by Shelby Len

I drove around a lot in high school. The car in question? A 2010 Honda Odyssey, dark gray with a broken sliding door labelled “DO NOT OPEN” in duct tape letters. She took me everywhere, to and from school, to both junior and senior prom, back and forth between my mom's and dad's houses and among countless other social and extracurricular functions. After moving to Madison, where everything was suddenly a walk or bus ride away, I realized how much joy driving gave me. My car was a physical manifestation of my freedom; it was something that was mine. Not only that, but as the owner and driver of my car, I got to pick the music.

Since my car wasn't bluetooth enabled (and I didn't come around to buying an FM translator for a good couple of years) I always kept the same six CDs in the CD player, in addition to however many CDs I could stuff into the driver's side door. Even now, those six CDs give me a visceral sense of nostalgia for my late high school years, as they constituted the background music for so many memories. Consider this a love letter: to my car, to high school, to physical media and to everyone else's car CDs out there.

Tyler, the Creator

Flower Boy (Columbia, 2017)

Picture this, you take a trip to Chicago with your family over summer vacation. You're dragged by your parents into Reckless Records (you're 15! You don't like record stores yet!) and as you absentmindedly flip through the CD section suddenly you see it. As a newly minted Tyler the Creator fan (you loved Goblin, your most listened to song on Spotify is “Smuckers” and you've almost bought Odd Future merch from Zumiez multiple times) you simply have to get it. You just have to convince your parents to kindly overlook the big ol' f-bomb that graces the cover. With reluctance and confusion they get it for you, and it becomes a staple of your collection. Fast forward to now. “November” still makes you cry, you still know every verse of “911/Mr. Lonely,” and you know you're going to crank up the volume so hard that the bass drop in “Pothole” makes the car windows vibrate. Tyler's range on this album is incredible. He shifts from dreamy and lovestruck in “See You Again” to brazen and unhinged in “Who Dat Boy,” to flowery and ethereal in “Garden Shed,” and manages to tie it all together with colorful, Roy Ayers inspired production. It's a Certified Hood Classic, that's for sure.

The Strokes, Room on Fire

(RCA, 2003)

My dad always used to say  that a band's second album can almost never surpass their first. In the case of The Strokes' sophomore album Room on Fire, I think he might be wrong. There are times I've listened to Room on Fire when it's made me cry, when I've hysterically screamed the lyrics into the windshield going at least ten over down the highway, and times when it made me want to get up and dance so much that I took my hands off the wheel and steered with my knees.

Room on Fire is a masterpiece of the garage rock revival movement that The Strokes spearheaded in the early 2000s. Each song is packed full of compact guitar work, anxious drums and lyrics that sound like they were yelled just millimeters from the microphone. Every second of this album's scant 33 minute run time is essential to getting across the angst and fatalism that pervades every song. Titles such as “What Ever Happened?,” “The End Has No End” and “I Can't Win” give you a good impression of what to expect. The Strokes's minimalist approach to instrumentation and production really proves that less is more, kind of in the same way Gang of Four proved this with their 1979 album Entertainment!. Needless to say, this album is very potent. Not only is this probably my favorite car CD, it might just be one of my favorite records of all time.

Mac Demarco, Salad Days

(Captured Tracks, 2014)

I know. Call me an indie kid, quirky, lame, whatever judgmental epithet you want because it's true: I have a very special spot in my heart for Mac Demarco. If you want to argue against his merits as a songwriter I challenge you to listen to literally any track on Salad Days in your car on a sunny summer afternoon without rolling all your windows down and singing along, not only to the lyrics but also to the uber-catchy instrumentals. On Salad Days, Demarco gets the combination of jangle-pop inspired guitar hooks, happy-go-lucky lyrics and minimal production  down to a science. In the post-Demarco world I now occupy — I stopped paying attention after my deep disappointment in his 2019 release Here Comes the Cowboy — I've been chasing after a possible contender for Salad Days. I've searched far and wide, from the hypnagogic pop of Connan Mockasin to the upbeat indie rock of Courtney Barnet, and yet nothing quite captures the feeling I get when I listen to this album, a feeling that I might describe as pure ecstasy.

Blink-182, Enema of the State

(MCA, 1999)

Can you tell that I had a Hot Topic emo phase in middle school? I picked up this CD at Cheapo Records in Minneapolis at a time in my life when I was knees deep in the likes of My Chemical Romance and Pierce the Veil. I wore Converse and a flannel around my waist every day and had an undercut complete with an at-home dye job. Eager to expand my pop-punk and emo horizons, I thought Enema of the State would be a good place to start. It wound up sitting dormant in my room through much of high school until I finally decided to put it in the car CD rotation. Frankly, this is the only Blink-182 album I care about. This album drips with naïveté and adolescent nostalgia like nothing else, touching on topics such as high school love stories in “Going Away to College”), believing aliens exist (“Aliens Exist”) and finding prank calls more fun than sex in “What's My Age Again?” It's a blast to listen to and sing along to, especially with a friend riding shotgun to sing along with you (and to imitate Tom DeLonge's nasal vocals in “All the Small Things” just for fun). It undoubtedly continues to stand as one of the crown jewels of pop punk.

Led Zeppelin, IV

(Atlantic, 1971)

As a Christmas gift when I was 14 or 15, my dad gifted to me the entire Led Zeppelin discography, all of which were original copies that he bought for himself as a teenager. Although my dad might try to argue the superiority of Physical Graffiti,my personal favorite is IV, and not just because it's the one with “Stairway to Heaven.” I love everything about Physical Graffiti, from the stripped-down guitar work and dreamy lyrics of “Going to California” to John Bonham's drum solo at the end of “Rock and Roll” that can only be described as out of this world. I often put this CD on when I'm in  a good mood, I think the rollicking opening track “Black Dog” demands it. But by the end of this somewhat short album I always manage to find myself feeling wistful. It might be easy to cast aside Zeppelin as just music that your parents listen to, which isn't altogether untrue, nor is this always a bad thing, IV is a timeless classic through and through.

The Libertines, Up the Bracket

(Rough Trade, 2002)

This album came into my hands by stealing it from my dad's CD collection, which is consigned to various storage bins in our basement. My parents always told me that the Libertines's music was the stuff that cool college kids listened to that I would grow to like as I got older, so you could imagine I felt pretty cool listening to this on the regular. Up the Bracket was always my go-to if ever I was in a hurry to get somewhere. The punky, up-tempo guitar riff of the opening track “Vertigo” never failed to make me want to step on the gas. Track after track on Up the Bracket keeps the sense of momentum and energy going, with tasteful brit-pop and power pop influences to boot. The only respite is the tender and sparsely acoustic “Radio America',' which gives me the feeling that I'm starring in my own rosy, sentimental teen movie. Up the Bracket is a raucous, head-banging love letter to the ghosts of 2000s garage rock past .