This week has got spunk. This week has a problem with prepositions. It’s driving driving driving. It’s a taxonomy of driving directly into the sun.
Drive safe.
Get the full 2023 playlist here.
“zero trucks” by Alana Springsteen
Just when you think country music has remixed every possible pun about trucks, here comes Alana Springsteen to give zero of them.
I am 100% including this song because the lyric “If you miss my tailgate / Well baby, you can kiss it” caused my friend Graham to spontaneously turn into a dad and say “Girl’s got spunk” and I laughed so hard I almost choked. I’m still laughing actually.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“Mustang” by Taylor Edwards
Some wild prepositional play in this track. She’s on a mustang, she’s in a Mustang. A Ford Mustang is decidedly not a truck but a wild horse is just so country that it’s shocking it took until 2023, the year of our Lord, for the Nashville hitmakers to brainstorm this particular play on words.
Is the mustang a metaphor for him? For her? Who is the wild one here? Is it a literal mustang that the cowboy is riding? Impossible to know.
Five out of five cowboy boots (👢👢👢👢👢) for the diegetic inclusion of “Cowboy Take Me Away” playing on the radio in the Mustang. The car, not the horse.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“No Question” by Jordan Fletcher
This bouncy track makes a decidedly non-diegetic reference to Jo Dee Messina’s seminal road trip hymn with the line “Heads or tails, we can head out to the west coast.” Jordan Fletcher is sweeping his dirty talkin’ love interest off her feet and into a vehicle of unspecified make and model.
If “driving off into the sunset” is a country music trope, there is clearly some finer distinction to be made between “leaving my heartbreak in the rearview” and “Baby, let’s run away together.” You can drive away if you’re heartbroken and you can drive away if you’re in love, but if you’re not having some pinnacle emotional experience, and if you’re just trying to figure out if you should get drinks (alcohol!!) with your ex or you’re simultaneously chatting with 4,233 guys on Hinge that you will never ever meet in real life or you’re in that phase where you slowly start to hate your girlfriend or you’re dating a guy who is good on paper but is actually three children in a trench coat… then bad news. You’re having a human experience. I regret to inform you that you’re stuck right where you are.
Three children in a trench coat! Definitely the human experience as we pass Two Guns, Arizona.