The Best Guitar Songs for a Long Drive

Music, Travel
May 4, 2026

The Best Guitar Songs for a Long Drive

By Frank O'Day

There’s something about a long stretch of open road that makes guitar music hit differently.

Not just louder, though yes, obviously louder. It’s more than that. The right song at the right moment on a long drive — windows down, fuel tank full, nothing but highway ahead — can feel like the whole thing was composed specifically for this moment, this road, this afternoon. You’ve felt it. Everyone who drives has felt it.

The tricky part is that not all guitar music works in a car. Some of it’s too demanding. Some of it’s too delicate. A three-minute jazz odyssey that’s extraordinary on headphones can feel exhausting when you’re trying to navigate a B-road at dusk with a thermos of cold coffee and 400 kilometres still to go.

What you want for a long drive is something with momentum. Songs that feel like forward motion. Songs that open up rather than close in. Songs where the guitar is doing something that makes the landscape feel bigger.

Here’s a playlist worth building.

Radar Love – Golden Earring

Start here. If there is a more perfectly engineered driving song in existence, it hasn’t been found yet.

The opening drum fill alone is enough to make you press the accelerator slightly harder without noticing. Then the guitar comes in, that thick, urgent riff doing exactly what a great driving riff should do: create a sensation of velocity. The whole song is about driving through the night to get back to someone. It earns every minute of its eight-minute runtime, which is not something you can say about most eight-minute songs.

Put this on as you’re leaving the city limits. You’ll understand immediately.

Running Down a Dream – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Tom Petty wrote an enormous number of perfect songs and this might be the most perfect of them for this specific purpose. It’s literally about driving. Fast. With the radio on. On a day that feels golden and open and full of possibility.

Mike Campbell’s guitar tone on this track is one of the great sounds in rock music. Clean but slightly mean, cutting through the mix like sunlight through a windscreen. The solo is unhurried and inevitable in the way that only the best solos are.

If you don’t feel something when the chorus hits on this song, pull over and check your pulse.

Highway to Hell – AC/DC

The title is doing a lot of work here, but the song deserves its place entirely on the strength of that riff.

Malcolm Young was one of the greatest rhythm guitarists who ever lived, and the chord sequence he built for Highway to Hell is deceptively simple in the way that all genuinely great things are deceptively simple. It grooves. It locks in. It makes you want to drive through the desert with the volume at a level your GP would describe as inadvisable.

Classic for a reason. Classic for many reasons. Play it loud.

Sultans of Swing – Dire Straits

This one earns its place not through aggression but through sheer musicianship.

Mark Knopfler plays fingerstyle while most rock guitarists were using picks, and the tone he gets is warm and fluid and completely his own. The solo at the end of Sultans of Swing is one of those moments where the guitar just opens up and says everything that words can’t. It builds and builds and then it flies.

Perfect for when the road gets quieter and you’re deep enough into the drive that your mind has stopped making shopping lists and started just existing.

Brown Eyed Girl – Van Morrison

Not an obvious pick, maybe. But there’s a looseness and joy to this song that makes it irresistible on a long drive, particularly in the afternoon when the sun is doing something nice with the clouds.

The guitar playing is unhurried and happy. The whole thing sounds like summer feels. It’s three minutes and two seconds long and every one of those seconds is worth your time.

You will sing along. That is not optional.

Money for Nothing – Dire Straits

Yes, Dire Straits twice. No apologies.

The riff that opens Money for Nothing is one of the most recognisable in popular music, and for good reason. It’s enormous. It’s heavy in a way that Dire Straits weren’t supposed to be heavy, which is part of why it still sounds surprising forty years later.

Sting’s falsetto in the intro is a bonus you didn’t know you needed. The production sounds massive in a car stereo. This is a big highway song, best deployed when the road is wide and straight and the horizon feels genuinely distant.

Walk of Life – Dire Straits

Fine. Three times. This is the last one, I promise.

Walk of Life is the palate cleanser. It’s upbeat, it’s melodic, and Knopfler’s guitar work is understated in all the right ways. It sounds like a song that’s been on the radio forever because it has been on the radio forever, but in a car on a long drive it somehow sounds fresh every time. There’s a muscle memory optimism to it that works at kilometre 200 and kilometre 600 equally well.

Hotel California – Eagles

The opening guitar arpeggio is one of the most recognised pieces of music on earth, which means it’s almost impossible to hear without a small involuntary sense of anticipation.

Hotel California is a seven-minute song that never feels like a seven-minute song, which is the highest compliment you can pay to anything of that length. The twin guitar solo at the end is genuinely extraordinary — Don Felder and Joe Walsh trading lines back and forth in a conversation that builds to something that should feel overwrought and instead feels completely earned.

Best experienced in the golden hour, when the light goes orange and the shadows get long.

Life is a Highway – Tom Cochrane

Another song about driving, obviously. There’s a reason these songs exist and keep getting made: the feeling of moving through landscape with a good song playing is one of the better feelings available to humans, and songwriters know it.

Tom Cochrane’s original is the right version. Not the Rascal Flatts cover (sorry, Rascal Flatts). The original has a roughness and an urgency that the remake sands off. The guitar work is nothing flashy, just solid rock playing in service of a melody that burrows into your brain and stays there for the rest of the trip.

Fast Car – Tracy Chapman

The guitar work here is so clean and so precise that it’s almost meditative. A fingerpicked acoustic pattern, mostly the same throughout, creating a feeling of motion and longing that the lyrics then build into something much bigger.

Fast Car is nominally a sad song about trying to escape a difficult life. But there’s something hopeful at its core — the idea that a car and a road and enough forward momentum can change things. On a long drive, that feeling is very easy to access.

One of the greatest songs written in the last fifty years. Full stop.

Comfortably Numb – Pink Floyd

Save this one for night driving.

David Gilmour’s second solo in Comfortably Numb is frequently cited as the greatest guitar solo ever recorded, and on a long empty highway in the dark, with the stars out and the world quiet, it becomes something genuinely transcendent. It builds slowly and then it just goes somewhere extraordinary.

The song is six minutes long and feels like thirty seconds. That’s the mark of something special.

Old Man – Neil Young

A quieter choice to finish the main run. Acoustic guitar, harmonics ringing in the open air, Neil Young’s voice doing that slightly reedy, searching thing it does on his best recordings.

Old Man is about the passage of time and the ways different people’s lives mirror each other unexpectedly. It’s a song that makes you think without demanding that you think. On a long drive, when the conversations have quieted and everyone’s watching the landscape go by, this is exactly the right weight.

A Few More Worth Queuing Up

If you’re building this into a proper playlist for a serious drive, round it out with:

Rosanna – Toto (the guitar work is underrated, the groove is undeniable)

More Than a Feeling – Boston (that intro, every time)

Layla – Derek and the Dominos (the piano outro is a gift, but the guitar gets you there first)

The Weight – The Band (Robbie Robertson playing with space and restraint in a way most guitarists never learn)

Go Your Own Way – Fleetwood Mac (Lindsey Buckingham’s rhythm guitar is one of the most interesting things in classic rock and nobody talks about it enough)