Music for the train

Trains are different from cars. The motion is gentler. The headphones are on. There are people in the next seat who don't want to hear what you're hearing.

Short hops don't need a brief. Anything works for twenty minutes. The interesting question is long trains — two hours, four hours, a country away — where you're going to be in the same seat with the same music longer than most albums.

Same rules as a long drive, except you can read, which changes things. If a book is open, the reading playlist is right; quiet, no lyrics, no structure pulling at you. If it's closed, lo-fi or focus, depending on whether the window is doing anything interesting.

Volume matters more on a train than anywhere else. Even sealed headphones leak. The other passengers aren't a brief, but they're a constraint, and a constraint affects taste.