This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

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• 6 min read •

Mom was always humming and bustling when we were growing up. Snippets of “Morning Has Broken” while chopping turnips, stuff like that, with random la-la-la’s in place of the lyrics. I ended up associating many folk tunes with house chores because of this. I think it’s also why it took me so long to realize that I had indeed heard many Taiwanese and Mandarin pop songs before — just many of them wordless and in the form of my mother doing laundry.

I was much more mentally open to receiving these hums as a child, but growing older and deciding to go to music school also meant being hellbent on listening to as much flute and classical music as possible. I had to listen to learn my pieces and play them well, but for some reason it was a zero-sum issue in my head, as if time spent listening to anything else would impede my musical growth. It was about the music, but it was also a bit about being the best in those days.

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So, when I inevitably burnt out the autumn after college graduation, I started trying to breathe again with my heart instead of only my diaphragm. This also happened to be 2019, which is how I ended up focusing on relearning Mandarin and rediscovering T- and Mandopop during lockdown rather than remaining fixated on classical music.

Being curious and wanting to connect to Taiwan in some way, I enrolled in an online class through the Taiwanese government’s Overseas Community Affairs Council. One day my teacher happened to mention Teresa Teng, one of the most famous East Asian pop stars of the 20th century, and after class I felt a pull to track down her top hits.

As soon as I heard the first fifteen seconds of “Yue liang dai biao wo de xin” (月亮代表我的心 or “The Moon Represents My Heart”), something twisted inside me and tears sprang to my eyes. Holy crap, yeah — I had heard this before. I felt like I was seven years old in my parents’ kitchen again, Mom in my periphery sporting her tiny red apron and stirring a pot of good-smelling stuff while singing random syllables — dee dahh doh dohh, doo dooo dah dehhh — the melody of a gooey Taiwanese love song. It had been the soundtrack to my childhood, and I had had no idea. And chances are, if you’ve attended any Taiwanese or Chinese house parties or events, you’ve likely heard Teresa Teng’s angelic croon floating underneath the chatter.

⁂

A year later, my mom called me in the night. My waipo, my Chinese grandmother, had died of Covid in a hospital bed in Taipei. She had died alone. We decided that we would leave for Taiwan in five days.

I made my way to Jersey. Mom kept it inside but I could tell she was processing a million complicated feelings. Who wouldn’t be, losing a parent across the world? She had just spent the last three years returning to Taiwan for months at a time to help care for her mother, splitting the time up with her three older sisters. Waipo had been in her nineties, exact age unknown. She’d been sick for a long time, and by the end, she hadn’t known who any of us were — even her four daughters.

And so my mom, my sister, and I flew to Taipei. We stayed with my aunts and uncles in the small family apartment in the district of Neihu. The hospital-style rolling bed that my grandmother had spent most of her last years on was still there. We all tried to ignore it.

One of the mornings before the service, Mom and I were taking an early stroll around the nearby Lake Bihu. We fell into the kind of comfortable silence that exists between two people dear to each other. Bihu was shining in the sun, its waters brushing up against the raised, latticed white walkways over the lake as we traversed the well-worn path. Out of the blue, I said, “Hey, Mom, you ever listen to Teresa Teng?”

She looked at me incredulously. “Teresa Teng?” Turning back to the lake, she smiled to herself. “很有名啊！一定聽過了很多次。Hen you ming a! Yi ding ting guo le hen duo ci.” So famous! Listened to her so many times.

I laughed. “So you know that song? ‘Yue liang dai biao wo de xin’?” I paused, embarrassed about being so late to the party. “I kind of just started listening to her.”

She chuckled in her quiet way. “Well, of course!” in English. She started singing, “你問我愛你有多深 ni wen wo ai ni you duo shen…” I joined in unashamedly, butchering half-remembered lyrics: “…我愛你有 wo ai ni you… uh... ji fei…” You ask me how deep my love is… We only managed a couple more lines before we started laughing at ourselves and at each other, eventually wandering back home to Waipo’s tiny apartment.

My mom and Teresa, I learned, had a lot in common. They were both part of a wave of Taiwan-born Chinese, born nine years apart in neighboring counties off the west coast of Taiwan, and they both grew up in military villages in two of many Kuomintang families with several children and little means. Teresa showed talent from a young age and grew up to become one of the most famous Taiwanese singers of the century, recording albums in at least five different languages; yet somehow, with all that worldliness, her sweet and clear voice retains a feeling of intimacy. You feel like she’s singing only to you.

Two days later, we went up into the mountains outside of the city of Taipei and said goodbye to my waipo. I still remember my aunts, uncles, and cousins standing silently in the fog. It was the first time in my adult memory I had seen these strong women cry. My mom burst into tears and then quickly stopped herself. I patted her on the shoulder. The attendants lowered Waipo’s coffin, and then she was gone.

⁂

That was November 2022. When I sat down to begin writing this, I realized that it had been exactly three years since that strange week in Taipei.

I’m still listening to Teresa Teng these days. In fact, I returned to Taipei this past September and chanced upon some new musician friends to busk with. It was the first time I had done such a thing over there. A growth moment.

We set up on the sidewalk. We were riffing on different tunes, throwing out ideas ranging from centuries-old Chinese folk songs to Ed Sheeran (ah, western hegemony). You can probably guess where this is going — at a certain point, Cassie, my friend who plays sheng (an ancient Chinese reed instrument), said, “How about ‘Yue liang’?”

Oh, man. YES. Yes, of course.

Many people see “The Moon Represents My Heart” as a pivotal song of the 20th century because it managed to reach a diverse audience of mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong citizens at the height of political and social tensions, including the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution in China and martial law in Taiwan. Despite government censorship, it is touted as the song that revived pop culture in China after decades of patriotic music broadcasts. Across the strait, and across the sea, many were listening to the same love song.

Sometimes I listen and imagine Mom, fifteen in Taipei, hearing it for the first time on the radio. ◆

About Kathleen

Kathleen Barnes is a musician and visual artist currently living in Brooklyn, New York. She loves to read, eat dessert, climb tall mountains, and see/partake in weird puppet theater.

Instagram @awildkath

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This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

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Edición especial: Today’s essay was originally written in Spanish by José Luis Ruiz and translated to English by Humberto J. Rocha. Scroll down to read in English, or click the button to read in Spanish.

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• 6 min read •

I remember it well, I was barely 13 years old when I was able to save the seven pesos I needed to buy the 45 RPM record, the equivalent to 45 cents today. I ran, literally, to the supermarket known as “Giant,” the first self-service store that opened its doors in Mexico towards the end of the 1970s. Seven pesos was a fortune to me, as it was for most of the kids my age who belonged to the emerging lower-middle urban class. It was Carole King’s record, the one that included “It’s Too Late.” It was the first record that I would gift to a girl in my class, a special someone for whom I first felt something different, indescribable, from the first day that I saw her enter the classroom.

That morning, I can’t remember precisely what day, the teacher introduced her and assigned her a seat in the last row, which, luckily for me, was close by since I sat in the back, where they placed all the incorrigible and none-too-bright students. I was part of that club, despite my mother’s reprimands. Of course, I don’t remember what we talked about that day, or even if we talked, but, just as if it were yesterday, I can’t forget how I blushed at feeling her presence nearby, right next to me.

Naturally, a few days later she was already seated in the first row of our seventh grade class, Group B. She was a good student and, logically, it made sense to separate her from the bad kids in the group, that group of ill repute that I belonged to. Even so, without trying, the flame of empathy started burning between us.

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A few weeks after her arrival, her mother organized a class get-together in the small apartment where her family lived. She had three sisters and one brother, all of them very serious, with baby faces. They wore glasses and were well put together, in stark contrast to me. That day, her father was in charge of the music and his taste was, of course, purely ’70s. It was very clear that he enjoyed ruling over the record player and browsing his record collection, which included many of the singers that I liked listening to at home. His collection contained all types of bands, like Chicago, Blood Sweat & Tears, Steely Dan, Tommy James, Santana, Malo, and Fleetwood Mac, among many others, plus singers like Al Green, Marvin Gaye, James Taylor, Billy Joel, and James Brown.

They were all already in my musical universe, which kept growing thanks to my father’s musical influence, who, at any moment, and mostly when we were with him in the car, would tune into Radio Capital or Radio Mundo, to hear the song of the moment, and the one which he identified with not through its lyrics, which were in English, a language he couldn’t understand, but through its beat and rhythms. “Music is felt, enjoyed,” he’d say to my brothers and me with such frequency that this phrase of his stayed in our memories. Of course, he loved boleros from Mexican composers who took over the world, for example those of Consuelito Velazquez and her song “Besame Mucho” that was translated into various languages and covered by the greats from that era and today. But he also enjoyed TROVA and Cuban sound, from the rhythms of Caribbean music to salsa, as well as Frank Sinatra, Charles Aznavour, Tom Jones, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole, and an endless list of mythical singers from all over the world.

And then there was the day of that kiss, the first kiss, in that class get-together, which was nothing more than the union between her lips and mine, furtively, rushed, by the bathroom door, both of us so excited and nervous. And just at that moment, by complete randomness, her father put on the record with the song “It’s Too Late” by Carole King, whose lyrics I didn’t understand but that united us forever through this immaculate memory. Its significance to us wasn’t that it was “Too Late,” but that it was just the now, the moment, with its implicit message, that of hope.

There’ll be good times again for me and you,

But we just can’t stay together, don’t you feel it too?

Still I’m glad for what we had, and how I once loved you

However I could, I gathered the seven pesos needed to buy the record, the one that she kept safe in her bedroom’s wardrobe, she confessed to me years later. This revelation left me in a divine limbo. I couldn’t believe that something as simple as a 45-cent record could be of such importance to her. Since then, I’ve also appreciated those small details that life occasionally gives you.

I continue to enjoy the music of that time and the memory of that girl who, after some years, I never saw again. Without a doubt, “It’s Too Late” was a watershed in my life, my formation — not only musically, but existentially.

I still remember the cover of the full 1971 album Tapestry, in which Carole King sits at the sill of a grand window inside her Los Angeles home, accompanied by her beloved cat, Telemaco. It’s a record that in time I was able to buy, not because I could, but because of a magnanimous and infinite endearment.

I was born in 1960, the year in which many significant changes began to take form across the world, transformations that are still like lightning today on the horizon, and which profoundly marked me in my coming of age. I’m privileged to be part of a generation that has witnessed such diverse social phenomena, and of the accelerated evolution of technology that in my childhood and teenage years seemed so far away that it was almost utopian.

I followed on TV the landing of a man on the moon in 1969 (there is still the controversy over whether this really happened), in a black and white transmission, and now the journey of Artemis II to our beloved natural satellite, 57 years later. Of course, both of these events continue to amaze me and confirm to me that the human being continues to be an inexhaustible fountain of creativity.

Music is a living example of this, and it’s still there accompanying changes, refreshing the world. In the 1970s, it was Marvin Gaye’s iconic song, “What’s Going On,” that most resounded during those convulsive years. Today, it’s Bad Bunny’s unique phrasing that releases passions in the intrepid era of cultural, political, and social networks.

When I hear music from the 1970s I reflect over its social legacy, in all of its ways, and I don’t think that anyone can scratch that era’s contribution to a neverending form of human expression.

