About Life Is a Highway

"Life Is a Highway" is a song by Tom Cochrane from his second studio album, Mad Mad World (1991). The song became a number-one hit in Cochrane's native Canada in late 1991. "Life Is a Highway" also peaked at number six on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart in August 1992 and reached the top three in Australia and New Zealand that same year. The song was covered by Chris LeDoux for his 1998 album One Road Man and Rascal Flatts for the Cars soundtrack.

Cochrane has stated that "Life Is a Highway" was originally conceived in the 1980s as "Love is a Highway" while he was still a member of Red Rider, but was shelved at that time because he felt the unfinished song was unusable. Following a trip with his family to Eastern Africa with the World Vision famine relief organization, Cochrane revisited the song on the advice of his friend John Webster, an instrumentalist on the Mad Mad World album. In a 2017 interview with The Canadian Press to mark the song's 25th anniversary, Cochrane said Webster encouraged him to revisit the demo recording, which at that point only had mumbled vocals and improvised lyrics, but not the song's well-known chorus. "(The song) became a pep talk to myself... saying you can’t really control all of this stuff, you just do the best you can," he says. Cochrane says he was trying to make sense of the poverty he witnessed on his trip, which he found "shocking and traumatic".