“Roadrunner” by The Modern Lovers

"Roadrunner" is Jonathan Richman's hymn to driving, which he has described as a love song to Massachusetts Route 128, and the Modern Lovers' version on their self-titled album is the one with John Cale in the producer's chair. Richman had written it by 1970, when he was 19 and already playing it in public, and he borrowed its shape from the Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray", a band he'd seen over and over as a teenager.

It runs on little more than D and A, the same insistent, throbbing pulse as the Velvets, with Richman riffing on the theme like a kid with the radio up and the night wide open, Jerry Harrison's organ humming, Ernie Brooks and David Robinson hammering away. Greil Marcus called it "the most obvious song in the world, and the strangest", and Rolling Stone ranked it 77th among the greatest songs of all time in 2021.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.