Playlist: Texas

Man, oh, man. We are in the west now, folks. It’s good to breathe the dusty air of the Lone Star State and drive the open roads (even though there’s more pickup trucks than people down here). Let me give you a healthy helping of songs to keep you sustained on the long lonely roads down here. And, never fear friends, I have a special all-Dylan playlist for Texas queued up for the next few days. 

Texas Sun: My wife sent me this song and we listened to it when we drove to Texas together to pick up the bus engine from a guy named Randy outside of San Antonio. That part of Texas is still fairly green, rolling and open. We stayed in Bandera, the cowboy capital of the west—a sleepy little town with a quintessential western graveyard. 

Northeast Texas Women: I can’t name another Willis Alan Ramsey song and that’s okay. This one is good enough to fill a catalog. The sheer number of descriptors he has for hair alone—cast iron curls, cotton candy hair—makes it worth a listen. Plus, I am a sucker for any song with a coda. 

Just Outside of Austin: Who knew that Willie Nelson’s son had such transcendent vocals? Spotify recommended this song to me on my Discover Weekly and I instantly remembered why I just pay them to keep the tunes coming. This isn’t the dusty, cowboy vocaled yodeling that many Texas tunes default into (though there’s nothing wrong with that!). No, friends, this is a stroll down a sidewalk on a day when you don’t need a jacket and you’re not going to break a sweat either. Just plain easy and feel good. 

Dallas: The Flatlanders send this one. Even though I have driven through Dallas and I’ve flown over Dallas, and neither experience was any fun, this song creates an alternate reality where I might actually romanticize the title city. 

Texas Love Song: Speaking of romance—Slaid Cleaves squeezes every possible rhyme out of the Lone Star state in this very sweet, very clever love song.