**This is a continuation of the Introduction to Sonic Highways: Musical Immersion on the Roads of America.  Part I, "One of These Things First," can be accessed here.  The third and final part of the Introduction will be published later tonight.**

Though I abandoned my childhood tendencies of taping songs off of the radio as I came of age in the era of the iPod and the CD-R, I still clung dearly to my affinity with music.  By the time I reached adolescence, the 90s were over, as was the golden age of CD stores.  By the early 2000s, the world had had enough of the boy bands and post-80s garage and alternative rock bands that had seen the peak of the grunge-driven, analog era of one-hit wonders that cluttered the music collections of America’s blossoming youth.  Mainstream music began its willful and mercilessly stubborn decline into what it is today: the same chord structure and key signature being regurgitated over and over again for new generations of listeners to blindly lap up from the overcrowded pool that is so overly-chlorinated with unoriginality.

My first car, my steed, my chariot: Helga.

With the introduction of digital formats like the mp3 and the invention of Napster, people my age shifted the way in which they collected and organized their music libraries.  Computers—and in turn, the Internet—became not only staples in households, but necessities.  As the demand for computers grew, the need for more disk space and higher efficiency grew as well.  Computer companies started spewing out prototype after prototype, each one larger and faster than its predecessor.  People were able to build playlists of digital files, burn them to a CD, and essentially take their music anywhere.  With the invention of the mp3 player (namely Apple’s iPod), music became basically reliant on digital formats.  Not only could people store their entire music collection within a brick measuring about six square inches, but they could take it anywhere as well.  On top of that, everyone started making playlists, so much that it became almost an art form in itself.  Playlists became the new mix tapes, and so music became completely customizable, as one could basically put on any song at any time, as well as build a playlist highlighting the best songs for even the most mundane of activities: cleaning, studying, even hanging out on a summer night on a beach with friends.  The iPod gave everyone a voice, whether they were musicians or not, and it gave us all a chance to express ourselves, simply by mixing an artist’s work with our own vision or individual need to express.  It gave us all a sense of power we had never really felt before.

My middle/high school is situated in a ‘city’ called New London, which is about twenty-five miles east-northeast of my town.  I use the term ‘city’ loosely, because in Connecticut, any place that has a Greyhound bus station, buildings that rise above thirty feet, and has more than a certain amount of traffic lights constitutes a city (I think technically it was still a town, but I digress).  Before I had my own car, either my parents would drive me (or my sister, while she still matriculated there; she is three years older than me), or a friend and neighbor would give me a ride.  It was sometimes nice to be in the passenger seat—I could get some last minute homework done or take a snooze if it pleased me—but for the most part the time would always crawl by.  If I was with my dad, I would be forced to listen to NPR or Imus in the Morning, which is about as close to waterboarding as one can get when you’re a budding adolescent in a car on a daily trip that dragged by worse than Citizen Kane (except when you had to get something done, of course).  If I was with my sister, she usually spent the time talking to our friend (the same that would drive me after my sister graduated) while I would listen to my Discman in the backseat.  And if I was with my friend, it was always sappy R&B cranked to the highest decibel, with her singing at the top of her lungs, and with the heat always blasting inexplicably right into my face, even if it was late May.  I never complained of course (except sometimes with the NPR, because at seven in the morning there’s only so much “All Things Considered”—or whatever the hell is on NPR that early—that one can take at that age), and I was always grateful to those who would bring me to and from school.  But what I yearned for more than anything was to drive myself, as I’m sure anyone being shuttled to school by their parents can relate.  I had to admire my friend, though, for her seemingly apathetic attitude towards my presence in her car while she sang.  She would sing at the top of her lungs, with such gusto and feeling, no matter what day it was.  That’s the comfort I wanted more than anything to feel, and there was no way I was going to get that with either one of my parents or my sister or even my boisterous friend and neighbor in the driver’s seat.

At the ripe age of sixteen and a half, my prayers were answered when I finally got my driver’s license and inherited my mother’s bruised and battered—though mostly functional—1995 Honda Odyssey.  I loved that fucking car.  It isn’t like the Odysseys that Honda is pumping out today, with their automatic sliding doors and backseat DVD players.  This thing was a hunk-a-junk.  It boasted, at its best, an AM/FM radio with a tape deck, backseat air conditioning (which could be controlled by the people in the backseat! Gasp!), and removable middle row captain’s chairs, something I utilized in my latter days as the owner of the car, as my passengers could sit in the back row and stretch out their legs, giving the feeling as if they were in some sort of low-class, beat up limousine with stained carpets (but a limousine nonetheless).

