Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.It is “the most obvious song in the world, and the strangest”, wrote Greil Marcus in his cultural history Lipstick Traces. It is a song that for all bar a few seconds uses just two chords — D and A, with the tiniest foray into E at the end — and whose subject is Route 128, the unlovely highway that loops around Boston, Massachusetts. It is a song whose own author has not performed it for decades, and who a couple of years ago dismissed a campaign in his home state to give it official recognition: “I was saying I’m in love with my own loneliness. Isn’t that kind of narcissistic? It’s true, you know and I meant it that way. It was a sort of a lonely, self-involved song.”Jonathan Richman was a Massachusetts teenager besotted with The Velvet Underground when he wrote “Roadrunner”. He hung around the band when they played in Boston, and moved briefly to New York to be part of their milieu, sleeping on their manager’s couch: “Roadrunner” was, at heart, simply the Velvets’ “Sister Ray” rewritten to be about a ring road.He has said he wrote “Roadrunner” during his stay in New York because he was homesick. “I just made it up for myself, really, just to make up this hypnotic chord guitar chord thing about how I felt about the loneliness of borrowing my father’s car, which I did at 16 and 17, and driving around — and sort of being consoled by the lonely industrial parks, which felt as lonely as I felt.”But those who cover “Roadrunner” only borrow the car: the vehicle always belongs to Richman. In 2007, as a newspaper section editor, I sent the writer Laura Barton to drive every road mentioned in every version of “Roadrunner”. The resultant article in 2013 inspired a campaign in Massachusetts to make “Roadrunner” the official state rock song, led by state Rep Marty Walsh. And though that failed, state legislators keep on trying — it was a 2023 effort that prompted Richman’s polite dismissal of the notion.As long as there is music, though, and cars to play it in — and as long as there are bored kids with nothing better to do on a Saturday night but drive through the suburbs for the sake of it — “Roadrunner” will endure. It is strange, but it really is obvious.Let us know your memories of ‘Roadrunner’ in the comments section belowThe paperback edition of ‘The Life of a Song: The stories behind 100 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by ChambersMusic credits: Sanctuary; Universal; Sony; Reservoir; Cleopatra; Fire
