The Singles Jukebox

Reader Amnesty continues with a pitch from Josh Winters: soft dancepop fit for a night of driving…

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[7.09]
Josh Winters: The desire to break free from one’s surroundings has always been a romantic notion for me, and I often find myself yearning to inhabit a dreamscape like the one so richly illustrated in “Motorway.” Xanadu has become a desolate disco wasteland; everyone has ditched their roller skates and bolted off in their cars. But as the blares of their horns blur into the dark of the night, Victoria Hesketh hangs entrapped in the ether, strangely sedate yet seductive as she lays out her plan to flee the scene. The attempt itself inevitably proves futile, but through Hesketh’s deep fantasies, “Motorway” gives the bittersweet escape I intensely crave, even though the light at the end of the tunnel is as deceptive as it is alluring.
[9]

Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Americans have it easy: their escape narratives take place on the roads to the great unknown, the exotic dust roads and mountainous landscapes holding a certain allure. I recognise it’s not all like that, that the Los Angeles traffic is as horrid as everyone claims it to be, that the vision of the American road is a mythic one upheld by European arthouse films and country songs. But in the United Kingdom, we have the motorway, just as blocky as the American freeways but burdened by this cumbersome-yet-sensible word. Nobody romanticises the motorway — it’s grey and pretty shit, really. Little Boots attempts to romanticise it, but instead uses it as a metaphor to undercut her protagonist’s small town thirst for escape, hinting that the wonder and promise over the hill is accompanied by miles of the rigid and dull. “Shadows high / overtake,” she sings in a reserved tone, glorious imagery of midnight drives giving way to mechanical driver’s ed. There is no ideal escape here.
[7]

Iain Mew: “All our friends left behind”, words magnified by the same melody that got to me when Robbie Williams and Coldplay used it, too. “They’re not even on my mind/They have lives, they have plans/They could never understand” and then the slow clang of piano. Momentum, but momentum that knows it’s not going to get anywhere that fast. A busy hum, bright specks of synth going past. The sound of the night time car journey, exhaustion and routine mixed with the thrill of getting away and going somewhere, anywhere. A great way to start something, but especially something called Nocturnes.
[9]

Patrick St. Michel: Saint Etienne once sang “she said her life was like a motorway/dull, gray and long ’til he came along.” Little Boots doesn’t see it quite the same way, despite sounding quite a bit like Saint Etienne on this song. The motorway is everything for the two characters here — the longer the better, they seem to say, because that means they dive further into lands where they don’t understand the road signs and away from a town they long ago outgrew. But Little Boots recognizes it isn’t a sure thing — “maybe we can find our perfect place,” her voice letting each syllable of that first word air out. But you gotta take that gamble, and she knows it. “We can drive away,” and that’s the important thing.
[9]

Alfred Soto: Appropriate title — the vocals are an unabashed Sarah Cracknell rip, although the polite electronics nod don’t evoke “Like a Motorway” so much as late nineties All Saints.
[5]

Crystal Leww: Pop songs about love and cars with the road as a metaphor are one of my favorite things, but this lacks the substance and particularly the tension to make me feel anything about this drive. Remember that brief moment in 2008 when Little Boots was going to be bigger than Ellie Goulding? Maybe all for the best that it didn’t work out.
[3]

Brad Shoup: She programmed the pulse, which is so key to this theme. Definitely pleased to see the physical percussion; it made me wish the climbing keyboard line that leads into the final chorus were actually muted horns. Really, the weakest element is Little Boots the singer, who brings a steady twinkle but no road blindness, no blear. I love the lonely duty of a long journey; escape is just a concept. But I get enough grimness from the track.
[7]

Scott Mildenhall: Motorways can be faintly magical places at night. Little Boots’ idealised rendering of such a place, probably with cat’s eyes flashing neon blues and greens, and offering some kind of way of meeting someone without pulling into a service station is especially so. What will matter is the here and now, “just me and you”, that weird in-between. Tell anyone else the next morning, they’d be bored. You went for a drive — so what? Two-and-a-half years after it was first aired in demo form, “Motorway” is proof that long, seemingly aimless journeys can have beautiful results.
[8]

Mallory O’Donnell: Where epic post-rave drive into the sunset meets frankly dull Tuesday evening commute. Spoiler alert: they were the same anyway.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: Night driving’s famously evocative, an everyday otherworldly light show with its own mythology and own genres; but the reason it’s so evocative is it’s so lonely. Think about it, why and when you would: you’re either driving aimlessly — literally burning away your money — or you’re commuting, a star alone in a flood of stars, lulled into a steady orbit but never quite bound. (As Karen Joy Fowler writes in “Lily Red“: “She felt it often in the car. She drove onto the freeway that ran between her job and her house, and she thought about driving right past her exit and stopping in some small town wherever she happened to run out of gas, and the next thing she knew, that was exactly what she had done.”) It’s suburban fantasy, handily heightened by the radio — it’s why “I Drove All Night” pulses with portent, it and the cellos — and it’s best when understated. Nocturnes, too, is best when understated — the second half of the album is gaudy glitzo, the first is a phenomenal EP — and “Motorway” kicks off the good half. Little Boots, free of hype and expectations, goes dowdy in her influences; “all our friends left behind” is as much as a nod to Sarah Cracknell (“4 Months, 2 Weeks,” specifically”) as Victoria Hesketh’s posh timbre, but her true affinity lies with tracks like Dido’s “Sand in My Shoes“: travel writing for everyday travelers, each unfamiliar town an unopened story and each exit sign a missed connection. Hesketh sees mundane details — changing lanes, cold coffee — through streetlamp and reverb haze, and longs for someone to do the same, whether lover or listener. “They could never understand”: it invites wish-fulfillment, that you and only you are stirred toward this escape — and if you’re captivated this far into a Little Boots album in 2013 you probably are. Of course there won’t really be a new life; you’ve never actually driven past your exit and past your own skin, lives and plans and logistics muck it up. But you understand.
[8]

Will Adams: A few years ago, I had to drive my sister to the Los Angeles airport for a red eye to the east coast on the Fourth of July. Traffic on the 405 was light by that time of night, and soon enough, she was walking into the terminal with her bag. I turned back onto the highway, accelerating to a comfortable 75 mph. Two minutes into the drive, I heard a muffled boom overheard. I took my eyes off the road just enough to see red sparks cascading. The fireworks had begun, exploding all around me. I felt a surreal calmness come over me as I continued to coast. “Motorway” recalls that memory so vividly: the long piano chords mimic the expanse of the highway, six empty lanes and endless road ahead. The overall haze resembles the streetlamps, whizzing by so fast they blurred into a continuous stream of yellow light. And peeking through it all is that plucked synth arpeggio: the fireworks that followed me home.
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