100 favourite songs: #93: "Wide Open Road" - The Triffids

Hauntingly simple in its sparse use of keyboards, clean, ringing guitars, and just the one, repeated drum fill, it has an epic majesty which is entirely suited to the semi-mythical Australia of The Triffids’ vision; no other song has so perfectly captured the sense of vast, uncharted expanses which characterises the Australia of our collective imagination. - 8/9/02

I’ve been pretty into the Triffids at various time in the past, and there are still some days when I think that Born Sandy Devotional is probably the best Australian album I know. Their palette is broad, but “Wide Open Road” is the one that everyone knows, and with good reason — it’s a genuine nation-defining anthem, resonant and powerful in its simplicity. Songwriter David McComb knew how to wield a symbol and a mythology, and the music is fit to match, haunted, spacious and rich without being adorned any more than necessary, and the result is something at once distinctively Australian and unquestionably universal.