I’ve always felt a sense of loss, and even though I certainly was not conscious of how important it was to have someone by your side, I knew that what this girl and I had made us happy. For me, music became a sort of banner and “It’s Too Late” became a hymn that has accompanied me through time; a hymn that, curiously, I listened to in the solitude of the house following the departure of someone who is still very important in my life.

Today, I still listen to Carole King’s song, along with many others from that great artist, and I still shudder from the memories that it evokes, memories which take me on a journey of illusion and fantasy towards those earlier years that are now so far from my life.

Although it’s true that the lyrics of the song talk about how late it can be to fix something, they’re also a window of opportunity that opens up towards hope. This song will always live within me because I know that it’s never too late for love nor for reconciliation. ◆

Leer en español

About José Luis

José Luis Ruiz lives in Mexico City, where he encounters something new and surprising every day. He is a journalist by training, but above all, by conviction. Communication is now his field of action. He enjoys music, cinema, baseball, and literature. His list of favorite authors is long and varied. He is a wanderer and an avid reader.

X @jlruiz10

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• 3 min read •

When I was twenty, I would leave my apartment at 10:30 p.m. every night to take an hour-long walk around my college campus and through the surrounding neighborhood. Each night, my route would be different, but I had my favorite landmarks to walk by like the rose garden, the church, and the tennis courts where stray cats would sleep. October was the best month to take these walks, followed second by May. In October, nights were cool and damp, and the leaves were starting to turn. In May, you could feel the heat of the day radiating off the pavement and fighting with the cooler night breeze. It had to be late at night because the air was different and fewer people were out, which made me feel like I owned all the roads I was walking on.

These walks gave me a lot of time to listen to music. I credit this period of my life with defining my taste in a way that I doubt I will ever be able to escape. I think my ears are permanently tuned to this time, and it was then that I discovered “2021” by A.G. Cook. I hate to admit it, but my Spotify algorithm made the introduction. I had found a few songs I liked on a playlist, and from there A.G. Cook, her frequent collaborator, was a logical next step.

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Hearing “2021” for the first time was like being shown a photo and not being able to make any sense of what is in it. The song is short and addictive, with layered and simple lyrics, sparkling synths, and a heavy beat. I had never really listened to much electronic music before, so listening to “2021” and truly loving it felt completely new.

What surprised me the most as I listened to the song more and more is how sweet it really is. Despite the big beat and repetitive structure, it makes me feel so light. The vocals feel childish in a nostalgic way, and the melody almost feels like a nursery rhyme. My favorite part is the synths that sound like bells, and are exactly what child me imagined twinkling stars sound like.

I would listen to “2021” on my nightly walks and allow myself to see my life differently. The soft side of the song spoke to my younger self still within me. It reminded me of the sparkly Disney pop songs I would dance to in my bedroom with a fake microphone, pretending I was performing. Remembering my younger self each night brought her to the forefront of my thoughts. Suddenly, I was thinking about her and what she wanted every single day. What would younger me want to wear? What have I never done that she always wanted to do?

My nightly walks became like visits to a psychic. I would set out from my apartment thinking about a decision I needed to make or something that was bothering me, start listening to “2021,” and picture my child self dancing. It was like looking into a crystal ball of my desires, my dreams, and who I wanted to be. Job struggles, housing struggles, friendship and relationship struggles, they all made a little more sense after visiting my younger self each night.

Being twenty, for me, was awkward. I could feel that I was growing out of my child self, while at the same time feeling too young to have a clear sense of direction. But letting my younger self be a cornerstone of building my voice and path was exactly where I needed to start.

I recently stumbled upon a remix of “2021” by the artist umru. This new yet familiar version feels like a gift — a new way of listening to a song I have etched deep into my consciousness.

As the lyrics go, “Everything you do, it’s been done, done, done before. Everything you say, yeah, you said that yesterday.” I take these words to mean that everything in my life, I know the answer to, I just have to listen to myself. I find this beyond comforting. ◆

About Juliane

Juliane Pautrot is a writer and aspiring songwriter living in Brooklyn.

Instagram @juliane.ptrt

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• 4 min read •

Upon my weary heart was showered smiles, plaudits, and flowers. But beyond them, I saw thorns and troubles innumerable.

I’ve come to believe that a work of art finds you when you need it to. Or perhaps, when it needs you. If you’re exceedingly lucky, it stays with you, even returning again. It builds an enduring relevance that only in hindsight feels like foreshadowing. And as in all tragedies, the message is heard too late.

Autumn of 2010. A lonely, booze-soaked, miserable season spent on the rock-ridden beach of the Puget Sound. There, the rain never really stops, so we thought it best to be wet inside and out: another Evan Williams, another Olde English. Sick with problems all of my own making, at my own insistence, while the rain poured, equally persistent and indifferent.

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And the sound of drone, of tape loops, of guitar feedback. Cavernous and opaque. And then a distant voice, fragile as glass on the stone shore.

Nothing means anything, anymore.

That year Titus Andronicus released their sophomore masterpiece: The Monitor, a staggering opus utilizing the imagery and literary thematics of the U.S. Civil War as a prism to refract the eternal problem of having to exist with others. In my opinion, The Last Great American Rock Album.

The narrative (loose as the format requires) follows Our Hero from his desolate home of New Jersey to his search for greener pastures in Boston, Massachusetts. The song, “A Pot In Which To Piss,” begins in a phantom numbness, before crescendoing by way of table-pounding rhythms and blood rousing lamentations, and finds Our Hero face to face with an intractable problem. A nihilism that comes from no longer knowing one’s self, and thus not really being able to know anyone else. I found myself likewise. I am, to quote the Willem Dafoe meme, something of a fucking idiot myself, and with my newly, barely earned high school diploma from a lovely but suffocating small town, thought I’d strike out for a bright future in that pearl of the Pacific Northwest, that bastion of thriving ambition, that hub of fame and fortune: Olympia, Washington.

In “A Pot In Which To Piss,” and really the entire album it belongs to, I’d found the companion I wanted most, a braggadocious drinking buddy and philosopher wrapped into one. Perhaps Our Hero needed me too — to bear witness, to actualize him. We who could recognize the same pain of self-imposed exile. I’d washed up on this cold shore untrusting and unknowing of myself, and so unable to trust or know anyone else. So I drank, I philandered, I treaded water and convinced myself it was momentum. Hearing the strings and crushing guitars, the shredded vocal cords and vivacious piano, I felt as though I could own my loneliness, even be proud of it. In the searing, unflagging rallying cries, I heard what I wanted: hail the victorious wretch.

Let them see you struggle and they’re gonna tear you apart.

Titus Androncius has followed me all over this great land, coast to coast, for 15 years now.

But in a painful irony, I first heard “A Pot In Which To Piss” at the perfect time to drown merrily in its monumental defeatism, and too early to heed its forbearing. It wears the wounds of failure one cannot really know without age, when the tally sheet is longer and you see just how many more losses than wins you’ve booked. My time in Olympia came to a close, but it’d be amateur hour in comparison with fleeing to New York.

This move came in the disguise of a professional advancement, but in reality, I was out of places to go. I’d worn out every relationship I had, whittled them down with my inherent mistrust of anyone close to me. Drinking my weight in whiskey as a fig leaf, hiding myself behind blackouts. So what did I do? More of the same, of course. But this time when it counted, when I had people and opportunities requiring courage and focus, neither of which I’d developed. Thus, the old familiar failures piled up again. Missed shots, humiliations, exile.

In my first rapture with the song, I’d missed the point. It wasn’t about clinging to misery, it was about understanding it. I wouldn’t mistake this again. In the midst of these various indignities, I sobered up, clung to friends who wouldn’t allow my collapse. I married a woman whose effortless grace made me want to be worthy of her presence, let alone her love.

Yet still, I find it painful, excruciating, to know others and be known. Because it requires something I, and Our Hero, seem unable to grant or accept: forgiveness. The notion itself awakens in me a grinding enmity, a bellow from somewhere hollowed out inside screaming “not good enough,” or, to quote from elsewhere in the album, “You will always be a loser.” A faint scream that never leaves.

“A Pot In Which To Piss” asks: when stripped of all dignity, all disguise, what is left of me? Can I allow myself to be known by anyone, one atrocious failure after another? Is there any camaraderie to be found? And it reminds me of the necessity of forgiveness as an end to torment. ◆

About Connor

Connor Zaft is an artist in New York. In the winter, he stagehands around the city. In the summer he fights wildfire in the western states. In between, he writes music and photographs. When he can, he directs plays. You can spy on him via Instagram.

Instagram @cwzaft

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• 4 min read •

The summer before 7th grade, my family moved to a small town in West Virginia. While the towns I had previously lived in were by no means huge cities, they were university towns with a lot going on.

Our new house was half a mile up a hill with 70 feet of vertical gain (in a word, steep) and we were further separated from town by 3 miles on a four-lane highway. I would not be riding my bike to school, nor to the movies, nor to the local pet store to purchase crickets for my pet lizard (RIP Cornelius!) anytime soon. At 13, I found myself with less autonomy than I had at 11. While I think I understood objectively that this was due to the authority of geography rather than societal or parental rules, 13 isn’t a great age to surrender freedom for any reason.

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I was also at an age where you discover that being a smart girl can be a social liability. One of my new friends stole my straight-A report card out of the book where I had stashed it and showed it to everyone, evidence that I thought I was smarter than the rest of them. They all seemed to agree that I was a show-off and a snob, despite the fact that she was the one flashing the report card around while I was clearly trying to grab it back.

After an alienating school year, with hours spent waiting to do anything (for the school bus, for rides from parents to go anywhere or do anything) the summer rolled around and I went back to camp for two weeks. Camp can be a refuge for many kids and I was ready to go. My best friend and I were doing the High Low Adventure program, so in addition to the usual water-based activities, we were doing trips away from the base, for spelunking, rock climbing, and a high-ropes course.

On one trip from the camp, we realized the standard issue big white van didn’t have enough seatbelts for everyone. One camper would need to go with the two other counselors in their personal car, while everyone else rode in the van. The car-driving counselors chose me to tag along. The backseat of the small, ’80s-make Toyota sedan was littered with indie magazines, sketchbooks, and other effects of liberal arts college kids. Not in so many words, the counselors let me know that of all the annoying kids present, I had been selected as least annoying. Specifically, our sole male counselor was also riding in the car and I could be trusted not to be weird about it.

Whatever the reason, I had arrived. Windows down, mix tape on, I listened to them discuss the other counselors and their friends at school — who was dating who, what really happened to the Counselor in Training who was not invited back (failed the lifeguard training). They let it slip that I was not alone in finding a certain fellow camper extremely irritating; I was delighted to learn that my judgement in this was sound. They even laughed at a joke I made.

The tape was like nothing I had ever heard before but I’m sure it was pretty standard ’90s college radio fare. The song that stands out most in memory was “Add it Up” by the Violent Femmes, because of the curse words, obviously. As it suddenly dawned on these 19-year-olds that playing the actual lyrics of the song might get them in trouble with the camp director, they lunged for the volume knob. Not quite in time. Although the song makes it very clear where it’s heading, they didn’t make the connection until the first “screw” of the second verse. Strict vigilance was maintained until the F-bombs stopped dropping in verse three. At the end of the trip, I was sworn to secrecy about what I had heard, both on the tape and in the car.

