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Don't worry, friends. That wobbling pile of cassettes that you kicked over while cleaning your bedroom closet, hucked into an IGA bag and emptied into a St. Vincent de Paul receptacle? They're here, sitting lumpen in a shopping bag in the passenger seat of my 1991 Ford Grand Marquis, which is throttling eastward down Highway 1, bound for a summer wedding in Woody Point, Nfld.

Everyone needs travelling music and this is mine: 80 cassettes, including 53 purchased en masse for three dollars a shot at Brian's Record Option in Kingston, Ont., a skunky, redoubtable music depot shaggy with CDs, books and albums, but, best of all, tapes. Cassettes are the cockroaches of the musical world. You can crush them under floor mats and bury them under seat cushions, but still they cannot be destroyed. Were these long players digitally plattered, they would have cost me $860. It would have meant selling off all of my tires and hubcaps and spending my summer months in the heat of the city, which I'm not prepared to do.

Because I'm taking this four-day trip to the East Coast alone, the only voices I'll hear will have been squeezed onto thimbles of magnetic tape and housed in cheap black and white plastic. If I've learned anything after years touring Canada, it's that a font of travelling music can make the grind of Winnipeg-Regina or Halifax-Sydney feel easy and transient. For me, Led Zeppelin never made sense until I listened to them while thundering into the mountains for the first time in 1987. And records of loss and detachment – Closing Time and King of America; even the Barry Sisters – never sounded right until I was lost and detached from home. Now, as I pull out of Toronto and sink my hand into the bag, I hope that other records like these will be yielded.

My hand finds Damn the Torpedoes first, then They Might be Giants' Flood, then Meat is Murder (which I quickly expunge), then, as I drive past a huge Prince Edward County billboard of a young maiden cradling a basket of fruit, Nirvana's From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah. The tape ends as I pull into the ferry dock for a stopover on Wolfe Island. Kurt stops screaming and the drinking starts.

Later, under the summer moon, I meet up with friends and we drive around the reedy marshland of Brophy's Point listening to Black Uhuru's Red, then some Cheech and Chong. Then, as we stop at my friend's hunting club, John Prine's Jesus: The Missing Years whirs in the cassette player as my head fades to sleep.

The following day begins with Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline. It rains during Side 1, then the sun cracks through the sky with Side 2. As I wheel past Cornwall, Ont., toward Quebec, I'm reminded that listening to music in the sanctity of one's sedan is to be chambered away with it; cocooned against the grrrr of fellow motorists and the jackhammer parade of work crews.

Through Dylan, The Best of Asleep at the Wheel, and a Byrds collection with the picture of a jukebox on the cover, I hear things in the music that I haven't heard before: The way the tape echo hits Dylan's voice in Girl From the North Country; Lucky Ocean's pedal steel padding in Miles of Texas; and the delinquent rhythm guitar that plays behind Roger McGuinn's 12-string at the beginning of Eight Miles High. I become so drawn inside the music that I forget to notice that I've taken the wrong highway into Quebec.

While listening to Beck's Mellow Gold, I grind through Montreal's narrow overpass tangle. Seeking something more tranquil and reassuring, I push an Atlantic Rhythm and Blues collection – Roberta Flack, Donnie Hathaway, Aretha Franklin's Rock Steady – into the tape deck. This guides me through the city's traffic snarl until I am released along Highway 40 toward Quebec City listening to Eddie Van Halen's guitar solo in Beat It. Michael Jackson gives way to Hot Chocolate, who give way to Kraftwerk's Trans Europe Express, its electronic machine works thrumming perfectly to the engine's grinding beat. Propelled by the song's deep motoring trance, I flatten the accelerator. To other drivers, I must look like I'm having an impossibly good time.

I spend the night in Rivière-du-Loup, Que. The town's name suits the cafés, ice-cream shops and winding LaFontaine Boulevard, but I prefer the English translation: Wolf River. It makes stopping there seem wilder and more compelling, even though my only feral moment came while trying to order a ham and cheese sandwich in French at a local bakery.

Latte'd and baguette'd at mid-morning, I head toward Edmundston, N.B. The first tape of my drive is Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub which I never would have discovered if it weren't for the devalued cassette. Even though digital music is ubiquitous and cheap, cassettes enslave the listener to an album rather than facilitate easy track-jumping. Since my tape deck has no song-finding toggle, I listen to Gilberto Gil's first record and Robyn Hitchcock's Eye front to back, then spend 50 minutes with an album I'd forgotten about – Little Criminals by Randy Newman – which spirits me through the light Maritime rain toward Fredericton.

Many travellers grouse about New Brunswick's geographic sameness and the numbing condition it imposes upon drivers. But the drive isn't so numbing as it is comforting in its endless pattern of dark forests and historical rivers. My hand plunges into the tape bag searching for something traditional to match what I'm seeing through my windshield. I pull out, in succession, Flatt and Scrugg's On Foggy Mountain, Pat Temple and the High Lonesome Players' Stone Boat, some Nina Simone and Ladies of the Canyon. Then, as the road turns from black and grey to a deep radiant pink on the highway to Moncton, I slide Rust Never Sleeps into the machine, its songs of ghostly thrashers and wandering nomads sitting close to my ear. An asphalt highway bending. Trying to catch an hour on the s un… Through the weight of Neil Young's epic transcontinental road essay, the steeples of Sackville reveal themselves down Exit 504.

My ears are ringing as I fall asleep, my tinnitus goosed from two days of records unthinkingly reefed to the limit. After an evening at the Marshlands Inn in Sackville – which proved to be fine, comfortable and colonial, even though a scary antique doll watched me from the nightstand – I'm carried into the teeming forests of Nova Scotia listening to The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, its African guitars and keening violins and thwomping hand drums colouring the muted grey-blue of the day. The African voices are wild and strange, but their exoticism matches the unfamiliarity of the towns that stream past me: Lochaber, Mabou, Monastery, Earltown, Folly Lake, Tatamagouche.

Soweto gives way to New York City: Talking Heads' More Songs About Buildings and Food followed by Remain in Light. You may find yourself at the wheel of a large automobile… After taking three listens to absorb Warren Zevon's Excitable Boy, I cross Cape Breton Island as Gord Downie sings about shipwrecks and rocky sockets while my dirty-grilled metal beast coasts into the ferry dock, waiting to be shipped across the water to Port aux Basques, Nfld.

It's 6 in the morning as I head north toward Gros Morne National Park, sleepless after an evening twisting in a vinyl ferry recliner. Western Newfoundland reminds me of West Africa: wild, untamed, overgrown. The sky is spitting rain to the songs of Gordon Lightfoot. The sun finally peers through the clouds, then retreats, then, a few hours later, soaks Corner Brook and Deer Lake as I enter the park with Rocket From the Crypt's Scream Dracula Scream slashing and pounding to produce a kind of madness that matches the park's roaring glacial crust.

The record ends as my car rises and falls with the road, carrying me past Birchy Head and Glenburnie to Woody Point, the glimmer of Bonne Bay and its embarrassment of whales shimmering in the morning light. I reach into the tape bag for something to accompany my last few moments on the road, but my arm returns to the steering wheel. Some parts of a journey are best left soundless.

Dave Bidini is a founding member of the band Rheostatics. His books include The Five Hole Stories, On A Cold Road, and the upcoming Around the World in Fifty-Seven and a Half Gigs, to be published in October.