Katmandu

Pure high-octane escapism, and Seger wears it unabashedly — this is the most gleefully unserious entry in his catalog and all the better for it. The track moves with a buoyancy that the weightier songs don't allow, the band playing with a looseness that sounds genuinely fun to play, the organ comping cheerfully over a shuffle beat that practically demands physical movement. Seger's voice shifts here too — less weighted, more playful, delivering the lyrics about fantasizing an escape to Katmandu with a grin you can practically hear. The song belongs to a particular American tradition of the road as pure freedom rather than burden, the fantasy of just leaving — not from anything specific but toward something undefined and exotic. Katmandu is less a real place than a state of mind, a projection screen for all the itches ordinary life can't scratch. The guitar solo has a rawness and directness that cuts through any irony — it means it, even as the whole enterprise acknowledges the daydream quality of the premise. This is a song for rolling down the highway at speed with nothing urgent on your agenda, or for midweek when the office walls are pressing in — it provides two minutes of believing you could just go, which is sometimes exactly the amount of escape you need.