There were other songs on the tape but “Add it Up” is the one that burned into my memory, with its manic energy, propulsive beats, and of course, forbidden lyrics. The song was a window into a future where I would be interesting, cool enough to hang, where I wouldn’t have to pretend to be someone else in order to make and keep friends. Listening to the song, I felt like these camp counselors saw something in me no one else saw, not other adults, and certainly not my peers in my new hometown. After an incredibly isolating year, this affirmation could not have come at a better time. ◆

About Constance

Constance Brichford is a river guide and freelance copywriter out of Moab, Utah.

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• 4 min read •

Content warning - this post briefly mentions suicidal ideation

There was no greater scam at my high school than being a TA.

For seniors with a free period and no interest in beefing up their college applications with extracurriculars, the school offered the chance to be a teacher’s assistant. The thing is, while public school teachers are wildly overworked and in desperate need of assistance, they’re not looking to get it from the school’s least ambitious 17-year-olds. So a TA’s main job was to sit alone at a computer connected to the internet and not cause trouble.

That’s how I spent every second period of my senior year — sitting in the back of Mr. Neville’s biology class, surrounded by boxes of teaching materials, listening to Pandora Radio on his desktop computer.

At the time, my musical taste was emerging from several years of classic rock — perfunctory to all young white men — and veering hard into the indie rock and indie pop of the day. Arcade Fire. Death Cab for Cutie. Band of Horses. The damn Garden State soundtrack.

Though I wouldn’t say I loved any of it, I certainly liked a lot of it. I was a sensitive kid with inclinations toward hipsterdom. For the moment, I was happily following the herd, trying on new identities, waiting for one to fit.

Then, I heard “Love Love Love” by The Mountain Goats playing from the mediocre computer speakers at the back of Mr. Neville’s classroom.

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My first thought was a slightly incredulous, “What is this?” Maybe it was the metallic clicking of the strummed guitar, louder than the chords themselves. Maybe it was John Darnielle’s reedy voice, trailing off at the end of each verse, like he’s singing to himself in his kitchen. Maybe it was the unabashedly earnest lyrics, riddled with literary references that I felt smarter for understanding — references to Crime and Punishment, which I had read in English class, and the phrase “a mirror dimly,” an oblique reference to a Bible verse that I only knew because of A Scanner Darkly.

Or maybe it was the tone of self-aware self-destruction that I would soon learn pervades so much of The Mountain Goats canon.

It would still be a few years before I contemplated suicide for the first time. A few years before I learned that those extended periods of spiritual numbness I felt had a clinical name. But even at 17, I was subconsciously drawn to whatever it is that John Darnielle taps into with his music. That sense of knowing yourself and feeling betrayed by that knowing. That urge to steer into the skid in the hopes that someone else will grab the wheel, while admitting you’d never let them if they tried. And isn’t the world too good anyway? Too bright and too good.

I felt this song in my chest and in my guts. I wanted more.

In the nascent days of algorithm-driven media curation, Pandora was king. All you had to do was enter the name of a song or artist into its beautifully clunky, mid-2000s interface and in an instant you were delivered a “radio station” populated by similar artists. But unlike the feedback-heavy algorithms of today that let users scroll through long playlists or infinitely swipe their way to a desired output, Pandora users lived behind a veil of ignorance.

All you were given was the name, artist, and album of the song you were currently listening to. Your only manipulative tools were a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” button, and the more powerful “skip,” which you could use three times before it was grayed out. You didn’t know what song was coming next. You weren’t even allowed to go back and relisten to a song you particularly liked.

But in this case, I was determined.

I started a new “Mountain Goats Radio” station and began giving a thumbs down to anything that wasn’t The Mountain Goats. I aggressively used my skips and even tried deleting the cookies off of the web browser to get more skips. Slowly but surely, I bent the simple algorithm to my will, until nearly every song that came up was from John Darnielle’s vast oeuvre, of which I had barely scratched the surface.

The Sunset Tree. Tallahassee. We Shall All Be Healed. All Hail West Texas and a handful of early, lo-fi tapes that had made their way into Pandora’s library. I scrounged, coveted, and devoured it all.

And really, it’s how I found the song that changed me.

In the years that followed, discovering music became my obsession. First through Pandora, later Spotify and other tunable recommendation algorithms. Through blogs and review sites. Through dusty record crates in brick-and-mortar shops. The hunt became the thing.

Not only to indulge that early hipster superiority complex that comes with finding something before your friends. But to uncover those songs that stop me in my tracks. Songs that surprise me and make me ask, “What is this?” Songs that I can feel in my chest and in my guts.

Songs that last forever, and flare out with love, love, love. ◆

About Dan

Dan Neilan is a writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and unbelievably cute daughter — who has single-handedly destroyed his Spotify algorithm.

Website danneilan.com

Instagram @DanfordAndSon

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• 6 min read •

The summer I turned fifteen was a chrysalis.

It was 1992, which was 34 years and an entirely different world ago. It’s difficult to convey now how truly bored you could be as a teenager in a time before smartphones and Google and social media. If you were lucky, you spent your time waiting for something specific to happen, and the rest of the time you were waiting for just anything to happen. No quick answers or instantaneous communication. There was plenty of time to wonder and ruminate, and while that sounds like a luxury now, at 15 it could feel like a prison. I spent most nights that summer lying on my bed, my portable stereo next to my head, defacing a Lands’ End catalog that came in the mail with a ballpoint pen while listening to the radio.

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In 1992, all I had was the radio, and songs taped off the radio. I owned some cassettes and cassingles, but it wouldn’t be until the end of the summer that I would save up enough money working at the neighborhood pool to buy myself a CD player, a 5-disc player that I couldn’t afford to fill with 5 discs until that Christmas. Until then, it was me and the radio, and even that wasn’t satisfying. I would constantly scroll up and down the airwaves, from the ’50s/’60s oldies station my mom liked to the ’70s rock station my dad played in the car to the top 40 pop hits station I had outgrown two summers before, none of it scratching my itch. Until late one night, when my scroll caught a few notes of a song that was totally foreign to me, from a new college radio show that only transmitted between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m., and sometimes only came in clear if I physically kept my finger on the dial.

The fact that I had found a local station that played these unfamiliar but obviously cool songs blew the doors clean off my brain. I started staying up even later just to capture these precious, strange songs on my blank tape. Some nights I couldn’t hack it and would just put the tape in, press record, and fall asleep, then wake up like Christmas morning to sift through any new treasures I’d caught. And the brightest treasure in my net that summer was Tori Amos singing “Silent All These Years.”

Excuse me but can I be you for a while?

My dog won’t bite if you sit real still

I got the Antichrist in the kitchen yellin’ at me again

Yeah, I can hear that

I was aware of alternative music before this, mostly from movie soundtracks or other people’s older siblings, but I had no idea how to source it on my own. And even then, I was only aware of the Pixies, or the Smiths, or the Violent Femmes; cool weird dudes singing cool weird things. But to hear a cool weird GIRL singing cool weird things made me sit up straight and shoot light straight from my fingertips. Who WAS this and how could I somehow consume her?

I bought Little Earthquakes from Musicland on my next trip to the mall. I played that tape until I knew every single word, every single pause. I would play it while watching myself sing along in the mirror. I was hard at work remaking myself in this image — not exactly the image of Tori Amos, but the idea of Different. Tori Amos’s voice saying ‘Cause what if I’m a mermaid/In these jeans of his/With her name still on it? was a key that turned in my brain and unlocked the idea of If You Don’t Have to Listen to Top 40 Radio, What Else Do You Not Have to Do?

The answer, to 15-year-old me, was as basic as, “What if instead of getting jeans from the Gap, I bought… Levi’s?!” But in early-90s Tulsa, Oklahoma, this felt revelatory. I felt freed from trying to force myself into so many cookie-cutter situations. I could try to be weird and cool instead of trying unsuccessfully to be cute and popular! I could like what I liked and stop trying to please everyone! Yes, I probably would have come to this conclusion eventually on my own or by some other trigger, because that’s what adolescence is, but what a heady treat to come about it this way. I consumed Little Earthquakes and I became insufferable.

I started drawing an intricate yin-yang/sunburst tattoo on my ankle every morning with my mother’s brown Almay liquid eyeliner. I quit hanging out with some of my friends because they seemed way too normal to the new, alternative me. Instead, I would take my stereo down to the front porch in the evenings, where I would read Tom Robbins novels while hoping the older, private school kids down the block might notice me. (They did invite me to drink a can of Coors Light with them on the Fourth of July, but it was not the cultured hang I’d envisioned.)

I got in big trouble for writing the lyrics to Led Zeppelin’s “Hey Hey What Can I Do” on our foyer wall while it was stripped of wallpaper before being painted. (“I got a woman wanna BALL ALL DAY?!” my mother’s eyes bugging larger with every word.) I got grounded when, after my mother said there was no way in hell I could have dreadlocks, I decided to just stop brushing my hair for a week. This festered into a Sunday morning pre-church fight where I yelled the word “fuck” and my little brother cried. I had never felt so alive.

I did all these things through Tori who empowered me, until the day I flew too close to the sun. At my job at the pool concession stand, I had a very un-alternative crush on a blond lifeguard that predated my Tori renaissance and was proving hard to shake. Because I still had no idea how human beings signaled feelings, I decided the best way to woo him would be to causally leave Tori Amos lyrics and my yin-yang tattoo design all over the pool office — on the whiteboard, on our timecard station, on my concession stand receipt notepad. And it worked: it definitely got his attention. Only my still-forming brain didn’t clock the actual meaning of the lyrics

So you found a girl

Who thinks really deep thoughts

What’s so amazing about really deep thoughts?

Boy, you best pray that I bleed real soon

How’s that thought for you?

until the moment I watched this boy read them. He raised his eyebrows, crushed his paper snow-cone cup into the trash, and never looked at me again.

School started, and the hand-frayed hem of my Levi’s didn’t make quite the splash I’d expected, but I felt more at peace knowing I now had the fortitude to like what I liked. I bought Under the Pink and Boys for Pele, but they never hit the same as Little Earthquakes.

I saw Tori perform live when I was in college, and I remember feeling annoyed by the presence of her glittery, fairy-winged fan base — I would have preferred Tori sing directly to me in a dark theater, the way she felt in my brain back in 1992. It was a whole room full of sweet weirdos, each one of us certain that we were secretly the weirdest.

I’m so thankful to have found “Silent All These Years.” As much as the lyrics spoke to me, I needed the feeling of discovering it all by myself, not from a movie or a friend, but on my own late-night journey across the radio waves, alone in my dark teenage bedroom. Tori Amos’s croons and howls were the primordial goo my personality started blooming in. Her cool weirdness emboldened my not-cool weirdness long enough for me to learn to rein it in a little, and realize you could wear whatever jeans you wanted so long as you’d found the right song to sing in your head. ◆

About Sarah

Sarah Brown used to document her life online, back when the internet was still one cooling, giant continent full of oversharing weirdos, and it didn’t matter yet what anyone’s kitchen looked like. She now lives a more private existence but writes about fancy candles and lip balm on her Instagram account, @affluentdetritus.

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Millie De Chirico (No. 098)

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• 4 min read •

In 1987, I was a bookish but irreverent high school senior in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with predictable music tastes: the Beatles; college rock; some jazz and classical. This being the peak of “new age” music, Michael Hedges and George Winston also made the mix, and one day, I bought a record that looked to come from that soothing realm: Rounder’s New Acoustic Music Sampler. The tracks were indeed acoustic, but earthier than the Windham Hill stuff — less candlelight; more campfire. My favorite, the burbling “Intro,” came from 1982’s Fluxedo, by dobroist Jerry Douglas.

