RevZilla's "Two Wheels Together" Spotify playlist to amplify your ride

Before I joined RevZilla, I worked in music marketing and radio promotion in Nashville. I played guitar in a wide variety of bands, ranging from punk rock to classic country. For years in my house, we didn’t watch TV, but rather we would listen to music in a way that most people engage with television. The record player was the center point of the living room.

But for all of my love of music, it was something that, until recently, I never brought along on my motorcycle adventures.

Let me clarify that.

I didn’t have a comm system installed in my personal helmet until a few years ago and I’ve never used ear buds. Rather, I would just sing to myself in my helmet. I knew songs like Hal Ketchum’s “Small Town Saturday Night” and Jason Isbell’s “Outfit” by heart and would sing the lyrics over and over again while pounding out rhythms on my Bonneville’s tank. It’s how I passed the miles on those crazy cross-country rides I like to tell stories about on Highside/Lowside.

And for a last resort, there is always, “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” That’s my go-to song when the road gets long and I need something ridiculous to keep myself alert.

But over the past few years, with the advent of Spotify on my smartphone, I’ve started incorporating music, via a comm system, into my street rides (I still don’t really listen to music off-road, too many important sounds you could miss). And it’s changed the way I approach riding, for the better.

Slogging down long highway miles to get to the good riding was never fun, but rather a necessary evil to get to the roads we want to carve. But with music, those longer highway treks are much more enjoyable, at least for me. I find myself dancing around on the bike, goofing off, and having fun. It helps to melt the miles away.

Then, back in 2020, I wrote an article asking all of you, our Common Tread readers, for your favorite songs. The goal was to build out a playlist of our shared favorite songs so we could enjoy old favorites and discover new ones!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Spurgeon Dunbar (@spurgdunbar)

The comments section blew up in a way that I wasn’t expecting. All of you had so many ideas and suggestions that it was hard to absorb. Then there were the direct messages I got on Instagram. It was… impressive.

As a result, we began a serialized "Two Wheels Together" playlist on RevZilla’s Spotify channel. A collection of your favorites as well as recommendations from fellow RevZilla staffers. And it’s not even begun to scratch the surface of everyone’s suggestions from that first article.

While Two Wheels Together Volume 001 was a bit of a hurried release, I think Volume 002 and the all-new Volume 003 have a bit more of a natural flow and cultivated feel. I did my best to go in and try and smooth out genre changes and song selection so there is a progression in vibe that makes sense. And if something doesn’t work for you, you can always skip it and move on.

As discussed in the first article, these aren’t necessarily songs about motorcycling, but rather songs that are fun to listen to while riding. Having been able to give them a few spins while riding, I’m pretty happy with how these have evolved. They’re a good mix of genres as well as new releases and classic favorites.

But like everything we do at Common Tread and RevZilla, we are constantly evolving in an effort to improve. So please make sure to let me know what we could do better for Volume 004. What songs did we miss? What genres aren’t represented? What piece of the flow feels too abrupt?

In the meantime, I hope you get a kick out of these tunes the same way I do. Put on your helmet, crank up the music, and get out there and ride.