Jam Sesh with Kevin, Vol. 6
JUNE 2025: Underrated road trip albums.
Depending on your level of impatience, lengthy road trips could be experienced as a semi-psychological horror—in terms of persistent drivers forgoing bathroom breaks for the sake of Making Good Time, or riding with someone with a despairing devotion to mainlining political podcasts for hours on end. This level of commitment to needlessly debasing an otherwise adventurous experience is kind of petty and ignoble, but it does make you appreciate traveling with someone who has a good instinct for providing a suitable soundtrack to all your shenanigans. Most of my road trips in my youth were centered around travel hockey, and my dad mostly played Tom Petty, The Smiths, and Sex Pistols—but now he has informed me that he gets his daily fix of brainrot from a goof crew of right-wing talking heads. Say what you will about Johnny Rotten, but he still manages to be moderately less racist than the average Candace Owens podcast.
Having a list of five or six full albums that you play front-to-back is a nice way to break up a long road trip, as my 16-hour treks to Bonnaroo have taught me. So
and I thought June was high-time to show our wonderful readers our long-drive staples now that summer is rolling around.CHECK OUT ON REPEAT!!
MY PICK: Freedom - Amen Dunes
The feeling that permeates Freedom is one of nostalgia, and it finds a way to hit on everything: love, mistakes, moving on. This is a neo-psychedelic record at heart with plenty of laid-back and glazed-over sounds, but it’s balanced out with guitar arrangements that feel whittled out of ancient oak and stone. The listening experience feels like a road trip between deep breaths of emotive melody and suave oblique riffs and shaking tambourines and hand-beaten percussion. This is atmospheric and breezy without ever being boring, a chilled-out War on Drugs that’s appropriate for a ride along the coast or underneath an expansive blue sky. Just drift through the trippy Americana.
Highlights: Blue Rose, Time, Skipping School, Miki Dora, Satudarah, Believe, Dracula
KEVIN’S PICK: Tres Hombres - ZZ Top
My Response:
I remember Tres Hombres appearing on Kevin’s Top 100 albums when we did our epic monstrosity of a musical analysis journey last year, and I can see how this would be a great road trip album. It’s an idiosyncratic fusion of Southern rock and blues boogie. “La Grange” is just a legendary riff, but the opening one-two-three of “Waitin’ for the Bus,” “Jesus Just Left Chicago,” and “Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers” is ferocious and hard-hitting. This is an album that revels in raunchy simplicity and the bluesy and rootsy feel of it makes for an ideal summer soundtrack.
MY PICK: Moon Safari - Air
Moon Safari frolics through the air like a dance album that decided to take it easy one day. There’s an obvious retro/throwback feel, hailing towards ‘60s lounge and ‘70s hi-fi studio wizardry, but it’s so well-augmented with a modern flair that this album feels fresh, despite dropping in 1998. Back in May 2023, I was sent to interior British Columbia for a shoot, and I got to borrow one of the vehicles to drive up to Wells Grey Park, and within that hour-long drive, I saw desert-ish climate disappear through coniferous-covered mountains and wash away as I passed through cliffs, rivers, rolling hillsides as “Le femme d’argent” grooved along. Everything felt so surreal, a head-nodding loop for the perfect epic nature drive that gave me my first taste of the Pacific Northwest. This is a lush experience.
Highlights: La femme d’argent, Sexy Boy, All I Need, Remember, You Make it Easy, Ce matin-la, New Star in the Sky
KEVIN’S PICK: Slow Turning - John Hiatt
My Response:
There’s a comfort and home-spun quality to this album, and it gives me heavy Steve Earle vibes. “Drive South” is an excellent opener, and the rest of the tracks are loose and warm. Slow Turning is also an album of hard-won lessons about life and love, a collection of 12 sturdy and likeable songs, all played with taste and fire. It’s casual without being laid-back, and it explores some unlikely passageways through the vignettes of different characters: The cheery lovers in the down-home Bonnie and Clyde update “Trudy and Dave,” the uneasy couple in “Icy Blue Heart,” the tight families in “Georgia Rae,” the bar-stool expert in “Paper Thin,” and a cry of lonely despair “Is Anybody There?” Like the most memorable of road trips, Slow Tuning is an unexpected adventure.
MY PICK: All Hail West Texas - The Mountain Goats
By looking at the cover, you can quickly glean what kind of journey you’re setting out on when you play this album: Sparsely white, with the words “fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys” at the bottom. With the vast majority of the tracks recorded in lo-fi glory using a Panasonic RX-FT500, just about all of these tunes are character sketches with some tape hiss. The lyrics are arrestingly straightforward, and there’s an everpresent drone that sounds like the constant awareness of death. In the lulls of a road trip when you’re driving through endless expanses of nothing, give me a series of melancholic vignettes about life, love, and the messy emotions that come with all of that.
Highlights: The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton, Fall of the Star High School Running Back, The Mess Inside, Jeff Davis County Blues, Distant Stations, Source Decay
KEVIN’S PICK: Summerlong - Rose City Band
My Response:
This is a happy slice of Grateful Dead/The Byrds/J.J. Cale jam-bad music, some elysian country rock augmented by subtle psychedelia. It’s mellow but upbeat, with steady basslines and fuzzy vocals. It’s likeable like a piece of pie, a glass of lemonade, a hit off a nice vape pen. It works wonderfully as the soundtrack to those early summer days when the days are still getting longer, and the sun shines past eight at night. Any further analysis is counterintuitive to music like this; it’s better to zone out and let the jams flow through you.
That’s it for the June 2025 edition of Jam Sesh! Let us know what you think about our picks in the comments.
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