Songs for Driving Home Alone After Something You Can't Talk About Yet

There’s a specific thing that happens after something happens. Before you can call anyone. Before you can form a sentence about it in your own head.

You’re alone in the car. The ignition is on. You have twenty or forty or ninety minutes of driving ahead of you, and the only thing standing between you and the thing itself is whatever comes out of the speakers when you finally press play.

The radio is too much. Anything with hooks is too much. Talking to anyone is unthinkable. And silence — weirdly — is the worst option of all, because silence forces you to think, and thinking is the thing you are specifically not ready for yet.

What you need is music that drives with you. A certain narcotic propulsion. Forward motion you can fall into while something inside you sorts itself out on its own schedule.

These twelve songs are that. Phosphorescent’s “Song for Zula” and The War on Drugs’ eleven-minute “Thinking of a Place” set the pace — hypnotic, steady, unhurried, made for the highway. The National’s “Runaway” and Frank Ocean’s “Nights” pivot the playlist into the slow middle: horn-drenched resignation on one side, a beat-switch masterpiece on the other. Kurt Vile’s “Wakin on a Pretty Day” is nine and a half minutes of pure drift, the guitar figure looping until the distance between the car and the house becomes irrelevant.

Mazzy Star’s “Into Dust” and Beach House’s “Space Song” slow things further — two of the great late-night dream-pop ballads, one from 1993 and one from 2015, both of them the specific shade of blue the sky goes at 2am on an empty interstate. Bon Iver’s “Holocene” is the quiet turning point: the moment in the drive when you admit to yourself what happened.

Cass McCombs’s “Big Wheel” and Kevin Morby’s “Dorothy” are two different kinds of company — one eerie and shifting, one warm and steady. Bruce Springsteen’s “Incident on 57th Street” closes out the long section of the drive with seven and a half minutes of young-Springsteen cinematic storytelling, and Lord Huron’s “Ghost on the Shore” lets the arrangement fade out the same way the headlights fade out in the rearview when you finally pull into the driveway.

Put it on. Drive. The thing you can’t talk about yet will still be there when you get home. But you’ll be home.