At college that fall, on my maiden pilgrimage to Philadelphia’s Tower Records (a total wonderland — it had a freaking escalator), I found Fluxedo. I loved it, and while I still mostly listened to the Feelies, New Order, Replacements, etc., I kept exploring Douglas’s catalog. His new album, Changing Channels, was gauzy and boring. But 1979’s Fluxology had the refined twang of Fluxedo alongside bluegrass standards like “Wheel Hoss.” It burbled, but it also ripped.

After graduation, I moved back to Winston. I fell in love and got my heart broken, badly. I felt dissolved, nullified — I couldn’t compute, could barely speak.

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One late winter day, a letter came from a college friend, written on the back of a flyer for the Merle Watson Memorial Festival, happening in Wilkesboro, just an hour up the road. Amid the sprawling lineup, he had circled one name: Jerry Douglas. Three-day student tickets were $18, so I xeroxed my ID and sent a check for $36, and on the last weekend in April 1992, my high school buddy Andrew and I headed to Wilkesboro.

Douglas’s set was sweet indeed, but just a morsel within a weekend-long feast of mind-blowing chops, impossibly tight vocal harmonies, and sheer exuberance. No mumbling slackers disavowing their entertainer status; uncomplicated, unabashed entertainment was the point. Riders in the Sky’s corny-clever cowboy schtick included fucking lasso tricks.

Imbuing everything was host Doc Watson, manifesting kindly country cool, albeit with a poignant cast, having lost Merle, his musical partner and son, just seven years earlier. Watson, blind since childhood, was led onstage over and over to sit in with Ricky Skaggs or Peter Rowan, or to play a set of his own — cuing solos with a quick “Pick it, Ricky!” “Tell ‘em about it, Jack!” And whenever he said “Lemme get one,” he tore it up.

The crowd utterly adored Doc. I adored Doc. And I adored the crowd — everyone radiated pure pleasure, and the joy was infectious. When virtuosic freak Mark O’Connor steered a solo fiddle piece into a blazing cyclical riff resembling Terry Riley, the guy in front of Andrew and me leaned towards his friend and drawled, “Bill, I think we lost ‘im.” We cracked up, and he turned, grinning, pleased as punch. While the audience was as racially homogeneous as you might suspect, a palpable kinship united good ol’ boys and soccer moms, barefoot farm kids and barefoot preppy-hippies — NASCAR and NARAL, living in harmony.

The communal ethos extended to practical matters: when the gates opened each morning, folks spread out their blankets and camp chairs in front of the stage. But it was understood that when they broke to have lunch or wade in the nearby creek, you could borrow their spot, even sit in their chairs, until they returned. Andrew and I perched a lot that weekend, and on Sunday afternoon, as the crowd started heading home for good, we moved way up front, sitting next to a couple young dudes who had driven from Canada — from, like, Manitoba. This wasn’t their first fest, and while I was excited about the band setting up — which included Tony Rice, Bela Fleck, Sam Bush, Mark O’Connor, Jerry Douglas, and Mark Schatz, all of whom I knew from the Rounder compilation — they were ecstatic, immediately yelling “‘Whitewater’! Play ‘Whitewater’!” explaining that it was a ripper off Fleck’s album Drive that featured most of the players onstage. We watched in wonder as these six wizards took turns picking songs and singing lead, playing 100% off the dome at 100 miles an hour. About three tunes in, Tony Rice pointed at the crowd and said “Somebody out there yelled ‘Whitewater.’” And they destroyed it. Holy sheep shit.

I felt transformed by the festival — by the music, yes, but even more by the sense of communion, of a great society. I didn’t give up the Velvet Underground, but for the next five years, I went deep into bluegrass history, hosted a bluegrass radio show, hit more festivals. Bluegrass fans talk about their conversion experiences, and the 1992 Merle Watson Memorial Festival was undoubtedly mine, born of a seed planted five years earlier, a song with a prophetic title. ◆

Postscript: The videos are available by pure serendipity; North Carolina Public Television had filmed the festival, subsequently airing a series of performances and eventually compiling a two-hour movie called Pickin’ for Merle.

About Nick

Nick Rubin lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. He runs a tutoring company; co-hosts a community radio show; plays music; and wages war with creeping Charlie and Japanese stiltgrass.

Instagram, X, Bsky @nickvrubin

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Shawna Pochan (No. 110)

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• 4 min read •

Content warning - this post briefly mentions self-harm

I was 12 years old when I first heard this song on TV. The music video was the last one to play on a music video show I watched at the time (the channel was some offshoot of Fuse that DirecTV offered back then, and for the life of me I can’t find evidence of its existence). I remember the fascination I felt when watching. The fantastical elements and 2D animation caught my eye, as well as ratty-looking Bert McCracken singing in fancy costume with the rest of the band. Later, I went on YouTube to listen to more of The Used’s In Love and Death album and proceeded to spend the rest of the night downloading their entire discography on LimeWire.

“All That I’ve Got” hit a nerve for me. I felt very isolated at the time, but I couldn’t find the words for it until I heard Bert yelling “I’m far from lonely and it’s all that I’ve got” during the chorus. It was true then, and is frankly still true now. I had some confidence that my family would be there for me no matter what, yet I was aware that they were all that I had at the time, and I felt guilty for wanting more.

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I didn’t have friends in school, and the one girl who did hang out with me eventually made it clear she was barely tolerating me. I was abandoned midyear for a group of louder, funnier girls, and my new routine was to head straight home after school and into the bathroom. I had a pair of nail scissors that I’d press onto some hidden part of my skin until it left a mark, but didn’t draw any blood. I didn’t have the stomach for that, and although I felt like a jackass for not even fully committing to self-harm, I feared my parents’ discovery too much to go any further. In due time I met my best friend, and despite the jubilance of finally having someone I could actually talk to, I never brought up my scissors to her.

Fast forward to the beginning of 2020. By the time the first Covid-19 wave hit, I found myself feeling isolated again. I had broken up with my partner of less than a year, convinced I was stupid for thinking there was even a chance that someone so beautiful could actually fully desire me. But I managed to coast through this isolation period via Zoom calls with my college friends — until one late night in October when I returned to my middle school playlists and relistened to “All That I’ve Got.”

By the time the chorus repeated for a second time, I was bawling my eyes out. I experienced a full-on breakdown. My entire life’s insecurity and hurt was being sung and shouted at me in those four minutes, and I felt so stripped and raw by the end that I didn’t even have the energy to hate myself for feeling that way.

For years I believed that every small mistake and social faux pas I made warranted cruelty to my being. I thought I shouldn’t have anything to complain about because I had it all: loving friends and family, a roof over my head, food in my stomach. Yet something was terribly wrong. It wasn’t until that moment, crying at my desk in front of my laptop, that I understood that punishing myself would never help me heal. I realized that my pain deserves to be acknowledged; that I am allowed to fully grieve things like the death of a friend, and all the times I’ve been physically and emotionally violated. And my grief can be unabashedly sad and angry.

When I looked out my window and saw the sunrise, I knew this wouldn’t be the last time I’d have a moment like this. But it was the first time a moment like this forced me to begin accepting my suffering. I still have a lot of work ahead of me; I have to continually remember to allow myself to hope for better and accept the care my loved ones offer. I have to believe that the people I love do love me back.

It took me over a year to finally start seeing a therapist. It took even longer to reach out to old friends and muster the courage to tell the love of my life just how much I missed and needed them, how scared I was to let them know that back in 2020. I’ve had a variety of highs and lows since then. However, I know now that I’m not alone in this hodgepodge of feelings, and I never was.

There’s more to life than uncertainty about the future and the weight of old hurts.

No matter how unlikely it’ll seem sometimes, I’ll be more than “just fine.” ◆

About Daysi

Daysi Sanchez is a graduate student, a manager at a corporate cafeteria, and a writer. You can expect her to be doing the following outside of work: haunting Troutman Street, petting her dog Johnny, or writing in her journal while hunched over in a shrimp-like manner.

Instagram @si.como.la.flor

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• 4 min read •

I’ve been a metalhead for as long as I can remember. One of my first memories of childhood was listening to “Electric Funeral” by Black Sabbath in the front passenger seat of my dad’s Corvette when I was probably two or three (it was the early ’80s, safety regulations certainly weren’t what they are today). I remember grasping the handle above the glove compartment and banging my head to “Paranoid” and my proud father smiling ear to ear. I still remember that feeling of excitement in my chest and electricity in my brain. That’s the drug I’ve been chasing for over 40 years now.

My parents were very young when they had me. They were 20 and were just a couple of kids raising me in Aurora, a suburb of Denver, Colorado. But it was because they were so young (and incredibly cool and liberal) that I was exposed to all the same stuff they liked and were still discovering as young adults. R-rated movies, hard rock and metal music, jokes and comedy specials that were very adult — anything short of actual porn wasn’t off-limits for me. They treated me like a little adult. My mom used to love saying, “We want to raise you to be an adult.” So, I took on the responsibility of discussing what I was seeing and hearing with them, and they made sure I was able to understand and process it (and that I wasn’t going to grow up to be some weirdo serial killer).

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In my household there were a few bands and artists that absolutely stood above everyone else. First, it was the Beatles. My mom was a Beatles fanatic. She still is. My dad was into stuff that was a bit heavier; he loved Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and all the great rock bands of the 1970s. Growing up I was exposed to music from the ’50s all the way up through the modern stuff of the day. Music was a huge part of our family. The three of us always sang along in the car (poorly) and I really treasure those moments.

Being a very young (but surprisingly hip) little kid, I watched MTV the night it premiered with my parents. It was revolutionary. It literally changed my entire world overnight. Ozzy Osbourne liked to say that the first time he heard the Beatles, it was like he was living in a black and white world that suddenly turned to color. Nothing resonated with me more than that the first time I heard it said that way.

One summer day in August I was watching MTV, and I saw the band and heard the song that changed my life forever: Judas Priest’s “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’.” The world didn’t just turn to color; it was full of raging guitars and soaring vocals too.

The video for “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’” felt like it was specifically made for me. I couldn’t explain it then and I have trouble explaining it now. But it is, without a doubt, still my favorite song still to this day. It was strong, powerful, and so damned inspiring too. It spoke of taking advantage of your life, it told me to make the most of opportunities and to create opportunities for myself. For my three-year-old brain, this was like a lightning bolt hitting me square in the face. It was great music, but for me it was really about empowerment.

Seeing these guys in black, studded leather with lasers shooting off around them as they played this loud, aggressive, but still somehow hooky and digestible music with those incredible vocals from Rob Halford reshaped the entire world for me. I sat there in front of the massive TV in our den and was just stunned. This was EVERYTHING.

I went to my mom and said that I needed the tape… now. She giggled when I told her I wanted a Judas Priest record; I can only imagine what she was thinking in her head. The rule was that I needed to earn the money, so I “did chores,” which consisted of helping to put groceries away and cleaning my room. I was only three, so the tasks she made me do were simple, but she wanted to instill a life lesson.

