Traveling Music

Neil Peart decided to drive his BMW Z-8 automobile from L.A. to Big Bend
National Park, in Southwest Texas. As he sped along "between the gas-gulping
SUVs and asthmatic Japanese compacts clumping in the left lane, and the
roaring, straining semis in the right," he acted as his own DJ, lining up the
CDs chronologically and according to his possible moods. "Not only did the
music I listened to accompany my journey, but it also took me on sidetrips,
through memory and fractals of associations, threads reaching back through my
whole life in ways I had forgotten, or had never suspected.? Sifting through
those decades and those memories, I realized that I wasn't interested in
recounting the facts of my life in purely autobiographical terms, but rather ?
in trying to unweave the fabric of my life and times. As one who was never
much interested in looking back, because always too busy moving forward, I
found that once I opened those doors to the past, I became fascinated with the
times and their effect on me. The songs and the stories I had taken for
granted suddenly had a resonance that had clearly echoed down the corridors of
my entire life, and I felt a thrill of recognition, and the sense of a kind of
adventure. A travel story, but not so much about places, but about music and
memories."