it hard to start at all.
While performers like Jay-Z and Alicia Keys continue to crank out tunes that celebrate destinations like New York, barely anyone seems to be writing great songs about travel any more.
Once a life-changing event, leaving on a jet plane is now something everyone does, all the time. And it sucks.
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High fuel prices and dull highways means epic car journeys are out of the question. And the only people still hopping freight trains inevitably wind up mangled in machinery.
So, with due apologies for excessive wallowing in classic guitar licks of years gone by, please fasten your seatbelts, familiarize yourself with the safety procedures and hold on to the barf bag, as we embark on a journey through the best travel tunes ever written.
10. Peter, Paul and Mary: 'Leaving on a Jet Plane' (1967)
This wistful John Denver ballad telling the story of an achy-hearted traveler’s sadness at leaving a loved one and not knowing “when I’ll be back again” is an anthem for long-distance love.
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In these days of volcanic eruptions, striking air traffic controllers and passengers wearing explosive underpants, it could simply be a mundane tirade against the uncertainties of commercial flying.
Sad but apt fact: In one of popular music’s most apt demises, Denver died when his experimental plane crashed into the Pacific Ocean.
9. Gene Pitney: '24 Hours from Tulsa' (1963)
Clearly a song of its time, Gene Pitney’s hit is a tale of unexpectedly falling in love a day’s drive away from an existing relationship.
It wouldn’t happen today because the song’s protagonist would have hopped onto a budget airline and made the journey in a couple of hours -- although he could perhaps have squeezed in a mile-high quickie with the woman in seat 43a who was giving him those looks ...
Slightly tasteless fact: The Welsh hotel room where Pitney died of heart failure in 2006 was about 24 hours’ travel time from Tulsa.
8. Iggy Pop: 'The Passenger' (1977)
Not to be confused with Elton John’s execrable 1984 song “Passengers,” or the 2003 album “Passenger” by Swedish nu metal band “Passenger,” Iggy’s restless punk anthem cleaves a ragged path through the dark heart of an unexplored urban landscape -- or at least it used to until it was appropriated (with lucrative results for Mr. Pop no doubt) to peddle cars, Guinness and cosmetics.
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Sell-out fact: Apparently no longer content to be a passenger, Iggy himself -- old, wrinkled but still shirtless -- now advertises car insurance in the United Kingdom.
7. M.I.A.: 'Paper Planes' 2008
Before you start hurling heavy objects at your computer screen, hear us out.
Yes, this might be a feeble attempt to keep this list current, but M.I.A.’s melodic mash-up of The Clash’s “Straight to Hell” and Wreckx-n-Effect’s “Rumpshaker” is about travel.
Sure, M.I.A.’s incoherent polemics on global oppression create as many critics as fans, and all the edgy stuff about visas and hustling on “Paper Planes” is somewhat undone by the misfiring irony of the song’s cartoon violence -- but there’s no avoiding the fact it was a solid platinum hit.
Undiplomatic fact: M.I.A.’s strident support for Sri Lanka’s Tiger Tamil fighters led to her being branded a “terrorist sympathizer” by the island’s government.
