Windows Down, Volume Up: The Adi Ulmansky Road Trip Playlist America Deserves
There's a specific kind of feeling you get when the city finally falls away behind you, the road opens up ahead, and you realize you have nowhere to be for the next several hours except exactly where you are. It's part freedom, part loneliness, part something you can't name — and honestly? It's the same feeling Adi Ulmansky chases in her music.
Her sound has always lived in that in-between space. The tension between knowing and not knowing. Between staying and leaving. Between the life you're driving away from and the one you haven't reached yet. Which makes her catalog, when you think about it, one of the most perfectly road-ready bodies of work in contemporary music — even if she never set out to score an American highway.
So we did it for her. Here's the mixtape she never made: a route-by-route guide to pairing Adi Ulmansky's music with the roads that deserve it most.
Pacific Coast Highway, California — The One Where You Realize You've Been Holding Your Breath
The stretch: Santa Monica to Big Sur, windows down, ocean to your left, cliffs to your right.
The PCH is the road that makes people cry without knowing why. It's too beautiful. It asks too much of you emotionally. You need music that doesn't try to compete with the view — music that just sits inside the feeling with you.
This is where Adi's quieter, more suspended tracks do their best work. The ones where she lets a note hang in the air longer than feels comfortable. The ones where the production breathes. On a stretch of highway where the Pacific is right there, enormous and indifferent and gorgeous, her voice becomes the interior monologue to the landscape's exterior scale. You're watching something vast. She's narrating what it does to you.
Play her most restrained, atmospheric work here. Let the silences between phrases sync up with the moments when the road curves and the ocean disappears for a second — and then comes back.
Route 66, New Mexico — The Ghost Road That Needs a Ghost Sound
The stretch: Albuquerque to Gallup, past the painted desert and the places that used to be something.
Route 66 is American mythology made asphalt. But the parts people don't talk about — the abandoned motels, the towns that almost made it, the signage fading in the sun — those are the parts that actually get under your skin.
Adi Ulmansky's music has always had a relationship with the things that don't quite resolve. The feelings that don't tie up neatly. The emotional loose ends. That energy is exactly right for the New Mexico stretch of 66, where the landscape itself feels like a sentence that never finished.
Her tracks that carry that undercurrent of longing without spelling it out — the ones where you feel the ache without being told what it's about — those are your companions here. Roll slow. Let the distance do its thing.
Highway 1, Oregon Coast — For When the Weather Matches Your Mood
The stretch: Astoria down through Lincoln City, fog rolling in off the water, the trees doing that dramatic Pacific Northwest thing.
Oregon's coastal highway is moody in the best possible way. It doesn't do sunshine-and-good-vibes. It does grey skies and dramatic cliffs and the particular satisfaction of being somewhere that asks nothing cheerful of you.
This is where Adi's more textured, layered productions shine. The tracks where the instrumentation feels like weather — where something is building or settling or hovering just above resolution. Her lo-fi instincts and her ear for atmosphere were basically made for a drive where the ocean keeps appearing and disappearing through the fog.
If you've ever wanted to feel like the main character in something that hasn't decided its genre yet, this is the road and this is the soundtrack.
US-50, Nevada — The Loneliest Road in America Needs Company
The stretch: Officially nicknamed "The Loneliest Road in America" for a reason. Hours of nothing. Flat, silent, enormous nothing.
Most people would tell you to load up something upbeat for this stretch. Fight the emptiness with energy. We'd argue the opposite. Let Adi's music meet the loneliness head-on.
Her catalog includes tracks that don't flinch from being alone with a feeling — songs that don't rush toward resolution because they're genuinely comfortable sitting inside the hard stuff. US-50 across Nevada is 287 miles of open desert that will test your relationship with silence. The right Adi Ulmansky track doesn't fill that silence so much as it dignifies it. It tells you: yeah, this is a lot, and it's okay to just drive through it.
Pick the songs where she sounds most like she's talking to herself. That's the energy the Nevada desert is asking for.
Blue Ridge Parkway, Virginia/North Carolina — The Slow Road That Rewards Patience
The stretch: Shenandoah Valley south into the Smokies, no commercial vehicles, no billboards, just the mountains doing their ancient thing.
The Blue Ridge Parkway has a speed limit of 45 mph, which is either infuriating or a gift depending on your relationship with slowing down. It winds through some of the oldest mountains on the continent, past overlooks that make you feel like you've accidentally stumbled into something sacred.
For this one, reach for the Adi Ulmansky tracks that reward patience. The ones that don't give you everything in the first thirty seconds — the ones that build slowly, that reveal themselves in layers, that sound different on the third listen than they did on the first. The Parkway is not a highway you rush. Neither is her best music.
This is the drive where you'll suddenly notice a lyric you've heard fifty times and realize you never actually heard it before. The mountains have that effect on people. So does she.
The Texas Hill Country, US-290 — Big Sky, Bigger Feelings
The stretch: Austin west toward Fredericksburg, past the wildflowers in spring, the vineyards, the limestone hills rolling out in every direction.
Texas has a way of making everything feel consequential. The sky is just more here — more present, more dramatic, more willing to put on a show. US-290 through the Hill Country is one of those drives that makes people want to write things down.
Adi's more emotionally direct tracks — the ones where she's not hiding behind abstraction, where the vulnerability is right there on the surface — those belong here. Match the openness of the landscape with the openness in her voice. Let the bluebonnets blur past the window. Let whatever you've been carrying sit in the passenger seat for a minute.
Some roads make you want to talk. Some roads make you want to listen. The Hill Country is a listener. Adi Ulmansky knows how to fill that kind of space.
Build Your Route
The beautiful thing about Adi Ulmansky's catalog is that it travels well. It doesn't need a specific context to land — it creates its own. But there's something about pairing her music with physical movement, with miles accumulating, with the American landscape doing its enormous, indifferent, gorgeous thing outside your window, that unlocks something new in both the songs and the drive.
So pull up your map. Pick your highway. Queue up her catalog from the beginning, or shuffle it, or let the algorithm decide — and then just go. The mixtape she never made is already in your library. You just have to get on the road.