Soon, my parents took me down the street to Budget Tapes & Records and we walked into what was a very familiar place for me. I can still remember the joy I had going in there. I looked at my mom and expected her to speak for me, but she looked at me and said, “You’re the one buying the tape, you need to ask for it.” This was a big moment for me. I looked the clerk right in the eye and said, “I’d like Screaming for Vengeance by Judas Priest, please.”

The guy was probably no older than 25, and his face lit up with the biggest grin. He walked me over to the wall with the tapes, pulled it out for me, and led me back to the register. I had a $10 bill in my pocket, and he reached over the counter to get it from me and to give me my change. I felt like an adult. I felt so accomplished. This is what the song was talking about!

We got in my mom’s baby blue 280ZX and I asked if we could listen to my tape. My parents couldn’t wipe the beaming smiles from their faces. Those first riffs from “The Hellion” filled the air as we made our drive back home, where I proceeded to listen to that tape (and especially “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’”) for months and years to come. ◆

About Sean

Sean McNally is a progressive-minded guy living in Jacksonville, Florida and works in financial services. He’s been happily married for 21 years to his incredible and beautiful wife, Sherri. He likes music, movies, watching sports, collecting comic books, and cooking.

Instagram @ankhenaten91

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• 3 min read •

Anyone who knows me knows I love Lady Gaga. From the moment I first saw her music video for “Just Dance” on VH1’s Jump Start while getting ready for school, to the present day, traveling the country and abroad to the beaches of Rio de Janeiro to see her, my identity has been heavily shaped by Lady Gaga. But I want to take you back to a very specific moment.

Picture it: it’s the spring of 2011, and the world is a very different place. Covid-19 is nonexistent, eggs aren’t expensive, and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” has just been repealed. Then there’s me. A fresh 17-year-old finishing up his junior year of high school, still trying to understand, acknowledge, and accept himself at a time when being gay is becoming less taboo and a progressive liberation is underway. Lady Gaga’s Born This Way album explodes upon its global release, filled with chart-topping anthems, club-defining hits, and rebellious meaning. It quickly becomes the soundtrack of my life. One song, however, stands out.

When I first heard “Hair,” I was immediately pulled in. While it’s sonically a timeless marvel that blends Euro-pop club beats with melodies influenced by classic rock, its lyrics convey something more profound.

For years, I struggled to accept my sexuality. It was a long ordeal that even involved religious consultations with a pastor from my childhood. I had already experienced (and enjoyed) relations with men, however, a lingering fear of rejection and disappointment fueled my ongoing confusion and heartache. I longed for a sense of peace. I feared spiraling as the burden of shame, depression, and lack of self-worth became crippling. How could I help myself without feeling judgment or guilt?

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I remember hitting repeat on “Hair” like I was chasing a high. It became a daily mantra. I found comfort in the messages of individuality and freedom of expression. The rebellious and intuitive way Gaga expressed herself through her hair, a feature so many of us either underestimate or take for granted, was representative of her — and my — yearning for freedom from societal norms. It was awe-inspiring. As a teenager continuing to navigate who I was, “Hair” brought clarity.

Hearing that electrifying chorus…

I’ve had enough, this is my prayer

That I’ll die living just as free as my hair

I’ve had enough, I’m not a freak

I just keep fightin’ to stay cool on these streets

I’ve had enough, enough, enough

And this is my prayer, I swear

I’m as free as my hair

I’m as free as my hair

I am my hair

I am my hair

It did more than change me.

It saved me.

To this day, I credit “Hair” for pulling me back from a place that I may not have been able to return from on my own. It provided light in my life, especially in moments of darkness. It brought me understanding, acceptance, and peace.

Though my world has changed a thousand times in the 15 years since “Hair” was released, there is still a sense of peace that comes to me with every listen.

(And yes, I do recognize the irony given that I barely have any hair myself these days. Thank you, genetics!)

The fact that I have the opportunity to reflect on how I have been able to grow, and how I’m exactly who I’m supposed to be — how I have been able to enjoy such beautiful moments at her concerts and build relationships with some of the most amazing people I know — speaks volumes about the impact of not just the song, but the artist behind it. She knows how to extend her hand and pull us “Little Monsters” out.

While, at times, months can pass between listens, I still hold “Hair” close to my heart and know that it will always be there for me. ◆

About Aaron

Aaron Stewart was born and raised in Virginia. While he is a devout Little Monster (Lady Gaga fan), he admires music that spans multiple genres and generations. His other passions include traveling, food, and his cats.

Instagram @aarontstewart

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• 5 min read •

Brown couch. Yellow afternoon. Messy hair. Headphones. Discman spinning on my lap. I’d wanted one for months. Finally, a nice enough paycheck from laying down pepperonis at Pizza Hut to allow me this privacy, this volume.

I had to listen to music quietly when Dave was home. The angry voice on the other side of the bedroom door said so. I missed being able to curl up inside of a song the way I used to before this man came along and set up dominion under my mother’s roof. Gone were the long, sweet evenings at home alone with my sister while our mother was at work, huddled around the boombox on the living room floor, each of us with an ear pressed to the speaker, singing. He was always there now. And he had a lot of rules.

A brand new copy of Radiohead’s OK Computer swirled behind the window in the cover of the Discman. Songs I’d never heard before, one after another, and my thumb ever-inching the little black wheel of the volume up, up, up. I sat in the yellow light of a southern California afternoon in autumn with eyes closed, trying to forget where I was. The reality of things. How hard it had been. How mean and how lonely. Lonely as a tinkling electric guitar, melancholic and tender. The sudden build of a bassline pulsing quick and hard as my forever-anxious heart. Swirling, insistent, pleading lyrics. A voice cut loose and soaring, freer than mine had ever been, stepping off the ledge of heartache into an impossible hope.

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Shell smashed, juicing flowing. My breath quickened and became irregular. My shoulders shook. I couldn’t control them. Wings twitch, legs are going. Eyes flickering behind their tight lids, rushing with tears, bolted shut against the view of that depressing all-brown living room. I’d never felt at home here. Not under this roof and not in this town. Let down and hanging around. Then, the memory of a different yellow afternoon the year before. My stepfather and I alone on the back porch.

“If I had a signed guarantee from God that, not only would you graduate, but that you’d graduate at the top of your class, and that you’d not only pay back the student loan but go on to become a world-famous artist, I still wouldn’t cosign a loan for you to go to art school.”

I was 17 years old.

The first time I met Dave, he yelled at me. He yelled at me for being on the phone when he’d come to pick my mother up for their very first date. Horrified, I watched my mother breeze out the front door on his arm. Soon, he was under our roof and the yelling never stopped. He called me names and made sure I knew how much he didn’t like me. Dave would keep time of our showers. He banged on doors and barked orders. He measured out how much milk we could drink. He chose what glass we could drink it from. He grounded me for two weeks for forgetting to turn off the fan in my bedroom before leaving for school one morning, “It could’ve thrown a spark and burned the whole house down.”

Dave grounded me for two weeks for pretty much anything. Ten minutes late coming home from school and I would be grounded. During those two weeks, he made sure life was as miserable as possible and that I knew how worthless and unwanted I was. He read my diary and mockingly quoted it to me. He told me that until I turned 18, I was his property and that anything that came from me was his property, too. My mother never commented negatively upon any of this, nor put a stop to it. She shrugged. She defended him. Crushed like a bug in the ground.

I started ditching school. Eventually, I ran away from home. Twice. I remember the last cop who came to our front door to ensure I was really back home before lifting the Missing Persons Report saying to my angry stepfather, “Kids don’t run away for no reason. Especially not girls.”

That yellow afternoon on the couch, as the lyrics rushed into my ears, volume high, my eyes flooding with tears, I felt my mind change. The refrain that had been playing in my brain on loop for years of I-CAN’T-GO-ON-LIVING-HERE became I-WILL-NOT-DIE-IN-THIS-TOWN. One day, I am gonna grow wings.

For the next seven years, I spent as much time as I could inside the art department at the community college in my hometown, holding tight the knowledge contained in that single lyric; the knowledge that other people managed to build lives that fit them, lives that didn’t make them want to run away.

I kept my job at Pizza Hut and worked as a maid, then as a cocktail waitress in a strip club, before landing a job at an art supply store. There wasn’t much talk of college at home, nor any encouragement to go. I paid for my books and tuition on my own. I took painting classes at night and held that song in my head as I moved the oil paint I’d pocketed from work across cheap canvas, repeating that solitary, pleading lyric against the reality I was stuck in. One day, I am gonna grow wings.

I took every art class available, repeating them as many times as I could until I was barred from enrolling again, begging special permission from the department head to make an allowance for me just one more time. One day, I am gonna grow wings.

On September 3^rd, 2005 at 9 a.m., the morning of my 25^th birthday, I walked into my first class at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. I sat down at a drawing horse, no longer in need of anyone’s signature other than my own. One day. Where you are. Where you are. Where you are. ◆

About Angela

Angela Simione is an artist living in New York City.

Instagram @angelasimione

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• 5 min read •

“Livin’ on the Edge” by Aerosmith marked an absolute paradigm shift in my musical taste. It set the path not only for what I listen to but how I express myself.

As a child in the ’80s, my tastes were pretty conventional. From my parents’ collection, I got the Beatles, the Beach Boys, John Denver, and crucially Paul Simon. From the radio, film soundtracks, and just the background culture of the time, I got plenty of ’80s pop — Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston. The essentials.

The music I started choosing as I grew older was rap — often the goofy stuff. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince were the first artists I’d really consider “my music,” and they led me to compilations like Rap Traxx 2 and X-Tendamix Dance Mix ’92 — the first CD I ever owned, as the first in my family to even have a CD player. I got it on reward points during my years delivering newspapers for the Nanaimo Daily Free Press.

The one thing I definitely avoided was guitar music. My brother Dan is three years older than me, and we were about as different as you can be while parented by the same two people. I had glasses, was bookish and confident. Dan fancied himself a rebel and was easily persuadable. In the late ’80s, he determined that his music was heavy metal (we used the term very loosely) — Def Leppard, Poison, Kiss. Loud, low, and aiming to offend. He grew a rat tail just to piss off our mom.

Since I was clearly so different from him, his music was clearly not mine. Anything with guitars — especially distorted ones — was heavy metal and therefore Dan’s music and therefore nothing to bother with. Screaming vocals? No thank you.

(The one thing we agreed on was Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet. Yes, it had guitars, big hair, and metal stylings for the album cover. But Aunt Barb — ten years our mother’s junior — played it, and that made it enjoyable common ground.)

It was a strange experience, therefore, to listen to LG73 — one of Vancouver’s “all hits” radio stations — play the Top 8 at 8 and get transfixed by a song that by rights should repel me. Lightly overdriven guitars making a jangly lick over a persistent drone and an acoustic strum, with a big kick drum building the anticipation. The guitars get louder and crunchier in the chorus, Steven Tyler screams, there’s a wanky guitar solo, and it’s a sprawling, epic song. Yet I was hooked.

Partly, I think, the lyrical message pulled me in. I reused sandwich containers for school lunches, convinced the parents council to buy recycling bins for every classroom, campaigned to save the rainforest. I knew, as Tyler sang, that “Something’s wrong with the world today.” He wasn’t singing about cars, chicks, or Satan, but social disharmony and environmental degradation. His urgency as well as, finally, his optimism appealed to me.

