Ventura highway in the sunshine

There are songs that belong to rooms, and there are songs that belong to the road. America's "Ventura Highway" is of the latter kind — a song that seems to have been written not at a desk but behind the wheel, somewhere between the last town and the next horizon. Released in 1972 on their album Homecoming, the track is a sun-drenched reverie, all fingerpicked guitars and unhurried harmonies, drifting along like the very breeze it describes.

Dewey Bunnell, who penned the song, drew from childhood memories of driving through Ventura County, California — the golden light, the open stretches of highway, the feeling of being suspended between departure and arrival. It's a song less about a destination than about the state of mind a good road puts you in: that particular, untranslatable lightness when the windows are down and the landscape is doing the thinking for you.

And perhaps that is why "Ventura Highway" has quietly, permanently lodged itself near the top of my driving playlist — that carefully tended collection of songs reserved for long stretches of asphalt and wandering thoughts. There is something about those opening chords that makes the road ahead seem a little longer, a little kinder, the kind of road you wouldn't mind never quite reaching the end of. It asks nothing of you but to keep moving, and in return, it gives you the afternoon.