13 tracks, 53 minutes and change. I don’t think I’ve taken this disc out of the deck all week, just can’t get enough of it. Every song on here reminds me of California in some way, and just seems to really capture something about L.A.

I’m reminded of the pair of road trips I took there from Grants Pass in high school with Tiffany, a girl who had moved from L.A. to my town that semester. (’88 or ’89 I think. May have even been ’90.) We left on the first journey right around this time of year; I remember being worried about driving her car South across the border through the snow in the mountains.

She was hugely into The Doors, I think she had their entire catalog on cassette and we listened to it the whole way. I had never had the chance to dig through an artist’s entire career in one shot like this before, it was an experience. There’s something about crashing on a stranger’s couch just short of dawn after a 15-hour drive to a city you know nothing about, with the mythology provided by Hollywood swimming in your brain and “L.A. Woman” ringing in your ears.

For the second trip, Twiggy hitched down with us, providing her own source of mayhem. I remember us staying up all night with Tiffany’s cousin(?), carving our names into the varnish of his acoustic guitar next to the graffiti of all his friends.

The idea of “Freedom” will forever be tangled up with long stretches of highway, friends, and music.