In 1976, while driving on Interstate 80 from Salt Lake City to New York, Nancy Holt recorded the audio work U.S. 80 SOLO, having just completed Sun Tunnels (1973-76). I-80 is the second-longest interstate highway in the US, spanning the entire country from west to east, beginning in San Francisco, California, and ending in Teaneck, New Jersey. At the time, the presence of recently constructed interstate highways (the result of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956) and an increasingly car-centered population made long-distance journeys to destinations around the country more common.

In a steady, progressive narration, Holt recorded on a portable tape-recorder her impressions of the towns and sites that appear as her car rolls along the highway, her voice punctuated by radio talk shows and music. She does not emphasize special destinations or major events, but rather the linear, cinematic unfolding of time as the car glides through space. The work captures the unique mental and physical space of being in a car alone and the ever-in-betweenness of the mind as it identifies, free-associates, and meanders through its own thoughts. 

In 1979, the Nebraska part was broadcast on the radio by Fine Art Broadcast Service for A Space, Toronto, as part of the series Radio by Artists curated by artist/producer Ian Murray, with the title U.S. 80 SOLO: Nebraska. Recently this section has been exhibited in Sound as Sculpture at The Warehouse, Dallas on the radio and in Nancy Holt: Light and Shadow Poetics at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles.