Best road music experience: Listening to Fugazi “Huntington, WV USA 4.05.02” while driving through Huntington

Music provides a regular soundtrack for my daily commute, but this summer I made solo drives from western Virginia to Kansas City and back. Finding inspiration and distraction through music helps make a non-stop 14-hour haul a little more bearable.

By the time I reached Huntington, West Virginia, on the drive back east, I’d clocked 24 hours of driving, not counting an additional 10 or more hours on the road over the week between those two longer trips. Fortunately, I’d planned for this moment and loaded up Fugazi’s 2002 show in Huntington — their last year as a touring band but first in the city that gave birth to Appalachian Terror Unit. I listened this Huntington song in 2015, but hearing it on Interstate 64 and while driving through town brought a new urgency and left me in awe of a tightly knit unit that stepped away from recording and touring while still at their peak.