In my youth I drove a lot of miles. It helped me get through severe depression. I’d get into my car and drive up and down the highway, sometimes for hours. Doing this helped me process my grief. It didn’t matter whether I was driving through some urban sprawl or a natural one, I needed to drive. Driving through the desert can be a unique and solitary experience. Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, these are places that have a vast expanse of sand, and the sky seems to stretch out in all directions. There is a desolate beauty to be found in arid landscapes. Contemplation and introspection are evoked, and adding music can amplify any emotion we feel thereby creating a profound impact on our experience of driving somewhere.

I won’t share my sad song that I listened to. All that matters is I was able to get healing. Sad music has a remarkable ability to evoke deep emotions within us. Yes, sad music often carries a sense of melancholy, longing, or even grief. Combine those with desert travel and you get my line of thinking. This type of music and the solitude and emptiness of the desert, can result in a powerful and introspective journey. Should I mention that I drove over 120mph through HWY 80 and received 3 tickets in 2 days? The Highway Patrol clocked me through Nevada in my Camaro, and gave me a ticket and a strong warning. I continued on my way.

You know, the expansive emptiness around you allows you to fill the space inside your mind that is occupied by sadness. The barren landscape and the sad music brings some kind of emotional depth, and creates this catharsis. Well, that’s what I believe. In the desert we can feel insignificant, and thereby we have to reflect. Music triggers emotions that might be buried.

It allows us to delve into our innermost thoughts and confront our deepest sorrows or regrets. Perhaps we begin to feel a heightened sense of connection to the environment. There is a bond between the melancholic tunes and the solitude of the desert.  There is an internal emotional landscape and the external physical one. We feel released. Finally, we can have a channel for expressing and processing feelings that may have been suppressed. There are drawbacks of course. I am not stating that you should torture yourself. You need to focus on the road. It’s important to maintain a balance to ensure you don’t compromise safety. I hope you get the healing that you need and deserve. Good luck traveler.

“What is your private song? The song you hear in loneliness, and sorrow, the song that breaks you down in the darkness, injures and illuminates your mortality and the mutilation of your soul. It is the song you listen to and see your life before you.

The heart retreats and it must retreat because there is no survival outside of your solitary confinement and the mouth like a beak cries out its horrific warble and the eyes strike out in their blind hunting for paltry worms of understanding. Mountains of memories fall into a sea of hurt greater and deeper than the mind can conceive.
The damnable darkness cannot be measured, but eternal light is unmeasurable too. Your song when finished stops you from being a stranger to yourself, and in your nested human frailty grows power.

You are a man of the human race and beyond the dark branches of night hiding the eternal movement of the stars comes the faint beginning of a different song. Fly to it. All of us have some kind of private song, something that connects with us, makes us sad or whatever. Drinking songs, songs that stir old memories. I find peace after my secret song has played and my secret grief ends. There is hope. So, do something with your sorrow.” ~Michael Kurcina

“I was messing about with the TR-808 drum machine and came up with the drum pattern and hand claps,” recalled cowriter Jezz Woodroffe. “Robbie (Blunt, guitarist) arrived, liked the groove, and very quickly we had the main chords. The middle eight came from my Godwin string synth machine, and Robbie came up with the haunting theme. ‘Big Log’ was written in the middle of winter. We’d run out of fuel for the fire. We found the remains of an old tree lying outside, which was about 15 feet long, but had nothing to cut it with. So we put one end in the fire and slowly burnt it, till it was hollow.” ~Robert Plant