Musician/playwright/sculptor (whew!) and visual artist Terry Allen, who penned this tune, once opined that no one with access to a long, empty road and a good car radio should ever need a psychiatrist. Though he spent much of his career in California he has always retained a flinty, in-spite-of-itself love affair with the high plains of West Texas. Even the litany of small last-picture-show towns blowing by in his slipstream have a certain romance: "I'm a high straight in Plainview/Side bet in Idalou/And a fresh deck in New Deal…" Rendered here in a rollicking, full-throttle version by Robert Earl Keen (no slouch as a chronicler of Lone Star locales himself, Allen's anthem of liberation through horsepower rings doubly true: "The closest I'll ever get to Heaven/Is makin' speed up ol' 87…that hard-assed Amarillo Highway…"