Tune In to the West

You can’t make a cross-country road trip out west without some good tunes! How boring would that be? And if you’re driving through Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma? Those highways are awesome if you need hours and hours of quiet to ponder the meaning of life. Otherwise, you’re going to need some music. Keep reading to find out how you can tune in to the west!

We made the long road trip from Tennessee to Yellowstone years ago, so this time I knew my husband and I would need more than Sirius XM to get us through a drive to New Mexico. There are only so many times one can listen to the same old loops.

Being the obsessive-compulsive over-planner that I am, I decided to curate a Spotify playlist to the tunes of “Tune in to the West. And you know what? It turned out to be a great idea.

Yes, it took countless hours to go through songs to find ones I liked, but once I started searching, I couldn’t stop! Do you know how many songs exist with “Texas”, “Oklahoma”, “Amarillo”, and “Albuquerque” in the titles? I don’t think you want to know! Okay, there aren’t as many with “Albuquerque”, but more than two was shocking to me. And songs about driving? You could make a whole playlist dedicated to those!

In the end, I compiled a playlist of 262 songs. That’s about 13 hours of music. Neurotic? Maybe. My husband thought so, but in the end, he admitted it did make the drive less tedious. (He was more impressed with the playlist than my homemade bento snack boxes, but that’s for another post.)

How To Choose Your Tunes

You know what you like. Start with that. What are songs you never get tired of hearing? There are bound to be a few that have a vibe correlating with your destination. Add those. There are tons of beach songs, for instance if you’re headed to a tropical locale. You could include songs by Boston if you’re going northeast. Get creative. Stretch a little.

Search for songs about particular cities or activities. Just make sure you include some that are fresh. A genre that’s not usually your jam can make things interesting. Mix it up!

I think it’s important to have songs you can sing along with, too. Keeps you engaged. I’ll never forget when I was a kid, my family would sing along to “Side by Side” on our road trips. Come to think of it, I need to add that to my playlist.

No matter what songs you choose, there is one song I contend every road trip playlist MUST include, whether you care for country music or not. That song is “King of the Road” by Roger Miller. He won 5 Grammy Awards in 1966 for that song, and in 2024 Rolling Stone rated it #60 on its Top 200 Country Western Songs of All Time. It’s a classic. Here’s a little preview if you’ve never heard it before.

“Trailers for sale or rent. Rooms to let 50 cents. No phone, no pool, no pets. Ain’t got no cigarettes. Ah, but two hours of pushin’ broom buys a 8 x 12 four-bit room. I’m a man of means, by no means. King of the Road.”

There are other renditions of “King of the Road if you’re not a fan of Roger Miller’s style, but shame on you if you’re not!

Ideas on How You Can Tune in to the West

If you need some music ideas to tune in to the west, I’ve shared a link to my Spotify list. You can preview 100 of the songs below. Fair warning- it’s heavy on the country with songs by Bon Jovi, Whitesnake, Depeche Mode, Lady Gaga, and others thrown in. What are your favorite road trip songs? Let me know in the comments!

We enjoyed listening to this playlist so much, we listened to it again on a trip to northern California and again on a recent trip to southern California. I will definitely create more playlists in the future.