5 of Our Favorite Car/Music Mashups

We love exploring the overlaps between the worlds of cars and music on this site. Want a list of songs about specific cars? We got you. Cars owned by rock stars? Here are 20. A history of obsolete in-car audio? Rob Siegel wrote a five-part series, and part one is here. Remember that one band named after a car—or was it a car part, or a crash test dummy? We dug up fourteen examples.

We polled the staff of this website for its favorite intersections of the automotive and the musical worlds. Most are songs, but there’s one band-and-race team collab that’s worth scrolling down to see. Enjoy!

Rapid Roy and His ’57 Chevrolet

I’ve been on a bit of a Jim Croce kick lately while I’m on longer trips. The tunes just bounce out of the stereo and are the definition of easy road-trip listening. One song, in particular, that I’ll never skip: Rapid Roy (The Stock Car Boy). You can just picture rough and tumble Roy, blasting around local dirt tracks, cleaning out the competitors for prize money. Can’t beat it!

“But every Sunday afternoon he is a dirt-track demon in his ’57 Chevrolet!” — Nate Petroelje

Sergeant O’Leary’s Cadillac-ack-ack-ack

Bit obscure, but the mention of Chevy and Cadillac in Billy Joel’s “Movin’ Out”:

Sergeant O’Leary is walkin’ the beat
At night he becomes a bartender
He works at Mister Cacciatore’s down
On Sullivan Street
Across from the medical center
He’s tradin’ in his Chevy for a Cadillac (ack, ack, ack, ack, ack)
You oughta know by now
And if he can’t drive
With a broken back
At least he can polish the fenders

I just think it expresses the way cars represent “arriving” in America. Working two jobs so you can upgrade to a Cadillac sums up what that once meant for a whole generation of blue-collar people. Even if he can’t drive, he treasures the symbol of his hard work. That verse hits me every time, and I think a lot of people look at their car or cars and think about the hard work that got them there. — Eric Weiner

Car Songs from the 1960s

I couldn’t get enough of ’60s car songs when I was a kid. For some reason, many of them had “little” in their names: “Hey Little Cobra” by the Rip Chords, “Little GTO” by Ronny & The Daytonas, and “Little Deuce Coupe” by the Beach Boys. Hearing these on the oldies station seared these cars into my impressionable brain every bit as much as when I saw them at weekend car shows.— Eddy Eckart

Daft Punk X Lotus

Not so much a song, but the car/music mashup I remember the most is when, at the 2013 Monaco Grand Prix, Daft Punk sponsored the Lotus F1 team with their name on the car, and donned Lotus racing suits to watch the race. As a big fan of Lotus, Kimi Räikkönen and Daft Punk, it was the perfect mix. — Andrew Newton

Jerry the Race Car Driver and His 4-4-2

This is the anti-barbershop-quartet song about a local racing driver. It’s funky, down-to-earth, and bittersweet. “With a Bocephus sticker on his 442, he’d light ’em up just for fun.” The lyrics are sparse, but enough to give a sense of Jerry’s life. He’s talented, but not enough that it will change anything for him. He “never did win no checkered flag, but never did come in last.” Also, the breakdown that starts about a minute and a half into the song captures the feeling of a mean V-8, so it’s a cool one for that alone. — Alex Sobran

Inception, Mopar-Style

I’m going with the video for Audioslave’s “Show Me How To Live.” It’s a great song on its own, but the video is so much fun because it’s just the band inserting itself into Vanishing Point (1971). Tom Morello is a Mopar fan, so of course they pick one of the most iconic Mopar muscle car chases ever and drive around in a white Challenger. The video relies on a lot of film footage, so know that no E-Types were harmed in the filming of the video. — Brandan Gillogly

Fast, Furious Flame-Thrower

Do fictional mashups count? I’m quite sure that guitars are musical instruments and that this one is mounted to a massive, four-axle rig.

For those who haven’t seen the movie, a bit of background: If you let your brainwashed henchmen have a flamethrowing guitar, he’s gonna want a giant set of speakers to play through, and if you give him a giant set of speakers, he’s gonna want to take them on rampages through the desert with his buddies, which means he needs a custom truck, and probably some backup drummers, too. — Grace Houghton

Continental Tastes

These days I’ve become someone who generally worships studio musicians and the jazz-fusion albums that feature them, so I must go a bit farther back to a music video that both appealed to my personality and my specific taste in cars. Depeche Mode’s “Dream On” had a deeply dark theme with a 1973 Continental Mark IV with animated lights that further enhanced the story. I am not gonna say it made me like Lincolns even more than I already do, but it absolutely ensured I’d go bananas for one particular 1972 Continental Mark IV.

This video and the iconic “Ironic” music video for Alanis Morrisette has the same producer, Stéphane Sednaoui. The Ironic video pre-dates it by five years, but its clear that Stéphane has a thing for 1970s Lincolns. And you didn’t need to see Stéphane on some program on MTV back in the day to know that, but it didn’t hurt since he arrived to a video shoot in the same Mark IV used in the Depeche Mode video.

Yes I know I have a problem, but I am fine with it. — Sajeev Mehta