Road Trip Mix - for saxophone octet

Year: 2025

Duration: ca. 18:15

Purchase: Currently under commissioner exclusivity. Coming eventually to Murphy Music Press!

In 2019, during the first year of my undergraduate music studies, I composed a work for saxophone quartet entitled Drive. This work was a suite of four brief movements, each one a snapshot inspired in some way by my experiences with and love of driving. In 2025, I revisited the work when I was asked to set it to a new instrumentation, and in doing so, I began to think about how I would approach this same basic concept six years later, with a music degree in hand and over twice as many years’ worth of experience on the road. When Professor Allen Cordingley of Texas Christian University (my alma mater!) offered me the chance to compose a work for saxophone octet—twice as many as Drive’s quartet—I felt sure I wanted to take this idea on.

The result is Road Trip Mix, a “spiritual sequel” of sorts. It follows the same principle of reflecting my love of driving, but acknowledges that its meaning to me has deepened with the passage of time and reflects on how driving cars has played an important part in my life. Whereas Drive was a brief suite, Road Trip Mix is a full-blown divertimento—one designed as if it were an eclectic playlist meant, ideally, to be heard loudly through your car speakers while you cruise down the highway, headed for state lines. Enjoy what you hear and, if you don’t, just wait a second; the autoplay setting is on and you’ll hear something new soon.

I. Car-Centric Sh*thole

The title of this movement is a phrase coined by my friend Kevin Kirkham and used enthusiastically by a handful of my friends as a comedic-but-honest criticism of places that, through a lack of walkable infrastructure and weak public transport systems, force citizens to own and rely on a car to get around (thus requiring all the costs and frustrations of car ownership). My home, the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, is one such area like this. I grew very used to driving all around this massive metropolitan area during my teens and early twenties, and I distinctly recall the busy hour-long commutes that I made twice a day during my time attending Texas Christian University (whose alma mater makes a somewhat masked appearance in this movement). I wholly agree with my friends’ criticism of this place; it is a car-centric sh*thole, yes, but it is my car-centric sh*thole, and even when I am stuck in its’ awful big city highway traffic, I’ll always love it.

II. Drawing on the Windows (In Hell, Frozen Over)

Around the beginning of 2025, my fiancée purchased an electric car that she and I have shared since. Early on, not yet used to the needs of an electric vehicle and not yet in possession of our own car charger, we ran out of power and found ourselves stuck at a closed charging station outside a city representative’s office (which was incorrectly advertised as being open for use). Roadside assistance took around six hours (we finally got a tow around 3AM) and, in the meantime, we sat in a dead car and tried to keep ourselves entertained during this unexpected setback. Notably, this was during the coldest part of the year, and it was below freezing temperature outside. The windows fogged up in the car and, trying to prevent complete misery, we found ourselves using our fingers to draw silly doodles in the fog on the windows and, in doing so, sharing a moment of earnest romance and friendship during an utterly stupid situation.

III. Black Void/White Knuckles

Before I studied at TCU, I began my undergraduate studies at Illinois State University. Fourteen times (to the best of my memory), I made a twelve hour long drive from my home town to the town of Normal, Illinois or vice-versa. Every time, I made the drive with one of the following conditions: 1.) I split the drive evenly into two separate days, or 2.) my father joined me for the drive, with both of us doing about half of the drive. There was one exception, however; one time, I did the drive in a single day entirely on my own. By the tenth hour, when I was deep into the night and out on interstate highways where light pollution is little and the night sky is a true pitch black, I noticed that my energy was waning, and I was beginning to nod off. Panic set in quickly after, and I began a repetitive process in which I would stop at gas stations, anxiously stare at caffeine pills and sodas, reject the idea on the basis that it would only make me more anxious and no less tired, and then drive further. After a few hellish hours of tightly gripping the wheel and honestly thinking I might fall asleep, crash, and die before reaching my destination, I did eventually make it to ISU, where I vowed to never again attempt such a feat.

IV. The God of Tires’ Troublesome Trials

There was a period of about three years during my undergraduate studies—encompassing the end of my time at ISU and the beginning of my time at TCU—where I seemed to have the worst possible luck with tires going flat. The details are a bit blurry looking back, but I do seriously think there was a period of a few months where I got a flat tire once each month. A significant number of these were full blowouts as well, splitting tires into several pieces, and they often happened while I was driving on highways. As this bad luck streak revealed itself over time, I began to ask my father a joke question with each instance: “what god did I anger to earn all these flat tires?” This movement exaggerates this idea, depicting a joyful traveler figuratively and literally deflated by a fickle and cruel God of Tires.

V. Rise and Fall (Left Turns Abound)

With two hours a day dedicated to driving when I was studying at TCU, I begin finding new music and podcasts to listen to as a way of trying to keep things fresh. One such album that I listened to this way was Chappell Roan’s album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. This album is a masterpiece to me and, as it turns out, to a massive audience around the country. Apple Music’s summary of the album describes it as “[chronicling] her realization of being queer and coming into her own” and noting after the first song’s unexpected musical shift that “left turns like that abound over the next 13 songs”. The music of the album, in turn, became an important impetus for my own budding journey of queerness, its descriptions of womanhood and queer identity causing me to stop and seriously consider my own gender in a way I hadn’t really done before, helping me along the way to the eventual discovery of my gender fluidity. I remain grateful to this music for causing a positive left turn in my self-image and consider this movement a celebratory response in which I respectfully borrow a melodic gesture from Super Modern Ultra Graphic Girl.

VI. Oh My God, There’s a Kitten on the Highway

On July 4th of 2025, less than ten minutes into a drive to visit my family and relax in a pool, I spotted something unusual on the median of Interstate 35 East and reported it to my fiancée thusly: “oh my god, there’s a kitten on the highway”. I parked my car halfway in the left lane, turned my hazards on, and ran backwards toward traffic to claim the innocent little baby before death could. My fiancée and I wrapped him in a pool towel and tears clouded my vision as we both promised him that we’d never let anything bad happen to him again. We took him to the vet, who estimated that he was around five weeks old and found that despite a chin injury, he was otherwise unharmed and perfectly healthy. That day, my fiancée named him Fish. At the time I’ve completed this work, Fish is now almost five months old and is living a happy, safe life with us. In the first weeks after I rescued him, I wrote him “The Fish Song”, a goofy little melody about how he is a gremlin, a star, a biter, and numerous others things, with one most important thing: “but more than all of that, you are a cat—you’re not a bat, you’re not a mat, you’re not a hat, yes, you are a cat!” This movement closes Road Trip Mix with no shortage of anxiety but, eventually, also with a resounding celebration of life as seen through the eyes of a rescued kitten and his owners, all nervously excited for what awaits on the roads ahead—both metaphorically and literally.