This week is flipping on the KC lights. It’s flirting with your girlfriend. It’s revving the engine. It’s throwing a bag into the truck bed and hitting the highways. Someone’s gotta do it, might as well be us.
Drive safe.
Get the full 2023 playlist here.
“Pickup Truck” by Keith Anderson
This song articulates the essential thesis of truck songs: “Who needs a pickup line when you’ve got a pickup truck?”1
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“Go Get Her” by Restless Road
“Chase her down like a sunset” is such a lovely twist on the cowboy trope. It’s an ending that implies a new beginning rather like the uncertainty of trying to get your ex back. Someone riding into the sunset is, inevitably, heading west, toward a still-wild unknown, and also hopefully wearing sunglasses.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“Ain’t From It” by Grant Gilbert
First, it’s insane that this song rhymes “highways” with “King James.”
Second, Grant Gilbert uses the royal “we” to talk about life in a small town. Small-town people are a special type of person, he implies. Gilbert is one such special small-town person, but you, listener, are, too. Brought in by his “we” and his “us,” no matter where you grew up.
Does the individual experience get overwritten by these “collective” memories? Does this manufactured nostalgia for American hyperreality gradually come to replace personal truth? The human memory has a preference for narrative over sensory information. So do the actual lived details start to give way to these country music stories? Do these songs start to reshape my actual memories of, for example, the two-lane hill country highways of my own hometown? Do Gilbert’s cash-only bars overwrite the wine bars in the story I tell myself about where I’m from?
In other words, it doesn’t matter if you didn’t grow up in the country because you can always just borrow Gilbert’s.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
Unless, of course, it’s a Honda Ridgeline.
Honda Ridgeline is, I recall, started out as a 4 cylinder pickup truck. At time of its appearance on showroom floors, Road & Track, among others, had a heyday hootin' and hollerin' with uncontrollable laughter. It's been "beefed up" since but still.....engine displaces almost, not quite, 2 two-liter bottles of Coke. My sister owned one a long while back. Said it tolerated 6 bales of hay--not a flake more. Hardly sounds like...well...a real truck.