Listen to It All Night Long: Rascal Flatts' "Life is a Highway"

There are turns and bends and winding stretches snaking through mountains and deserts, and the song, like those roads, steps left and right a dozen times between different speeds and tones.

It makes sense. As Rascal Flatts’ lead vocalist Gary LeVox opens the song in his chipper drawl: “Life’s like a road that you travel on, there’s one day here and the next day gone. Sometimes you bed, sometimes you stand, sometimes you turn your back to the wind.” You do travel down life like you drive down a road, you pass through one day after another as you pass through one town after another, and that road is smooth sometimes and other times it’s shot through with potholes and riddled with cracks and bumps that throw you off course and knock you about.

Rascal Flatts’ “Life Is A Highway,” recorded for Pixar’s film 2006 Cars, winds, weaves and dips as a road would. A road’s seldom straight. There are turns and bends and winding stretches snaking through mountains and deserts, and the song, like those roads, steps left and right a dozen times between different speeds and tones. It opens with a burst from lead guitarist Joe Don Rooey and a kids’ howl of “WHOO!” from LeVox but then settles into a more docile, foot-stamping beat before then shooting back up as LeVox hits the song’s repeated and famous titular lyrics “Life is a highway and I wanna ride it all night long.”

Yet there’s also that moment when the band drops the volume right down to a gentle swoon and LeVox sings in almost a pillow whisper of how “There was a distance between you and I. A misunderstanding once. But now we look it in the eye,” and you can imagine the scene from Cars where Lightning McQueen drives by the waterfall with the beautiful sports car Sally. On comes a roaring “Ooh” and LeVox revs the song back up to full, hot-road road trip speed.

This song knows life goes up and down and so it's talk of how “There’s a world outside every darkened door” doesn’t sound like the idealistic bullshit of a kid who’s never been around the block but someone wise enough to know the road can be tough but strong enough to still sing with LeVox’s joyous rev that “There’s no load I can’t hold” and that makes you believe that he can ride life’s highway “all night long.” Listen to this song long enough, and you’ll believe you can too.