Some songs are written to convey the emotions of the writer, some were written to channel the emotions of the listener, some were meant to tell stories, and some were just meant to be there to be the perfect soundtrack to moments in our lives.
Slow Ride by Foghat is the latter. It may have been written as an eight-minute and 14-second-long ode to sex, but that’s not its true purpose. This is a song meant to be played during moments of pure freedom and release, when the world is opening up before us.
In the closing scenes of Dazed and Confused, perhaps my favorite film of all time, Mitch Kramer arrives home at dawn after the night of his young life. He’s been battered, bruised, befriended, buzzed, and born again as a high schooler. He runs into his mom, who has waited up, and tells him this is one free pass. He stumbles into his room, lies down on his bed, and puts on his headphones. As he does, Slow Ride starts to play, he lies back and smiles. The scene cuts to an overhead shot of a car cruising down a long, straight highway. Inside the car, Randall “Pink” Floyd, Wooderson, Slater, and Simone are all smiles, sharing a joint as the world opens up in front of them. It cuts to the view of the highway and slowly fades to black.
It’s a perfect scene, and Slow Ride is the perfect song for it, even if it wasn’t the first choice. Linklater originally wanted Dazed and Confused by Led Zeppelin to play. I like to believe that somehow Zeppelin knew it would have been the wrong song and withheld the rights. Much as I love the song Dazed and Confused, it’s not about that. Slow Ride exists for that kind of moment.
Sometimes it’s just not any deeper than that.
My wife and I drove across the country to Montana as part of our Honeymoon. We both love road trips and seeing the country from the highway. We explored for a couple of weeks, having decided the most fun way to do it was to just go wherever our hearts and the road took us. That’s the perfect way to do it, although you can end up in some weird hotels on occasion. At the tail end of the trip, we would meet her father, who was visiting the country, and since she had more time off than I did, she’d stay out in Montana a bit, and I’d take the car back. This led to my perfect Slow Ride moment.
The day I left, I was going from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to wherever I decided to lay up for the night. I was targeting Eastern Colorado without knowing quite what a desolate wasteland it was. This led to my driving down out of the mountains in the late morning. As I descended, the road slowly straightened out from twisty mountain switchbacks to a long, beautiful stretch of highway, driving into the mid-morning sun as it rose in the sky. I had an Arnold Palmer in my drink holder, and as the chilly mountain air gave way to the warmer climate, I was able to put my window down for a bit. As I did, those 4 easy going drumbeats that begin Slow Ride played, the guitar kicked in, and I turned the volume up to absurd.
Sometimes that’s all you need. The universe just gives you the perfect song to soundtrack a perfect moment. No matter how many miles were left to go, for those eight minutes, with the mountains rising behind me and the future in front of me, US-287 was rock and roll paradise.
SHOUTING STREET 
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