**This is a the final installment 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 second part, "Yesterday's Modern Box," can be read here.

I remember this one time when I was driving down the street I grew up on a few years ago, probably the summer of 2007.  It was a warm July night, the stars were out, and I was driving my father’s Volkswagen Passat with the sunroof open.  I was listening to a playlist I had aptly titled “nighttime,” which was filled with music that generally falls within the softer side of the musical spectrum (stuff like Jeff Buckley and Sigur Rós), and this Radiohead song called “Subterranean Homesick Alien” came on, which, for those of you who don’t know, is the third song off of their excellent 1997 masterpiece OK Computer (and if you didn’t know, you must purchase this album immediately and listen to it with all the lights turned off, but that’s besides the point).

My alien bride, c. 2009.

The song’s lyrics basically talk about how this guy wants to be abducted by aliens, and the music itself is constructed mostly of heavily reverberated low-end guitar mixed with a gentle drumbeat and bass line that sway and swoop along with Thom Yorke’s unmistakably silky, melancholy voice.  There’s a moment in the second verse in which Yorke pleads “I wish that they’d swoop down/in a country lane/late at night when I’m driving,” and at that moment of the song I remember—and I remember this vividly—I was coming towards the end of the street, where it makes a sharp right in front of a barn (for all you city folk, remember I grew up in New England, where there are barns on basically every street), and as I made the turn, my headlights painted shadows of tree branches along the walls of the barn, shifting from one side to another as the light moved across the breadth of the limb, and after I had completed the turn, and the shadows had passed, I looked up through the sunroof to see not one, but two shooting stars stream across the sky, almost intersecting.  I pulled off to the side, turned my lights off, and lowered the volume of the music to a faint murmur, as if out of fear that I might scare any other stray meteors away if I wasn’t careful.  I sat staring upwards at the navy sky, selfishly hoping that it might happen again, and as I sat there for a few seconds, getting lost in the polka-dot night, the music played on softly, whispering along with the crickets and katydids that punctuated the night with their strangely consonant and hypnotic calls to one another.  To borrow from Stephen Chbosky’s amazing coming-of-age novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower, in that moment, I felt “infinite,” even if just for a few seconds.  Call it coincidence, call it serendipity, but this was the moment that I knew music was more than just structured melody and harmony and rhythm; music was all around, and it was truly experiential.

From that point on, I really started to think about music as experience, both in my past encounters as well as in encounters that were bound to happen in the future.  I noticed the emotions I felt were affected and shaped by my surroundings, and that these emotions could be ‘synced up’ so to speak with certain types of music to deepen these kinds of experiences.  From that point on, I realized that I would never think about music in the same way ever again.  It became clear to me that music, matched with the proper environment and the right circumstances, could be so much more than poetic, audible sound.

As I look back on my experiences behind the wheel, it becomes more and more evident that I have catered my musical yearnings to satisfy my environment.  More than that, music has the ability to stir up a whole mess of emotions on its own, namely nostalgia and transcendence.  Hell, even now, when I listen to pianist George Winston’s stirring instrumental solo-piano album December, I think of cozy nights by the fire at my childhood home in Connecticut, Christmas lights donning the ornate mantle over the fireplace and the twinkling tree set by the sliding patio door.  Every time I hear the opening measures of “Bohemian Rhapsody” I will think of my late mother, and the nights we would dance and sing, never getting that operatic part toward the end exactly right, but never failing to bring it all home with flawless air guitar.  That kind of imagery doesn’t exist by itself in my memory.  It’s not just pictures, or snapshots of moments I wish I could revisit; there is an audible soundtrack that I can hear, clear as a bell, when I think of those moments.  The music is an integral part of these memories; so vital that without it, there would be something so obviously missing, that I could not even believe the memory to be true without it.  It’s that important.  I just can’t believe it took me so long to realize it.

Corey en route, c. 2009.

That trip to Bonnaroo I embarked on after my graduation stays as true in my mind as if it happened only yesterday.  Not only did it mark an important moment for me, being given the chance to bask in the privileges and responsibilities expected of me in the throngs of burgeoning adulthood, but it was my first real journey that I took, on my own, to discover something.  The festival itself was a wonderful experience (and still proves to be, as I will be attending my ninth this coming June), and for that I am glad I went.  But the moments I felt most alive happened on the way there, on the journey itself.  I may have realized it too late, or maybe I just didn’t make heads or tails of it while it happened and now I am getting a second chance, but something within me latched onto that experience.  Whether it was the hammering guitar of Ani DiFranco keeping us awake in southern Pennsylvania, or watching the sunrise over the Shenandoah Valley, listening to Bright Eyes’ seminal album I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning, there was something inside me that finally felt satisfied.  I couldn’t put a name to it until that fateful night watching shooting stars on my street, but nonetheless it was a vital feeling I experienced on that journey.  We set off to find not only Bonnaroo, but also to find an adventure.

In these modern times of ours, adventure isn’t a word that is heard very often.  Hell, when I lived in Brooklyn, it was a veritable “adventure” to go to Queens.  I suppose the term nowadays is relative, but my friend Ian and I, we were looking for adventure in the classic, noble sense that is so tragically neglected nowadays.  Classic folk-rock semi-clichés aside, we went in search of America.  We wanted late-night encounters with lot lizards in West Virginia, we wanted to attempt to buy beer from a gas station as soon as we crossed the Mason-Dixon.  We wanted to be Kerouac and Moriarty, reincarnated, except with a AAA Card and emergency hotel funds in case, you know, we got sleepy or something.

Perhaps America had changed since the days of the beat poets and their affinity for hitchhiking and pancake houses, but still we deigned to defy conformity and search for the greater good, that esoteric, benevolent force we all feel is patting us on the back.  We didn’t realize how sneakily it would join us on that trip, but we did find it.  It’s out there.  It’s the open road.  It’s the rolling hills and the mountain sunsets.  We are America’s song, we are its music: you, me, the immortal appetite for adventure.  It’s two friends, driving off into the great unknown, in a beat up Honda Odyssey, with only the road ahead of us, and gleeful anticipation, an insatiable appetite, and a hand-picked, ecstasy-inducing soundtrack acting as our only fuel.  Well, that and gasoline, which I think was only like two bucks back then.

The essays that follow tell stories of journeys: odysseys I’ve embarked on by myself and those I’ve taken with friends; expeditions so ingrained in my mind that whenever I see the faces of those friends, I catch flashes of the rolling highways and byways we traveled on reflected in their eyes.

But it’s also a story of one man, in search of greater meaning…within music, within nature, within history, within my own being. 

Join me.

Join me, and you could be feeling what THIS guy is (obviously) feeling.

The Journey Continues Tomorrow ...

Stay Tuned.