5 Great Road Trip Podcasts
Podcasts are a great way to spend time during road trips across the country, but there’s a distinct difference in what sorts of podcasts work best for your method of travel. For plane rides, you want something beautifully designed and immersive. With road trips, though, it’s a whole different story. Road noise alone makes it difficult to fully enjoy lush soundscapes, and having to pay attention to the road means you’re not going to have the brainpower to piece together the minutia of a subtle plot.
Instead, on a road trip, you want something engaging and fun. You want something marathon-worthy, but not devastating; driving road trip distances is stressful enough as it is. Some variety and segments to help keep you alert and make sure episodes don’t get stale is also a huge plus.
The list below is a collection of some great road trip podcasts, not listed in any particular order.
1. The McElroy Podcasts (The Adventure Zone and more)
The McElroys (brothers Justin, Travis, Griffin, and their father Clint) are veritable princes of the comedy podcast between their myriad shows, The Adventure Zone and My Brother, My Brother and Me being the most famous. It’s for good reason; the McElroys have been doing this for about ten years, and they’ve established a perfect brand of goofy for almost any listener. My personal favorite road trip podcast is The Adventure Zone, a show in which the brothers play Dungeons & Dragons with their father. Not only is it hilarious (once you get past a very rough first few episodes), it also has a serialized story that gets more and intense and beautiful than I could have imagined. If you’re looking for straight up comedy, My Brother, My Brother and Me is the way to go: it’s an advice show in which the brothers give some pretty bad advice to some truly bizarre questions, often from Yahoo! Answers. Wonderful! is another favorite, in which Griffin and his wife Rachel discuss things that are, simply put, wonderful. The McElroy podcasts are consistently funny, endearing ways to blow through a few hours of a road trip before you even realize how far you’ve gone.
The Adventure Zone: Apple | Stitcher
My Brother, My Brother and Me: Apple | Stitcher
Wonderful!: Apple | Website
2. Song Salad
Song Salad is a podcast in which the hosts, Shannon and Scott, pick one random musical genre, one random Wikipedia article, and then make a song about that article’s topic in that genre. The hosts are hilarious, and as they dive into the musical genre, it’s always interesting to see which features they’ll pull from in their own compositions. Their analysis of the Wikipedia articles is never unkind, no matter how ridiculous the article is. Song Salad is specifically nice for road trips not just because it’s funny, but because it has segments and a song each episode, which helps it give some variety to the drive.
3. Song Exploder
Keeping in line with music is Song Exploder, a podcast in which songs are taken apart detail by detail by the people involved in their creation. Song Exploder is recorded as an interview, but edited to make the musician seem more like they’re telling a story. As they go through how they wrote the lyrics, how a certain sound was created, who was brought in for backing vocals, what the producer or collaborators did to change the sound, and what the overall story of the song is, they intercut pieces of the song to help accentuate what’s being discusses, which also makes the podcast nicely dynamic. Each episode ends in the full version of the song. Song Exploder‘s archive has an interesting catalog of musicians that ranges from Norah Jones to Mitski to Ludwig Göransson.
4. HORSE
HORSE is a podcast about all things basketball . . . except the basketball. Hosted by Eric Silver of Join the Party and Mike Schubert of Potterless, the show goes into the lifestyle of basketball players, as well as some of the more ridiculous parts of basketball itself. Segments include “3 on 3,” a list of three best and worst things in a category, like best and worst basketball player nicknames. I don’t know anything about basketball, but I always get excited when I see that HORSE has a new episode out. Its segments give it variety, but mostly what makes it a great road trip listen is the jokes per minute and the vibrant energy the hosts bring to each episode.
5. Kaleidotrope
Kaleidotrope is a serialized audio fiction, so make sure you start at the beginning with this one. It’s the story of two college students working at their magical university’s radio station. Kaleidotrope is very true to its name: it’s a kaleidoscope of tropes from romantic comedies, all subverted and toyed with in some way. It delights in being sweet, somewhat low-stakes, and yes, fairly twee. The way that it leans into those feelings makes for a story that is surprisingly engaging and, at times, surprisingly surprising. It’s the perfect remedy for when you want a rom-com that’s not stuck in gender norms or antiquated relationship ideals–and it’s a great story to dig into without worrying much about solving any puzzle-like plot while on a road trip.
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