Hello and welcome to Old Highway Notes.I am a collector of music with eclectic tastes and a fondness for mix tapes and compilation albums. I also collect travel books and am interested in history and popular culture. I enjoy exploring the Internet and sharing my finds on the social web
One day I had an idea to make a playlist that traced a line on map. I would start with Route 66 in Chicago and I would add everything I could from my music collection that was relevant to each place along the map. I knew that this would be an enormous list of thousands of songs before I was done as the famous highway passed through so many musical hot spots such as Chicago, Texas and Los Angeles. I also knew that it would make for a great personal study project to look further into the backgrounds of the songs and artists that I was adding to my playlist.
Inspired, it occurred to me that I had probably visited thousands on music and travel websites and had not seen any collections grouped quite like this. I have since found a few similar sites, such as road trip sites that make mention of the music in the tape deck or music sites that focus on a certain city. Some history sites do a similar thing as well, but still I thought my project unique enough to chronicle on a blog. Old Highway Notes is that blog. I began with Route 66 and before long I began creating a few more playlists: Highway 101 up the West Coast of the Untied States and Interstate 95 running up the East Coast.
Old Highway Notes is an evolving project of discovery. Along the way, I stopped gradually stopped posting. I realized that if I continued at the depth I was digging I would never get out of Chicago, Southern California or Florida. After about a hundred posts I fell into a quagmire of research, and my off-line life got in the way of the project.
My original concept was to use my digital music collection which consists of around 7000 albums to create geography based playlists. For some cities such as Chicago or LA, I knew there would be a lot of musical matches so I knew I would spend quite while in those places. It turned out to be fairly overwhelming and Spotify and other services made it less and less of a useful thing build.While on hiatus, I began to experiment placing YouTube videos on interactive maps. I was looking at the points of interest, stories about the history of the city, and some other geographical background history about the places on the way and maybe some random songs by various artists from the location at hand. I searched on YouTube for videos of the places I would visit if I were to drive the Pan-American Highway. I pick as many uploads as look relevant and created a YouTube Playlist based on video titles and descriptions. Then I watched the videos. Some videos were a bad fit for one reason or another. Those I deleted from the playlist. One of the most common reasons for deleting videos from the playlist is when the subject matter was mostly a head shot of a video host. The point is to see the places we are exploring, not a narrator. Although I Have kept some in for narrative purposes. Often I find drone videos. I love the unique perspectives those can bring. Since it is a virtual road trip, I also like to include dashboard cams of driving into or around the location. These are also extremely common. Festivals, gardens, parks, museums and tourist attractions also tend to make interesting videos. I will usually add those keywords to the place name to find a better variety of results in my searching.
Old Highway Notes Old Highway Notes is a natural place to share this new interest. I have been exploring the Pan American Highway, the Trans Canada Highway, the Lincoln Highway and as personal challenge I'm going "Down the Mississippi". These will join my existing blog routes and I will resusume my explorations of Route 66, Highway 101 & I-95. You can watch the videos as presented, or for a change off pace I recommend viewing the videos while playing music on a separate device. This way you can mute the YouTube stream using the music of your choice as a soundtrack. Without varying sound recording levels and without dialog, you can enjoy images of a place without audio distractions. Muting also allows the use of videos from producers in other languages. The idea is to create a visual montage of the places on the map. Great idea for parties. I hope you enjoy the playlists.
Let's "Hit The Road, Jack"...
ROB
Keep Traveling!
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