For the first year and a half or so that I owned that car, I either used the radio or one of those tapes that hooked up to a portable CD player through the headphone jack, which allowed whatever was being played in the Walkman or Discman or whatever to be played over the car stereo.  For a long time I was toting around a CD booklet, filled with my own burned CDs along with a few treasures from my actual CD collection from the 1990s (and the rare new CD that I would actually purchase from a store).  It wasn’t until the middle of my senior year that I unwrapped my first iPod on Christmas morning.  I held it in my hands that morning with the same bewilderment that a caveman that had been frozen for thousands of year and then unfrozen to cope with today’s society would have held something like a lightbulb or a spatula.  I felt a mix of emotions, mostly those along the lines of joy and excitement that I had this brand new toy; pure technological progress in solid, tangible form.  But I also felt a tinge of sentimental nostalgia, a glimmer of despair that hid stealthily behind my toothy grin.  There was a part of me that knew the music that I had grown up listening to, and the way that I had heard such music, and the hours I had spent sitting by the radio in anticipation of hearing that one new song that I loved so much that I wanted to capture it forever on my tape deck, was gone forever.  This was the future I was holding in my hands, and it was adapt or die.

So adapt I did.  I plugged that little white box into my desktop Dell computer and watched in awe as my entire music library was transferred to this…thing, in a mere matter of seconds.  I remember gingerly plugging my headphones into my iPod for the first time, and was astounded that it actually had all my music inside of it.  All of it!  I could switch from one artist to another with the greatest of ease, cueing up song after song without having to press any ‘seek’ buttons or switching discs or any of the minor inconveniences the analog age had required of me.  Actually, come to think of it, none of that stuff was ever ‘inconvenient’ until we were given the technology making everything ‘more convenient;’ so in reality, they are only inconveniences in the relative sense, if at all.

Which song would you put on, looking at this?

Burned CDs only offered so much freedom.  They had a very precise, set limit to the amount of music that could be stored on one, and once you’ve heard it over and over again, it started to wear on you.  There was always the prospect of making another new CD, but sometimes the need for new music wasn’t up to speed with the availability of said new music.  Even the Shuffle function with a burned CD offered little to no comfort, as you were hearing the same songs as before, just in a different order.  The iPod was—and still is—the holy grail of all music players.  Everything was at my fingertips.  I could build and edit playlists to suit my liking (not on the iPod itself, but on the computer; that function of the iPod came much later), or I could shuffle the whole damn library if I wanted to.  But most importantly, I could suit my own individual musical needs in an instant.  If I was feeling sentimental, I could put on something from my youth, or if I wanted to listen to something I had just acquired, it was all right there.  It didn’t matter; it was all available to me, right at the push of a button.

Needless to say, I was hooked.  My iPod became my new best friend.  I never went anywhere without it.  It was as if it was my Bible, the source of knowledge and wisdom I could learn all of my lessons from, lessons handed down from on high by Dusty Springfield and Roger Waters.  And the great thing about it was that I could add as many chapters as I wanted.  There was no absolute.  There was always new music to listen to, and my iPod was music’s mortal vessel.  There were space confines of course, but those, like everything else, would essentially become a thing of the past.  I had my Bible, and my car became my church.  And I was the sassy church choir preaching the Word of the Lord.

Well, that’s essentially what I did.  As soon as I had my own space, my own little sphere in which I dictated what was playing over the stereo, I would sing my little heart out everyday on the half hour ride to school, and on the half hour drive home as well.  My car, and my iPod, gave me absolute power.  It was this power, this control over the aural element of my environment that allowed me to enjoy music on a whole different level.  I found myself enjoying my drives more, whether it was on the way to or from school, or if it was a lazy afternoon cruising around the back roads of my town.

Love me some trees.

During my drives I noticed that the way I encountered my environment began to manifest itself in the music I was listening to.  My surroundings had an effect on my mood and thus translated itself into the kind of music I wanted to hear.  On somber rainy days I would listen to the soft sounds of Rufus Wainwright, as it seemed appropriate to listen to that for some reason.  On sunny afternoons, driving around the woodland streets nestled in the hills surrounding the more central parts of my town, I would get stoned and look at the leaves on the trees through my sunroof while blaring The White Album.  (***Just to be clear and official here, I am not directly condoning the use of marijuana while behind the wheel of a car, though what you do with your driving time is totally up to you…just be careful.)

Where I was driving would give me visual cues on how to reflect on the world around me and how I fit into it—it being the big picture of course—as an individual, nurturing different emotions each time I would experience a certain place or climate or some combination of the two.  At first, I didn’t draw any conclusions from these experiences; I just thought it was cool to listen to Pink Floyd while driving around the woods at night.  I mostly just said, “Yeah, seems appropriate,” and went about driving.

Eventually, though, something clicked.  My whole perspective shifted as my senses evolved with discovery.  Every drive was suddenly an exhilaration.  Every destination seemed far less important, as the journeys themselves became the true thrill.

The Journey Continues Tomorrow ...

Stay Tuned.