I know the exact moment I first heard the most important song I would ever hear. This was in part because my parents woke me up at 8 a.m. and said, “We are about to play the most important song you will ever hear.” The song was “Mexico” by an English indie-folk band composed of three sisters called The Staves.

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I was shaken. Before I heard this song, I was 13 and had a half-baked theory I was the world’s most hated person, and I would never find anything that spoke to me because I was too complex to be understood. But “Mexico” spoke to me.

That evening, I watched the documentary my parents had heard The Staves in. “Austin to Boston” (2014) is a 72-minute film about a tour that starts at Austin’s South by Southwest Festival and ends in Boston, Massachusetts, featuring five creaky old Volkswagen camper vans and four bands — Ben Howard, The Staves, Nathaniel Rateliff and Bear’s Den — over two weeks. 

The documentary felt monumental to me in a way I couldn’t explain, especially the way they hit their harmonies, the guitar playing over a crackling fire. The whole thing feels raw with acoustic vocals and almost prosaic with regular-looking people making music in the backs of vans.

“Austin to Boston” made me feel like I was traveling alongside them. The parts of the documentary that stood out to me were moments at random no-name intersections along the road or interactions with locals. The Staves covered “Chicago” by Sufjan Stevens when they neared the city; the performance felt charged with the serendipity of the location just being a pit stop on the road trip. 

I felt seen by the music and the way the whole film was special, even though it was mostly in mundane transit.

Music became a coping mechanism of mine in transportation. I’ve always been intensely motion-sick, to the point that I’ve gotten nauseous even on playground swings, so I couldn’t use books or TV or scrolling on Instagram to distract me on road trips. I’m also incapable of stillness, always moving and gesticulating while speaking and getting distracted by everything I see. Listening to music on long drives was one way I felt settled. 

I took a flight from home, Bangalore, India, out to Los Angeles alone when I came to college for the first time. It was four hours to Qatar, a five-hour layover and another 16 hours to L.A. — a harrowing experience for my first time in the United States and the longest flight I had ever taken. 

My freshman year was right after the pandemic, so my parents, who attended every talent show, parent-teacher conference and high school basketball match, couldn’t come to move me into college. The journey was lonely and frightening, and it was my last chance to reckon with all the emotions of leaving the only place I had ever called home. 

The playlist I made for that flight was over six hours long and held every song that I felt like had ever changed my life. “Mexico” was on there. For every flight I have taken since then — and there have been many, varying in length from 50-minute flights to the Bay to my standard 20-hour one back home — I’ve made a playlist that speaks to that period of my life. 

The music has given me an opportunity to people-watch while I’m not distracted by some other activity. It’s made me feel loved and comforted and safe when I’m headed to places that are unknown and has made transit, which is essentially hours and hours of waiting to get to the place you need to be, bearable. 

I’ve always felt like I’ve been on the go. Life is busy, and you can get swept up in it really easily. A lot of mine has been spent waiting to get somewhere, whether geographical or metaphorical, but the trip there is where a lot of the most special moments of my life have happened.

There’s a painting I discovered around the time I watched “Austin to Boston” called “Music is a Means of Rapid Transportation” by Tracey Adams. A contemporary piece of art composed of ink and gouache in arches that twist on the paper, it’s blue and white and green and gorgeous and makes me feel peaceful the way The Staves do.

When my girlfriend and I were a couple of months into our relationship, we planned a weekend road trip away and made a collaborative playlist to listen to on the road. When I hear it now, I think of the sun, sea and sky on the drive to Crystal Cove and a beautiful girl on my arm. I think of Tracey Adams and of trips that have been made not only endurable but also magnificent because of the music I listened to. 

I’m reminded of a song by The Staves called “In the Long Run” which goes, “’Cause I’m still afraid / Of leaving the things I love dearly / I wander, I roam, I write home to tell you.” Transit can bring you closer or further from people and places you love, and it can be frightening and emotional, as well as a joy.

If music can give you some form of companionship during these journeys between the locations where real life occurs, then that is no small thing. That is no empty offering.

​“Jam Journal” is a rotating column featuring a new Daily Trojan editor in each installment commenting on the music most important to them. Sanya Verma is the online editor at the Daily Trojan.