Mount Kisco Public Library

The playlist for the drive to Ohio

There is a specific loneliness to the long drive to see the grandchildren, six hours of highway with a radio that cycles between static and the same twelve songs, and it ended for me last winter when a grandnephew fixed up what he called a playlist. The idea is simple. Your phone, or a cheap tablet, holds a list of music, and the list can be anything, and here is the part for our generation, the list can be built for you. The streaming services, Spotify is the big one, have a feature where you name a few songs you love, Tony Bennett, Patsy Cline, the records from the kitchen radio in 1969, and they assemble a radio station that never existed, all of it in that vein, familiar songs interleaved with ones you will be surprised you never knew. You speak or type the feeling you want, dinner jazz, driving music, the sound of 1962, and it happens. My playlist for the Ohio drive is called Route 80 Slow, and it has 300 songs now, and it learns me better every trip. The chat programs help with the setup, and this is the honest place to say the setup is the hard part for us, so bring the phone to class, or grab a teenager, and have the account made and the app installed once. After that it is one button on the dashboard of anything built this century. Six hours now goes by like a conversation. The grandchildren think I discovered music last year. In a way, I did.

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