Aux Cord Archaeology: Two Decades of Van Songs, One Ride Through Our Entire History

There's a hard drive in our tour van that nobody talks about anymore. It's been passed from vehicle to vehicle like a family heirloom — old MacBook, cracked case, a sticker from a gas station outside Flagstaff that no one remembers stopping at. On it: every van playlist we've ever made, going back to 2004.

We didn't set out to build an archive. Nobody was thinking about legacy at 2 AM somewhere on I-80, arguing over whether the next three hours belonged to hip-hop or somebody's depressing singer-songwriter phase. But playlists are time capsules whether you mean to make them or not. And ours, it turns out, tells the whole story of this band — better than any interview ever has.

2004–2007: The Everything Era

The early playlists are chaos. Fifty tracks, no theme, uploaded by five guys with five different tastes and zero conflict-resolution skills. There's a run where Modest Mouse's "Float On" sits directly next to a three-minute hardcore song one of us recorded in his basement. Then a Le Tigre track. Then, inexplicably, a Garrison Keillor clip someone added as a joke that we all somehow tolerated for a full tour.

What those playlists really document is a band that hadn't figured out who it was yet. We were throwing everything at the wall — sonically, sure, but also socially. Every song added was a small bid for identity. This is what I like. Pay attention to me.

2009–2012: The Passive-Aggressive Years

Then things got quieter, in the worst way.

Around 2009, the playlist became a battlefield. Nobody said "I'm mad at you" out loud anymore — they just added a song about it. Our drummer went through a stretch of loading up on early Wilco, which everyone correctly understood as a message. Our bassist answered with the entire Pet Sounds album, which was somehow both a peace offering and a flex.

There's a two-week stretch in 2011 where the only additions were instrumentals. Nobody wanted to put lyrics into the world. We were fighting about money, or the setlist, or something so small none of us can remember it now — but the silence on that hard drive is deafening.

If you're in a band and your van playlist has gone instrumental-only, I'd gently suggest having an actual conversation.

2014: The Year We Almost Parked Forever

One playlist from that fall is nearly empty. Four songs total, all added the same night, all ballads. We'd just come off a run where we played to nine people in Boise and eleven in Spokane, and the van ride back to Denver was the quietest we've ever been.

Someone put on The War on Drugs. Someone else added a Neko Case track. And then our guitarist, who almost never touched the aux, queued up Springsteen's "Land of Hope and Dreams." We listened to the whole thing without talking. When it ended, our drummer said, "Well, we're not doing anything else we're any good at."

We kept driving. We kept playing. That playlist is four songs long and it might be the most important document we own.

2018–Now: The Good Kind of Repetition

The recent playlists look different. Shorter. Curated. There's a shared vocabulary now — certain songs that come on every tour, the way a family has its inside jokes. Tom Petty's "Wildflowers" has opened every single drive home since 2018. Nobody added it to the playlist doc. It just happens.

There's also room for other people now. Opening bands get blocks. Our sound tech, who's ridden with us since 2019, has permanently claimed the first hour after load-out for whatever she wants, and it's usually Nigerian juju music or ’90s R&B, and it's always right.

Build Your Own

Here's our invitation: start a playlist with your band, your road trip crew, your family — whoever you log serious miles with. Don't overthink it. Just let it run.

Then, in ten years, scroll back to the beginning. You won't just hear songs. You'll hear who you were, who you were mad at, and the exact night you decided to keep going.

The van breaks down. The lineup changes. But the playlist — the playlist keeps every mile.