There may also have been a through line to the rap music I loved. I would later learn that Aerosmith had one of the first rap-rock collaborations, with Run-DMC on “Walk This Way,” but my undiscriminating ear could hear hip-hop cadences in the bridge:

Tell me what you think about your situation

Complication, aggravation

Is getting to you

If Chicken Little tells you that the sky is falling

Even if it wasn’t, would you still come crawling

Back again?

I bet you would, my friend

Again, and again, and again, and again, and again

It was righteous and clear in its accusation. I loved it.

I turned 14 a month after Aerosmith released the album Get a Grip, and you bet your ass it was on my wish list. My parents got it for me — on cassette, so I could listen on my Walkman during my paper route. I don’t know how they felt about it: “Oh no, the sensible one wants this awful music, too.”

And it did prove my gateway. The riff on “Eat the Rich” just slammed, “Cryin’” was brilliant, and I could not pretend this wasn’t my brother’s kind of music. I was converted. For his part, Dan was pivoting to — guess what? — rap. Gangsta rap, of course, with a special fondness for Tupac Shakur that endures to this day. His first tattoo fixed “Thug Life” to his shoulder in heavy gothic script, just to piss off our mom.

And me? From Aerosmith, it was a quick remedial run through Seattle grunge. 1994 became the annus mirabilis of Canadian alt-rock, and that was also the year I bought a guitar and started making my own music, a habit that, like my brother’s tattoo, hasn’t gone away.

Aerosmith, like my brother’s rat tail, did get cut off, however. By grunge purity standards, they were far too cock-rocky and commercial. As if to prove the point, they would have a huge hit with the shitty ballad for that asteroid movie — a song that ’80s me would have loved. But Get a Grip and its lead single “Livin’ on the Edge” were my Bing Bong in that incredible scene from Inside Out: the essential motor to get me out of the deep hole of latent culture and inherited musical taste, up to the high plateau of my own burgeoning interests and passions. Like Bing Bong, it didn’t make the journey with me, but it got me where I needed to be. ◆

About Michael

Michael Munnik is a songwriter and scholar living in Cardiff, Wales. Before emigrating to the UK, he fulfilled a lifelong dream as a radio journalist for CBC in Ottawa, Canada.

Bluesky @michaelmunnik.bsky.social

Website michaelmunnik.ca

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• 4 min read •

We don’t choose what catches us in a moment of deep grief, just as we don’t choose when tragedy finds us. Sometimes it arrives as a phone call from a morgue on a cold Monday evening in March while you’re playing The Sims on your parent’s desktop computer, unaware of life’s stakes and only concerned with building the best digital house for your ideal girl band.

At fourteen I was learning for the first time that people who are supposed to take care of you are struggling to take care of themselves, and things that are supposed to make sense feel more like decorations on a set that falls flat the minute you can’t support your participation in it. I also learned morgue secretaries are faster at making phone calls than hospitals or your parents.

When my grandmother passed away suddenly, I was left with my MP3 player and a lot of free time since I vowed not to play The Sims anymore to avoid summoning another family death — at least for that year. I would take long walks to Odesa’s seaside and put my player on shuffle, hoping to hear something that would temporarily fill the emptiness I felt right below my heart. Of the ten songs I downloaded that month, one perfectly scored the scene as I traced cold, misty circles in the sand with my winter boots.

My parents didn’t introduce me to their favorite musical artists and never made me listen to their record collection. Not that they had one. Nor did they show me movies they liked, which encouraged my solo exploration of all things art and heavily contributed to feelings of resentment when I came across people marinated in their parents’ taste. It’s like meeting people who learned how to cook from their family; undeniably and enviably sexy, and they don’t even deserve the full credit. I was on my own with Google and the illegal film library of the VK platform, where I found Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and promptly downloaded its soundtrack onto my player some time before my grandmother’s death.

My best music discoveries would continue to come from films, and later, in college, a professor would say it’s a cheap directorial trick to increase emotion in a scene that doesn’t rise there on its own. But like every fourteen-year-old, I thought life itself didn’t rise to the required level of emotion on its own, and so I’d download these soundtrack pieces for personal scoring opportunities. It helped that both my life and this sad Jim Carrey film featured cold walks on the beach.

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If you listen to the Korgis’ original version of “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime,” it has all the elements of a sad love ballad that you can still slow dance to. It reminds me of 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love,” and in that way feels more romantic than sorrowful. The version I discovered was a cover by Beck that strips down the ’80s elements of the original to a haunting minimalism. The first fifteen seconds draw you into a somber collection of chords that feel like a symphony of hung-up landline phone calls. To this day, they make me feel like I can hear my own heartbeat in a very crowded space. It’s exactly the feeling of having your world upended and sewn back down while you try to connect with reality.

Then Beck’s husky vocals come in to really drive home the after-the-punch feeling in your guts. We are starting in a pretty empty place, but slowly other instruments come in and the guitar strings add a sweetness that allows for feelings of grief to emerge over initial shock. At least that’s how it felt in my body at that age. The drums add a sense of marching strength and the comforting “mmhhmmh” Beck adds at the end of some lines is a great self-soothing trick I picked up as well. I don’t want to say this piece of music taught me to grieve, but I can’t remember anything else that held me at the time.

I had just started to take my English lessons more seriously and was determined to learn all the lyrics to the songs I was listening to. This one was easy enough for me not to Google. On a general note, I recommend grieving in another language, as it makes things feel much more manageable. You can kind of use the distance of the words to cushion the blow. You can use it as an isolation cord for the open electrical circuit that is your mind and body in the wake of loss.

That cold March turned into a cold April and eventually into a warm May. I watched a different movie and downloaded the next soundtrack onto my MP3 player. I skipped “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime” for the next ten years with occasional exceptions for the death anniversary. Listening to it recently, though, I realized that over time I’ve grown capable of being more present with the grief that this song first taught me to bear. Mirroring the song’s structure, I now see it as a hopeful reminder of the love I felt for someone who is long, long gone. The pain has subsided into an honoring. ◆

About Masha

Masha Makutonina is a Ukrainian videomaker, playwright, and audio producer from Odesa, Ukraine, now residing in New York. She has acted in NYU’s production of The Clear Blue Skies: Diaries from Ukraine. Her play Steppe, which she wrote and directed, has had a three-show run as a part of the Global Form Theatre Festival at Rattlestick Theatre in June 2023. Her play They Are Quits was a part of 938 Collective’s Short Play Festival at Dixon Theatre as well as Secret Theatre’s short play competition in summer of 2024. Her short film was recently screened at the 938 Collective’s showing at Cobble Hill cinema. Masha loves exploring hopeless futures of spaces and characters that are brought into dialogue by them.

Website mashamakutonina.neocities.org

Instagram @masha_makut

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• 5 min read •

Rise up this morning, smiled with the rising sun…

I walked out the door, bags packed and ready, a teenager who’d never really lived away from home. My mom came out behind me. About to lock the door, she paused, turned to me, and — in a concerned voice working quietly to keep its composure — asked, “Do you have Bob Marley with you?” I pulled a cassette mixtape out of my jacket pocket (blazer arms always rolled up, I felt a kinship with the guys in the Specials, the English Beat, and their ska ilk; more punk-adjacent than well-dressed). “Yep,” I said with a little smile. Marley occupied one side of that tape. “Good,” she added, “’cause when it gets tough you have to go back to the roots,” and she locked the door behind us.

Don’t worry ’bout a thing, cause every little thing gonna be alright

Summer 1986, leaving for the airport to fly to Pittsburgh, I was a 17-year-old heading out into the wild world on my own for the first time for real. Eager to begin studying aeronautical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, not knowing then that engineering would be a one-year stepping stone towards an industrial design degree — with minors in photography, French, and German — and, later, decades as a designer in the United States and Europe.

Singing sweet songs…

Check my pockets any time during high school and you’d likely find:

1. A guitar pick

I began playing guitar and bass in my early teens and was obsessed. I had one in hand whenever possible, sculpting my fingers into new shapes that would end up etched into my muscle memory.

2. Oodles of Noodles instant ramen

In the ’80s the pickings for a vegetarian were slim to none. A growing boy had to be prepared! “Vegetarian alternative” was not really a phrase yet. Nutrition, apparently not a concern.

3. A cassette tape

Filled with my favorite band of the moment, always ready for a stereo, boombox, walkman, or car radio to appear. One album would occupy each side of the tape for weeks, or even months, eventually rotating out.

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The Cure, the Specials, R.E.M. (Murmur & Reckoning). Sometimes a mixtape passed from friend to friend, or sibling, quality eroding with each copy of a copy, made it into my pocket — like the one named “waste don’t youth you,” full of punk, pop, new wave, subversive music only broadcast on college radio. But Bob Marley was a constant, an old-time favorite, “mom music,” along with the likes of the Grateful Dead, James Taylor, Richie Havens, Cat Stevens, Carole King, Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and many more. Even Lionel Richie and the Sugarhill Gang would join the mix of music from home sometimes, but rarely did they inhabit my pocket tapes.

... melodies pure and true

My world was a lot smaller then.

Traveling beyond the east coast was barely imaginable.

A lack of interest in sleepaway camp as a kid was just as well since my hippie parents didn’t have money for that anyway. Having been in and out of the hospital due to a serious asthma problem as a small child, perhaps all the days, weeks, and on one occasion over a month spent there at such a tender age removed any childhood inclination towards solo wanderlust.

The previous summer was the only time I’d been away from home for a longer period on my own, on a grant for political science and computer programming summer courses at Yale. Room and board included. Though my dorm was only a 15-minute walk away, I went home just once during those eight weeks. Being so close by, it was a low-stakes first flight from the nest. But interesting new worlds began to open academically and socially while I was there, and after that experience I had no trepidation about leaving home when it was time to leave for college.

In the decades since, I’ve been able to visit and live in different places across the United States, for work and play, and to travel extensively throughout Europe and Asia, including multiple trips to Japan, China, and Singapore.

Unfathomable before.

I was born in Midtown Manhattan, just north of Hell’s Kitchen, in 1968. My dad has lived in Brooklyn since then. His Irish-American parents had shallow roots in New York and Boston, and deep roots in Ireland. Cork and Limerick on his school teacher mom Marie’s side, and Longford on his NYPD and Army officer dad Tom’s side. Close enough for my dad and his brother to have dual citizenship, but distant enough for him to never have actually been to the Emerald Isle.

When I was about five years old, my 18-month-older brother and I ended up with our mom and stepdad, Steve, in New Haven when they were both, against all logical odds, accepted to matriculate at Yale University; mom for undergrad, Steve for architecture. This was especially unimaginable and unlikely for a young, poor, black mother of two from a working-class family in New York, only a few years after Yale had decided to begin allowing women to study as undergraduates. My brother and I did most of our growing up in that ivory-tower/wild-west town, and it was apparent that our little sister was in our mom’s belly when she graduated in 1975. Mom ended up going back to Yale in the early ’80s for a master’s of graphic design, subsequently becoming a professor there for many years. We’re pretty sure she’s the first woman with both undergraduate and graduate degrees from Yale to have a child (my brother) who earned three Yale diplomas as well.

Not bad work for a girl born into a working-class family in New York just after World War II. Her father, Willie, came from the South, a black man with roots in enslavement, and, further back, some Native American ancestry. He made his way to New York and became a career bus driver. Her mother, Mary, was a homemaker and part-time house cleaner, born to an Afro-Caribbean family from Saint Kitts.

