Here's What A Road Trip With Ina Garten Would Sound Like
Imagine you could go back in time to the early 1970s — a simpler time, really, when climate change was just a gleam in some scientists' eyes, the U.S. president was brazenly breaking the law, and the biggest worry in a young man's life was being drafted into a war in the jungles of Vietnam.
OK, so maybe the early 1970s weren't a paradise. By then, they'd already "paved paradise, put up a parking lot" — to hear Joni Mitchell tell it. Thanks to celebrity chef Ina Garten, you can hear Mitchell sing her well-known environmentalist anthem on a new playlist the author of the "Barefoot Contessa" cookbooks has created on Apple Music, Spotify, and Pandora (via Twitter). The playlist is called "Road Trip!", and the music reminds Garten of the four-month camping trip Ina and husband Jeffrey Garten took in the early 1970s. The music on the playlist will transport you to that era, too.
Garten has five playlists on Spotify now, and you'll find all of them to be filled with light, mostly happy, mostly old-timey music (if you consider the 1960s and '70s to be the old times). Garten has some Taylor Swift sprinkled into her playlists, probably because she and the Grammy-winning artist from a later generation are friends (via People).
Ina Garten's road trip playlist includes breezy songs and poignant ballads
Ina Garten's "Road Trip!" playlist sticks to the theme of that long-ago camping trip with husband Jeffrey. All of the songs were recorded before Taylor Swift was born, even 1989's "Free Fallin'" by Tom Petty, which snuck in there somehow. There's also "Take It Easy" by the Eagles, "Mrs. Robinson" by Simon & Garfunkel, and "Imagine" by John Lennon. And while "Imagine" is considered a protest anthem, as is Mitchell's "paved paradise" song (it's actually called "Big Yellow Taxi"), Garten isn't getting political with her playlist. For the most part, the songs are either light and literally breezy, like "Summer Breeze" by Seals and Crofts, or they tell a poignant story, like "Cat's in the Cradle" by Harry Chapin.
Garten raised eyebrows in 2018 when she was asked what she would serve world leaders (via Eater). Biden would get "something fun, like a lobster and clambake," while Trump would get "a subpoena." Maybe the joke was too good to pass up in front of a live audience at the 92nd Street Y in New York. In an interview with HuffPost published just a few days before her 92nd Street Y appearance, Garten said, as someone who cooks and entertains, she avoids discussing politics. "I don't know if people know what my political beliefs are or not, but I just think it's kind of like people's diets," she said. "You worry about your diet, and I'll worry about mine."