friend recently asked me the 10 albums I listened to most on my trip. It was a great question; I spent over five months listening to and falling in love with and getting ill from the same 40 CDs. Worse than that actually: I only listened to half of them. That's because I listen to albums obsessively. I listen to albums for weeks at a time, the same one over and over until I can't possibly listen to it anymore. Right now, I am listening to Wilco's "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," and I will listen to this all day long. "Cheer up, honey I hope you can." Back up, repeat. "Cheer up, honey I hope you can." As it turns out, the album is complex enough to merit such repetition, but that is incidental; among my previous sonic obsessions are 'N Sync's eponymous debut and Lionel Richie's Truly: The Love Songs.

Just so you know, the albums on this list are not necessarily "travel" albums. Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks" is a brilliant travel album - in general, Bob Dylan makes brilliant travel music - but I didn't listen much to my Bob Dylan CDs. Sometimes I chose albums because they matched the landscape I was driving through; sometimes I chose albums because they reminded me of someplace else entirely; sometimes I chose albums because I could sing along and lose hours doing it and the music was generally inoffensive. I am not a music critic, and I am not a wannabe critic. This was just music that seemed right right then, listed in the order of their entrance.

1 The Bends, Radiohead
Los Angeles to Seattle
I had missed the whole Radiohead thing, and I felt so left out. Radiohead was a brilliant band, the band of our times, THE band period. When did we decide this? Was it the same time we decided to watch "The Sopranos"? Cause I missed it all. I began my latecomer schooling with this album, probably their most accessible, and I loved it so much that it was all scratched up and unlistenable by the time I got to Seattle.

2. Fight Songs, The Old 97s
The whole damn way
This has always been my least favorite Old 97s album, but even if songs like "Indefinitely" didn't namecheck Highway 1, they would fit in northern California: "And the redwoods and the oak trees and the double yellow lines / Although they're in perfect symmetry, they keep imperfect time." Maybe it's because I'd worn out the band's other albums so long ago, or maybe it's because after a hundred sad convenience stores and too many pay phone conversations, songs like "Lonely Holiday" made so much sense: "It was a lonely holiday / I was alone, you were away / In Fayetteville or in another state / There's so many towns I hate."

3. There's Nothing Wrong With Love, Built to Spill
Wyoming, South Dakota, New Jersey Turnpike, Texas
Oh this album is so beautiful.

4. Gold, Ryan Adams
Minnesota
Nothing about this grabbed me the first time around, but it was dark and raining and late, the trucks spraying water on my windshield, my wipers sprinting to keep up, and the album just kept playing and playing as I drove through the night. It's a long album, and varied, and it begins in New York and ends in Los Angeles, which charmed me.

5. Jackson Five Greatest Hits
Michigan
Cause, you know, it's Motown.

6. Don't Fall in Love With Everyone You See, Okkervil River
New England
I put this on because I wanted to remember Austin. Instead, it was a perfect New England soundtrack, lovely and lonely and haunting.

7. Lonesome and Losing, Li'l Cap'n Travis
New England to New Orleans
I put this on because I wanted to remember Austin. It was perfect.

8. Appetite for Destruction, Guns N Roses
New York to Washington DC, Atlanta to New Orleans
I do this thing where I sing along like I'm doing a lounge act. "Turn around bitch, I've got a use for you." Well, you'll have to hear it. I could sing this stuff backwards in my sleep.

9. Footloose soundtrack
Washington DC back to New York, New York, New York
Sometimes I go mad. Like I'll hear a song - in this case, Kenny Loggins' "I'm Free (Heaven Help the Man)" -- and I lose it. The bombast, the crescendoes, the children's chorus. I'm such a sucker for nostalgia, and once upon a time, I burned up my Sears & Roebuck red carpet dancing to that song.

10. The Instigator, Rhett Miller
New York to Texas
This should be fairly obvious my now.

The list doesn't include the compilation CDs I made and that were made for me. However, for the record, new music from friends is my favorite thing these days, which is not so much a hint as a manifesto.