This is my message to you-ou-ou

“Going back to the roots” could have many different meanings. I didn’t reflect deeply upon it back then. But I played music every day in college — in my room, in bands, everywhere — and that was surely crucial in keeping enough balance to persevere.

Don’t worry ’bout a thing, cause every little thing gonna be alright

This song is simply joy. ◆

About Joshua

Joshua Murray grew up on the east coast of the USA, but he has been living in Malmö, Sweden the past 30 years and is the father of a 15-year-old. He also spends some of his free time at his girlfriend’s countryside house on the Danish Baltic Sea island of Bornholm. Josh is a musician (guitar, bass, vocals) who’s played continuously in bands since he was 15 years old, and he’s worked as an industrial designer his entire career. His current free time activity of choice is bouldering.

Instagram @moofboo_josh

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Chances are high

Whether you realize it or not, it’s likely that the music you listen to today exists thanks to black musicians in history. Entire genres of music have emerged and evolved in the last century because of trailblazers like Sister Rosetta Tharpe in the ’30s, Bo Diddley in the ’50s, and Eddie Hazel in the ’70s.

You can hear their influence everywhere — rock, pop, R&B, jazz, hip-hop, alternative, even punk.

Today we’re taking a special look at legendary black guitarists — from the musician credited with “the greatest guitar solo of all time” to the lesser-known virtuosos. These musicians’ innovation, experimentation, and technical skill made history, inspiring and impacting generations of artists.

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but these are some of the greats that have shaped music as we know it today:

1. Sister Rosetta Tharpe

American singer, songwriter, and guitarist
When: 1930s and 1940s

The basics

• b. 1915 - d. 1973 (aged 58)

• “The Godmother of rock and roll”

• Known for her unique mix of electric guitar and spiritual lyrics

• Became the first big recording star of gospel music

• Controversial among conservative religious groups because she performed in nightclubs

Her guitar style

• Spirited guitar playing with heavy distortion

• Aggressive picking, heavy-gauge strings

• Frequent use of double-stops (playing two notes at once) and chromaticism (using notes outside the key)

Why she’s important

• Widely considered one of the founders of rock and roll

• One the first big recording artists to use heavy distortion on her electric guitar

• Her 1945 hit “Strange Things Happening Every Day“ has been called the first rock and roll record

• Influenced early rock musicians like Johnny Cash, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Little Richard, and Elvis Presley

Watch Sister Rosetta Sharpe play guitar

A compilation of her guitar solos

2. Eddie Hazel

American guitarist and singer
When: 1970s

The basics

• b. 1950 - d. 1992 (aged 42)

• Lead guitarist for Parliament-Funkadelic

• Renowned for his emotional, psychedelic, and technically gifted playing

• Ranked no. 29 on Rolling Stone’s list of the Greatest Guitarists of All Time

His guitar style

• Razor sharp rhythm player

• Used a lot of reverb and played with “all the gadgets in the world”

• Unique, virtuoso ability to switch between intense funk rhythms and melodic, soaring solos

Why he’s important

• Helped define Parliament-Funkadelic’s signature sound

• His 10-minute guitar solo in the Funkadelic song “Maggot Brain” is regarded as one of the greatest solos of all time on any instrument

• Heavily influenced future generations of artists; often sampled in hip-hop, e.g. Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg

Watch Eddie Hazel play guitar

Live in 1979

3. Beverly “Guitar” Watkins

American blues guitarist
When: 1950s - 2000s

The basics

• b. 1939 - d. 2019 (aged 80)

• Known as the “Queen of the Blues Guitar”

• Shredded guitar on stage with James Brown, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, and Ray Charles since her teen years

• Achieved critical acclaim later in life thanks to the internet, recorded her first solo album at 60

Her guitar style

• Known for her “searing” and “ballistic” playing style

• Electrifying performances, often compared to Jimi Hendrix or Pete Townshend

• One of her trademarks was playing her guitar behind her head

• “My style is real Lightnin’ Hopkins lowdown blues. I call it hard classic blues, stompin’ blues, railroad smokin’ blues.”

Why she’s important

• One of the first women to gain recognition as a lead blues guitarist

• A cultural trailblazer, she overcame significant gender barriers in a male-dominated industry

• Legacy as a fiery virtuoso

Watch Beverly “Guitar” Watkins play guitar

See her famous behind-the-head guitar playing live

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This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

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• 6 min read •

I finished interviewing a former military officer and opted to take the subway back home. I usually got around Buenos Aires by bus.

My time in the Argentine capital was nearing its end. Every day felt more of a reminder of the precious, limited hours, the weight of crossed-out calendar pages pressing against my chest. I darted into the subway car just as the doors were closing and sat down.

A busker passed me, setting up his small portable speaker before strumming his guitar. (Fuck me if he’s about to play cumbias.) I was busy trying to figure out how to make the hands on my watch turn back.

He began to play. I recognized it immediately. My heart clenched and my skin tightened. He began to sing and I started to, quietly, lose it. I don’t think he expected this reaction but there was no stopping this show.

I got off at the next station. I had no cash.

⁂

Rock and roll — rocanrol — first came to me in the form of compact discs and MTV. I was living in Monterrey, Mexico at the time, a city known for its industrial vigor 224 kilometers from Laredo, Texas.

Looking back now, growing up in a city so unfortunately close to the American empire in the heydays of neoliberalism made it seem so normal that living in a place so similar to any random city in the US was something to aspire to. It wasn’t. But this manufactured yearning seeped into the culture. While many musical genres swept Monterrey, I developed a fascination for rock and roll and I increasingly wondered if this was something that could only be expressed in the English language.

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I can’t tell you when I first heard “Persiana Americana” (American Shutter, as in a window) but I know where I first felt the power of Rock en tu Idioma. This was an album released in the late 1980s that was a collection and most importantly a tribute to the who’s who of Latin American rock.

I was in the back seat of my mother’s Volkswagen Pointer in the underground parking lot of the Plaza La Silla Mall when the track by Enanitos Verdes, Green Dwarves, came on. I was spellbound.

This was rocanrol in a different flavor. Homemade. There were no mondegreens for me this time, I could understand every word in my native tongue. (I severely need subtitles. For years, I thought Duran Duran was singing “If they don’t kiss, there’s always me,” rather than “That fiery kiss, is all we need” in “A View to a Kill.”)

Rock latino carried the weight of an entire continent’s sociopolitical history. Created, forged, built in an environment with ever present conservative and traditional structures, concocted during the years, if not decades of brutally repressive governments.

Rocanrol was different. It stung, it was hopeful. It was unapologetically not nostalgic but rather forward-looking, toward a better tomorrow.

“Persiana Americana” was an anthem during our cross country road trips through Mexico. Its drum-filled introduction heightened my heartbeat and made me, not even a teenager then, think about the Mexico my parents had lived through. I wondered and asked them what it was like growing up in a Mexico City that wasn’t as full, as packed. Back when Iztapalapa, the most populated borough in the city, still felt green.

Listening to Soda Stereo while gazing at the stars from the back seat of the car on our drives from Monterrey to my birth town of Mexico City — a place I’ve never actually lived in — made the continent, countries, and people south of Mexico feel like they were long-lost relatives.

“We make up one single mestizo race that from Mexico down to the Strait of Magellan presents notable ethnographic similarities,” a famous Argentine explorer once said.

I left Mexico before I turned 10 when my mother got a job as a teacher in suburban Houston.

As a preteen and teen, I felt it was corny to like the music from your parents’ era. Despite this, I displayed my love for ’80s songs to my friends, but I only showed my favorite Latin American rock songs to a select few. None understood. Both linguistically and in a larger sense.

The only time I would hear some of these songs would be at parties my parents would drag my sister and me to, where it was nice, for a brief time, to be alongside people who got it, who knew the words, whose memories came alive again. Once, when I was a local journalist in Connecticut, I heard Soda Stereo blasting from a mechanic shop. I smiled, unable to actually see the person playing it.

What was supposed to be a one-year adventure in Los United Estates turned out to be two, three, ten. My sister and I spoke Spanish at home — my mother made sure of that — but on our trips to Mexico I noticed that I was falling behind on the day-to-day slang, that my friends noticed the changes in my dialect, that my Spanish was different. A distance began to form, a life that had previously been mine seemed to slip through my small fingers.

I was embarrassed that I didn’t know the words to several classic mariachi songs or other folk songs. And just when I’d been back home for long enough to feel myself finally able to latch on to those pulsing, vibrant roots, I’d be ripped back out to return to that other home north of the border.

I felt like I was losing my mexicanidad, my Mexicanness, despite genuine attempts at being as “Mexican” as I could in a different country.

In 2015, I spent a summer studying in Paris, relishing being a Latino in Europe, but at some point I realized that Latin America had always — always — been an option. For my study abroad semester in my third year of undergrad, I instinctively picked Buenos Aires. It was a no-brainer.

I knew that choice had been made years ago, in the underground parking lot of a Monterrey mall.

My seven months in Buenos Aires was the longest continuous time I’d been in Latin America since I had first left Mexico in 2003. Despertaba en español, soñaba en español, sonreía en español. Unconsciously, I ended up interviewing former military officers who were active during the Argentine Dirty War of the late 1970s and 1980s. The words from all these songs, from these rocanrol albums, had guided me there, had been, for years.

Returning to the United States felt like being forcibly awakened from a dream you never wanted to leave. Those uninterrupted months suddenly reached an end, but no closure. Flying away from the Buenos Aires airport crushed a small part of my soul.

I was haunted by a life I had only just tasted, but never lived. I thought of all the cousins I’d lost touch with, the swim meets I never competed in, the freedom I never experienced during my time in suburban America. The youth in Mexico, Argentina, in all of Latin America always seemed to live much freer lives than most anyone in suburban America. I don’t have specific studies to cite for this but I feel it in my core. Libertad, libertad.

“Persiana” defined, for a very long time, nostalgia to me. A time I never lived in, a future I’m nervous to think about, the loves (real and imagined) I never got to express myself with in my native language. For months after Buenos Aires I couldn’t listen to “Persiana,” my heart couldn’t handle it.

I took the subway the day I got back to Boston. No Soda Stereo, but I had a few dollars on me.

Just in case. ◆

About Humberto

Humberto J. Rocha is a full-time journalist living in London. He writes about carbon trading, biodiversity restoration and misses reporting on local news and community affairs. Growing up between Mexico City and Houston, Humberto freelances for Latin American outlets and tries to go to the cinema once a week.

Website www.humbertojrocha.com

Instagram @humjrocha

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Madeline Craig (No. 099)

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This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

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• 4 min read •

I’m usually trying to get somewhere else, but I’m not sure where I learned this desire. My maternal grandmother recently reminded me that she has resided in our small hometown for all eighty-six years of her life. It moves me to hear about people who are rooted where they are. I feel disoriented by stability, and I’m not sure that this is an attractive trait. What anchors my urge to flee is that other people — and places, and things — are spindles, altering images of ourselves. This is why Karen O’s “Rapt” (2014), an elliptical song the Korean-American musician says she wrote “about someone who became a habit that was hard to kick” still influences me at twenty-three — about a decade from when I first heard the song.

