Song of the Day 6/24: Tom Cochrane, “Life Is a Highway”

In honor of the Senate’s infrastructure deal, which apparently will be confined to not much more than highways.

This one pops up all the time on classic rock radio, and to be honest I never knew when it was released. I don’t recall it ever being a new song — it just started showing up in 40-minute rock blocks as if it had always been there. It sounds like arena rock circa 1980, but it was actually released in 1991 by a guy who’s famous in Canada — he’s been given every imaginable award, including Canada’s version of a knighthood — but, outside of this song, hardly known in the U.S.

Cochrane gained attention fronting the Canadian band Red Rider (I had never heard of them, either) who hit the Canadian charts many times in the ’80s. Their music sounds a lot like Bryan Adams’, and I guess one anodyne Canuck rocker was enough for the States, because Red Rider never broke into the American charts. Cochrane went solo in 1991 with this song, the first single from his “Mad, Mad World” LP. It reached No. 6 on the Hot 100.

“When I wrote that song after my first trip to Africa, which was just mind-bending and soul-sapping, I was mentally, physically and spiritually exhausted and I really needed something to pull me out of this funk,” Cochrane has said. “I had this sketch that I had written and I ended up going into the studio and recorded it in an hour at seven in the morning. The irony is that it was the most positive song I’d ever written, coming out of a pretty heavy experience. I needed a pep talk, and it became that for me and for millions of others.”

The video was filmed in the Badlands of Alberta, Canada, along Red Deer River, near Calgary. Except for Cochrane and the couple in the car (a 1965 Chevy Impala Super Sport, BTW) all the people in the video are members of a community of Hutterites who live in the area — unusual because, like other Anabaptist sects, they generally object to appearing in photos or on video.

When Pixar made the movie “Cars” in 2005 they asked country-pop trio Rascal Flatts to record a cover. Their version almost matched Cochrane’s — it reached No. 7 on the Hot 100 and No. 18 on the country charts — and drives home the fact that 21st-century “country” is yesteryear’s rock.