In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Part personal travelogue, part guidebook, and part advocacy guide, Lindsey Danis’s (Out) On the Road: The Radical Joy of Queer Travel is an empowering book for queer travelers
The Rumpus wrote of the book:
“Danis offers an abundance of resources, concrete information, and helpful suggestions for queer travelers, but doesn’t propose a one-size-fits all approach. They make space for readers of differing races, ethnicities, abilities, identities, personalities, and values; never getting prescriptive about the ‘right’ way to travel. (Obviously a queer book makes room for possibility.) In fact, each chapter ends with a list of prompts and questions so readers can reflect on what matters most to them as individual travelers.”
In their own words, here is Lindsey Danis’s Book Notes music playlist for their book (Out) On the Road: The Radical Joy of Queer Travel:
(Out) On the Road is part travel memoir, part guide, packed with all the things I didn’t even know to Google when I set off on my earliest adventures. The songs on this playlist kept me company while I researched and wrote.
Pulled from my own travels, these songs have defined pivotal moments at various life stages, from childhood to teen years and my emerging queerness, to the first trips I took independently and the journeys that have shaped me the most. The best stories are shared in my book, so I won’t spoil them here. This playlist transports me to the dining room of my childhood house, or the interior of my beloved Volvo station wagon, which was covered in bumper stickers, or expat bars in dusty alleyways and the shared connection those spaces provide.
“Graceland,” Paul Simon
Like the boy in the song, I am a child of divorce. This song soothed the pain of being different for reasons beyond my control. When I drove cross-country, years later, I couldn’t pass up the chance to visit Graceland, in search of the song’s promised redemption.
“La Louisiane,” Poisson Rouge
In Lafayette, Louisiana (state #47), there wasn’t much to do at night but drink and Hideaway on Lee was the obvious place. That’s where I heard this haunting anthem to Louisiana’s disappearing Francophone culture for the first time. The song is about a marginalized community resisting erasure, and the parallels to queerness were obvious.
“Heart of Gold,” Neil Young
This song followed me across Thailand and Laos from the nomad hub of Chiang Mai to Si Phan Don–4,000 Islands–a remote river archipelago near the Cambodian border. Its introspective yearning feels so obviously a backpacker’s anthem, but what can I say? I love it.
“A Horse With No Name,” America
In heavy rotation on my first cross-country road trip, this song transports me to the desert Southwest. After watching the sun rise over the Grand Canyon and hiking down into it a bit, so we could say we did, I drove through Petrified Wood National Forest to Albuquerque. As we drove east, we periodically stopped and gathered dirt, collecting portions of America in plastic bags as if this act of archiving could make America belong to us. For years, I kept that dirt in glass soda bottles with the location marked on the bottom. It’s long gone now, but I recall the colors: deep rich red, bruised-purple, golden sand, and the simple love I had then for a land that hasn’t always loved me back.
“Run-Around,” Blues Traveler
One of two tracks that played on repeat on the trip I took to Egypt and Israel. I was fourteen and spent half my time being moody and introspective and the other half enchanted by traces of ancient civilizations.
“America,” Simon & Garfunkel
YEARNING, pt. 1.
“American Music,” Violent Femmes
McDonald’s fries and coke with no ice in Cairo, drag queens lip syncing to Lady Gaga in Phnom Penh, Neil Young on repeat—America’s biggest export is our culture, including American music. Being American, I didn’t realize the cultural hegemony in this until a good friend, who was an international student, pointed it out to me. To be an American traveler is to find traces of home everywhere; to be understood because the world has learned your native tongue, and to see all of this as normal.
This song reminds me of the soft power expressed within the world’s love of American music—the tender hope for the unfulfilled promises this country was founded on—and the cultural myopia of most Americans. Too many of us don’t know our own history, never mind anybody else’s.
“Uncle John’s Band,” Indigo Girls
The second song that played on repeat the summer I spent in Israel and Egypt. I’d never heard it before then, didn’t realize it was a cover, and had never listened to the Grateful Dead, but over the monthlong adventure this song wormed its way into my heart and head.
Tracking it down back home took the sort of sleuthing I would later apply to figuring out if my crushes were into women. I faintly remember requesting the CD through an interlibrary loan then promptly burning myself a copy on cassette.
“Land of Canaan,” Indigo Girls
YEARNING, pt. 2 (sapphic era): It’s just the London skyline telling me you’re not mine.
The live version of this song is introduced with sly humor as “a rock and roll song” and the audience scream-sings along in a way that evokes lesbian nostalgia. (Out) On the Road is about travel, obviously, and finding the places where we fit, both within ourselves and within the wider world. Part of that is letting go, as this song reminds me.
“Born on a Train,” The Magnetic Fields
The Magnetic Fields’ alt-country album The Charm of the Highway Strip is an old favorite, this song most of all. It spoke to my wandering heart the same way that On the Road did, when I read it in high school, assuaged by Kerouac’s misfit crew and the glimpses of queer lives sprinkled in its pages.
“Reno Dakota,” The Magnetic Fields
Brokenhearted, at a crossroads in my life, and lost in the swamps of Florida, I fantasized about starting a Magnetic Fields cover band. I’d learn ukulele and sing all of Claudia Gonson’s songs, including this one, and perhaps one day, this would make the ex I couldn’t get out of my head fall back in love with me.
An avid chronicler of her many travels, Lindsey Danis has visited all fifty states, plus Puerto Rico, and twenty-eight countries. Her travel writings have appeared in publications including Condé Nast Traveler, Fodor’s, Business Insider, USA Today, The Albany Times-Union, Longreads and Eater. Lindsey’s essays have received a notable mention in Best American Travel Writing. In 2021, Lindsey founded Queer Adventurers, a travel blog for LGBTQ+ people. Lindsey received a BA in English from Vassar College and an MFA in Fiction from Emerson College and lives in Upstate New York.