I discovered “Rapt” in junior high while listening to a selection of music videos curated for the cable channel MTV. I spent my mornings before school laying on my side in fits of languidity, negotiating how the visual and sonic space created in my bedroom lengthened the amount of time I could spend avoiding the school bus. It felt like “Rapt” arrived through a dream: Karen O has an ethereal voice, and the video takes place underwater, where she considers her relativity to an exceptionally bright, circular light. Karen, in a sequined red dress, wades through the water as though it is familiar to her, although this light clearly overwhelms the scene. Those of us who like to flee need certain conduits, and there is a sense here that she has a desire to be entirely transported to and embraced by this light. She becomes a mess of lustre, the sequins on her dress catching and throwing the light back.

As someone who dabbles in the borderline and obsessive-compulsive arts, I’m not normal about interpersonal relationships. Before and after I encountered “Rapt,” I was bullied, which I’m embarrassed to say still impacts how I connect with other people. The kindest things I heard from people I crushed on when I was younger were things like “you’re not even an ugly girl” and “you’re beautiful in your own way,” and in conflict with other girls, if my docility slipped, the undercurrent of their withheld perception of me — as ugly, as fat, as poor — emerged.

As much as the image makes me laugh now, I would listen to “Rapt” on the way to and from school through my Walmart earbuds with my head against the murky school bus window. In high school and college, I remained hypervigilant but nonetheless hungry for connection. Somewhere in this time, I became overindulgent as a maladaptive solvent to loneliness. I fostered any and every relationship because people, like substances, can take you oh-so high when you’re oh-so low.

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When you learn to measure your self-perception through other people’s observations, you develop into more of a Möbius strip than someone well-rounded in social situations. I can only be too far away or too close to the people I want in my life, because I idealize everyone. Like Karen O says in the song, “love is soft, love’s a fucking bitch.” I have a poor metric for registering how other people feel about me, but when I’m loved, I’m warm and transformed.

What I love most about “Rapt” is that the phantasmagoria of abandoning oneself for another is so plainly stated, this condition of using another person to escape and defy material reality. It’s is the kind of song I would have awkwardly performed at a talent show in high school, and I admire that it reminds me of a time when yearning was alive and well. It’s not a song about character or compatibility, but the abstract nature of limerence, a recognition of the distance between the literal health of a relationship and the instinct to continue on with it as a habit instead of a conscious resolution.

Karen O told Michelle Zauner, the lead vocalist of Japanese Breakfast, in an interview that she is well acquainted with impermanence. I feel lucky to have discovered her in the era before mass music streaming completely changed how we find and connect with music, because I’m not sure if I could have managed the fragmentation I felt internally in junior high without the early influence of “Rapt” in my life. It felt nice to know that there was someone else, with much more experience than me, floating around in a sea of confusion and grasping at elusivity because of how badly she wanted someone, something, or someplace to absorb her, even if it was bad for her.

Even with a partner and two cats, I’m still learning how to reserve a fraction of the obsession I expel externally for myself. ◆

About Sade

Sade Collier is a writer and works in publishing. She lives in South Brooklyn with her partner, two cats, and a whole lot of books.

Instagram @sadeslittlediary

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Cosmo Halterman de Ochoa (No. 112)

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Happy Valentine’s Day!

Read all the essays in the Romance category 💘

🔒 Unlock this playlist with a paid subscription

Sweet Treats Playlist 🍫🍭🧁

Satisfy your sweet tooth. Listen→

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Music changes food

Since February is arguably the sweetest, as in sugary-est, month, I’ve had dessert on the mind. And in the last few days, I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of neurogastronomy — the science of how our senses shape taste. Turns out music can make a big difference.

“Research shows that what we hear can meaningfully influence how we perceive food…”

Basically, flavor is something we create in our brains, not something that comes from the food itself. We do this by interpreting chemical signals from our noses, ears, mouths, etc.

So whatever we’re hearing can actually shape how we taste our food. This is sometimes called “sonic seasoning” and I find it absolutely fascinating.

Maybe that’s why pairing food with music makes so much sense. It’s a sensory match made in heaven.

Dessert loves music. And musicians love dessert back.

Stevie Wonder and Eric Clapton are both known for having a big sweet tooth, Beyoncé adores peanut butter treats, Lady Gaga is especially fond of gummies, and Slash loves chocolate.

Plus, everyone from David Crosby to Dolly Parton have gushed about their love of baking.

So before we get to this month’s Sweet Treats playlist (below), I thought it would be fun to share a baking-loving musician’s recipe — for Valentine’s Day, or any day 👩‍🍳❤️

It just so happens to be her all-time favorite dessert…

Dolly’s Banana Puddin’ Cake

Prep time: 5 to 7 minutes
Cooking time: about 30 minutes
Serves: 10-12

Cake Ingredients:

• 2 boxes (12 oz.) vanilla wafers 🥮

• 6 large bananas, sliced 🍌

• 1 ½ cups sugar 🍬

• 3⁄4 cup all-purpose flour 🌾

• 6 egg yolks 🟠

• 3 whole eggs 🥚

• ½ cup butter 🧈

• Dash salt 🧂

• 6 cups milk 🥛

• 2 teaspoons vanilla🍦

Steps:

1. In a large baking pan, layer sliced bananas and vanilla wafers

2. Mix together sugar, flour, egg yolks and whole eggs, butter and salt in a heavy-bottomed saucepan

3. Add the milk, a little at a time

4. Cook slowly until the mixture thickens, about 20 minutes

5. Let mixture cool for a few minutes, then add vanilla

6. Pour over bananas and vanilla wafers

Meringue Topping ingredients:

• 6 egg whites 🥚

• 1 teaspoon lemon juice 🍋

• 1 teaspoon sugar 🍬

• 1 teaspoon vanilla 🍦

Steps:

1. Beat the egg whites with lemon juice, sugar and vanilla until stiff

2. Spoon this mixture over the top of the pudding

3. Brown at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes or until golden on top

Back to the music

Sweet Treats Playlist 🍫🍭🧁

I made you a playlist of my favorite songs about all things sweet. Featuring songs about ring pops, cheesecake, maple fudge, churros, and more…

From the kitschy (Warrant’s “Cherry Pie”) to the unexpected (Kim Gordon’s “The Candy House”) to the nostalgic (The Archies’ “Sugar Sugar”), this playlist covers all the bases.

Recommended listening: play while baking or nibbling on something sugary and delectable 😋

Read more

This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

Enjoying the series? Support here to keep the good stuff coming 😊

• 5 min read •

Just last night, I was reminded of just how bad it had gotten and just how sick I had become.

When I was 15, I fell in love with the local undertaker’s 16-year-old daughter, Jessica. How could I not? A beautiful dark-haired girl who had recently lost her mother — who was, let’s face it, one traffic accident or terminal diagnosis away from being an orphan — and whose father worked with dead people? Please. She was also quiet and mysterious and so much more mature than the one-year gap in our ages would seem to indicate. Although by that time I had already had several short-lived crushes, this was the first time that I was so simultaneously elated and wretched when I thought about a girl. I was sick, with a painful knot in my stomach that felt like something physical, and I was sure that Jessica was the only person in the world who could cure me of this illness.

And she was completely indifferent to me. Oh, she was kind and let me walk her home a couple of times, inviting me in to listen to tapes until kicking me out before her father got home, but there was no sign that she felt the same devotion that I did for her. Without coming right out and saying it, Jessica made clear that there was no way that the two of us were ever going to happen, due to our age difference if nothing else. I was miserable about the cosmic injustice of it all, but I had no words to express what I was feeling, to her or even to myself. All that would soon change, though.

But it could change with this relationship, de-derange, we’ve all been through some shit.

High school, among its other mortifications, brought with it an interminable bus ride every afternoon, time spent commiserating with friends about our miserable suburban existence. One of them was Ted, a punk with an abusive asshole of a stepfather who did everything he could to make the kid’s life a living hell. That day on the bus, Ted was unusually preoccupied with his Sanyo Walkman. When I asked if I could hear what he was listening to, he initially refused, telling me that it wasn’t for me and that I wouldn’t like it.

His protests only made me want to hear it more, of course, so I argued with him for a good five minutes before he finally gave in. “Fine,” he said, and shoved the headphones at me, watching nervously as I put them on and pressed play. Whatever dark metal screamfest I had expected left me unprepared for what I did hear: an urgent acoustic guitar, joined moments later by a plaintive, slightly adenoidal singer who had apparently looked deep into my soul and decided to set what he’d found there to music: “I need someone, a person to talk to / Someone who’d care to love / Could it be you? / Could it be you?”

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When we grow old, it is wonderful to think about being young, remembering only the pleasure of pain-free bodies and unwrinkled faces not yet etched by age and worry. It is much less wonderful to actually be young, to feel lonely and afraid much of the time and to have no idea when or even if these feelings will ever go away. A completely self-confident adolescent would be a monster. Thankfully, no matter how convincing a façade we adopted, most of us felt just as alienated and rejected as this singer: “You can all just kiss off into the air / Behind my back, I can see them stare / They’ll hurt me bad, but I won’t mind / They’ll hurt me bad, they do it all the time.”

When I took off the headphones, Ted regarded me nervously, afraid, I think, that I was going to mock him. Instead, I blurted out, “This is awesome!” and we spent the rest of the bus ride trading the headphones back and forth, Ted promising to loan me the tape so I could copy it that night on my brother’s boombox. Weird band name aside, I was hooked. I had never heard anything quite like this before, never heard my own inchoate hopes and fears and insecurities so clearly articulated.

Third verse, same as the first.

The pain I felt over my unrequited crush did not disappear immediately (that took a few weeks), but at least now I had a soundtrack for it, a vocabulary that allowed me to emotionally articulate myself to myself. Yes, I thought, That’s what I’m feeling — that’s exactly what it’s like. Nor was it only a metaphor that the first Violent Femmes album was the soundtrack to my heartache: when I rode my bike past Jessica’s house one dark October evening (hoping to catch a glimpse of her but really just wanting to be near to where she was), I listened to “Kiss Off” on my own knockoff Walkman just to twist the emotional knife a little deeper.

I am no longer the romantic obsessive I was in the fall of 1989. The ardent passion I experienced at 15 could not sustain itself for long — not for me and not even for the Violent Femmes, those peerless chroniclers of adolescent alienation and infatuation, whose next album, Hallowed Ground, led off with a song about a grown man murdering his own child by throwing her down a well. Maybe there’s a 15-year-old out there for whom “Country Death Song” resonates as much as “Kiss Off” did for me, but if so, I sure hope I never meet him.

To this day, whenever I’m tempted to romanticize adolescence, all I have to do is listen to that song to remind myself of a time when everything I was feeling — love, heartbreak, and everything in between — I was feeling for the first time, and to remember just how lonely and excruciating an experience that can be. ◆

About Christopher

Christopher Hartley is an amateur musician and professional writing instructor, teaching social work graduate students in East Harlem. He lives in the suburban wilds of Connecticut with his partner, Ingrid, who is not an undertaker’s daughter but is pretty awesome anyway.

Instagram @hartley1

⭐ Recommended by
Terri C. Smith (No. 116)

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This Song Changed My Life is open to submissions. For consideration, please fill out this simple form.

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Diary 💗 10 Artists to watch in 2026

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Top 10 Essays of 2025

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If you enjoyed this post, “like” it & leave a comment 🧡

Leave a comment

Categories

Friendship • Family • Coming of Age • Romance • Grief • Spirituality & Religion • Personal Development • LGBTQ+

Recommended

Top 10 • Grace’s Favorites • Secret