I’ve spent much of the past week and a half stuck in much-worse-than-usual traffic, and thinking about Kevin Fanning’s pitch-perfect meditation on commuting: How the Dead Live. “Thinking about the clock of my life ticking away every day while I’m sitting there, just waiting to be somewhere else, I feel the gulf between my body (where I am) and brain (where I want to be) widening,” Fanning writes. “The two growing further apart, until I’m only aware of the distance between them.”

The culprit is two major music festivals taking place a week apart, both in their own way celebrating country, folk, and Americana. While my body is sitting in a line of cars through green light after green light, my brain wouldn’t mind taking a few days off work to catch some shows. This week, stories about roots music, ready to read here on TMN or in an e-book you can export to your Kindle, iPad, iPhone, etc.