THE NEW 20’S ROAD TRIP PLAYLIST

Guest author Lancelot Schaubert is back with another playlist that tested his creative limits.

Photo by author

Good morning!

As you read this, I’m ramblin’ around flyover country with my family on a quest to find a four calendar café. We are again lucky to have Lancelot Schaubert here sharing the story behind a playlist—this one was made for a road trip of his own, and began as an exercise to test his creative limits.

Enjoy!

KA—

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Last time I talked about the playlist we made from the detritus of dad’s estate — his random Artist-Single notes scrawled with sharpie on every piece of trash in his house, but today I want to talk about creative limits. Specifically: the most absurd creative limits I could give myself for creating the ultimate New 20’s music road trip playlist.

For those who don’t know me: hi, I’m Lancelot and I’m addicted to strange creative limits as I chase my deepest desires — like that time I had climb into a shower naked with an American greywolf or the time I weathered the NYC housing trenches with a man experiencing homelessness for ten years until he found permanent housing. I like challenges, vows, deep longing (Sehnsucht), and the philosophy of play.

I also love road trips.

So here’s the origin story of my New 20’s Road Trip playlist’s strange creative limits that grew out of rather epic desires:

1. My good buddy, the pro photographer Mark 9 (who co-produced Cold Brewed with me) was complaining about how there’s no more good music since his college days. As I’m sure Kevin would agree, I thought that was nonsense. But there certainly is, as my film critic and philosopher friend Doug Welch would argue, a special place reserved in each of our hearts for the music we discover in the three to five years after the end of puberty.

2. My bride, Tara, used to love it when I would make her CDs or especially cassette playlists for our road trips. (My first and only car was a Ford Escort Zx2 that had a tape deck and I ran that thing for 200,000 miles road tripping the Mother Road Route 66 and all other highways. I gifted it to my sister when we moved to NYC in 2014. The car’s name, for those keeping score, was Mary Queen of Scots).

3. Did I mention I love road trips? I used to take them with my late father all the time. My sophomore internship required me to drive from Joplin, Missouri to San Diego in that car in 27 hours. That was mostly the creative limit of not having enough money for hotels. It got very Fear and Loathing by the end. Related to this, my favorite book of Steinbeck’s is the lesser-read Travels with Charlie in Search of America, in which the 60-year-old Steinbeck commissions GMC to design him “a truck with a camper built into the bed.” If you want to see me gush about that book, go here. But Steinbeck’s methods or no, pretty much since the invention of the radio, no road trip is whole without music. I say that advisedly: my first job at 15 years old was as a DJ for Lite Hits 100.1 FM WJBD.

4. I had started coming across fascinating new music on the backend of SubmitHub’s Hot or Not ranker that reminded me of classic road trip music.

Those four deep desires lead to the birth of the following absurd creative limits:

1. I was going to create the ultimate New 20’s road trip playlist.

2. 95% of the musicians needed to be people I’d never heard of before. That meant that for every 200 songs, only 10 could be artists I recognized.

3. ALL songs had to be new to me at the time I added them.

4. ALL songs had to be published in 2019 or later (I think I maybe made one exception for a 2017 one that gets played often in our home).

5. ALL songs had to give me some similar vibe to the kinds of songs my father would often put on a playlist, but that varied very wildly. Generally, it needed to sound like a classic road trip mix. But if not, it at least needed to remind me of the feel of dad’s playlists. Whatever the case, they had to be songs that I would enjoy driving to, songs that Tara would enjoy singing again and again. We’ve therefore probably only removed three of them.

6. I could keep adding throughout the rest of the decade, but by 2030, I would leave it alone forever.

This resulted in weird quirks. For instance, Bob Dylan — who absolutely would have made the cut for a “classic” road trip mix for me — released a new album in 2020 when I started this. So oddly enough, as he’s still kicking and still getting it done, he appealed to the “B” exception clause, even though it was “C” new. This happened a few times. The only — ONLY — exception to the “new to me” song was “Running Up That Hill” by Kate Bush for the simple reason that it was a classic road trip song that exploded again with Stranger Things, making her uber successful super late in life through the single best use of a mimetic song in film history. I weep every time I watch that episode, probably because I identify with the isolation, family atmosphere, and depression of Max for my own high school journey.

But I also weep because of the music.

So start your engines or (if you’re like me now on the east coast or in Europe without a car) buy your MTA north, Amtrak, or Omio tickets at the nearest app or kiosk, get a bagel and lox or some kind of tavern burger or whatever potent portables ye vegan folken eat these days, and turn this puppy on with the windows down. Unless, of course, you caught an Amtrak north to Montreal — but in that case, wave to the concrete slab at the Ticonderoga stop for me:

The fictional version of Lancelot’s dad shows up as “Bren” in Bell Hammers, which is best consumed in audiobook format (Lancelot narrated it himself). You ought to subscribe to Lancelot’s substack here:

If you publish your own Substack, edit a journal, or host a blog, Lancelot is a free and open collaborator and will happily pen guest posts on any number of subjects. He’s also starting to shop around for literary agents this summer for a pipeline of six fiction manuscripts.

Thanks to Lancelot for sharing his story and to you for being here. Do you still make mixes for road trips? Ever found a four—or five—calendar café? If so, where?

Kevin—

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