The Soundtrack of My Life

Last week, my homeboy J-Oro wrote a Soundtrack of His Life. He got the idea from our buddy, Ethan, who riffed on the idea after hearing a story on NPR in which a writer chose six songs that would make the soundtrack of her life. Being the narcissistic fucker that I am, I’ve thought about a soundtrack that could convey my spirit. I’ve fantasized about a soundtrack that could accompany, say, a film based about my life. A few years ago, I experimented with this by writing a piece titled “My Cancer Playlist,” a compilation of 12 songs that could express my “cancer journey” (as oncologists and practitioners in the field like to refer to that tumultuous time in the lives of their patients).

I just wanted to get in on the fun, this conga line of soundtracks, so here’s mine:

1979 - Ring My Bell, Anita Ward


This song came out in 1979. I was in my mother’s womb for the first four months of that year. Now when I bob my head and gyrate to this disco classic, I can’t help but secretly wish that my mom somehow listened to this song in Guadalajara while I was one with her. I can picture it now: me kicking in her womb, a smoke machine in the corner, cute chicks on the sidelines, a disco ball hanging from the uterus lining. I should’ve never left!

Many years later, I would see a parked car in the Mission. It had a bumper sticker that read “I Came to Get Down.” I went bonkers. Fuck yes. That’s what I want my headstone to read.

1984 – Cherish, Kool & the Gang

I have shards of memories from a trip I took with my dad to Miami when we lived near Orlando. (I remember staying in a hotel for one night. I vaguely remember being so pleased by the grown-up table they had in the corner of our room with a pen and blank notepad resting expectantly on it.) On the drive to Miami, I remember sitting buckled into the passenger seat. This song came on the radio while we drove across a bridge. I peered over at my dad. The sun shined behind him, flickered from the suspension cables or passing cars that zipped by. I remember feeling at peace, safe beside my dad.

In large part, my early childhood was unremarkable. I was loved by my parents and sisters. I was one of the lucky ones. Cherish.

1993 - Genius of Love, Tom Tom Club

Junior high. Everyone’s wearing baggy colored pants and striped shirts from Miller’s Outpost. Even though I’m a peruano and not mexicano like most of the other Latinos at my school in Fremont, CA, I figure I should wear the same clothes they’re wearing and listen to the music they’re listening to, like 98.1 KISS FM and 106.1 KMEL (the people’s station!) Since I’m a Latino, I feel like I was supposed to listen to rap and hip hop and R&B and old school R&B, though I had no clue what that really meant, old school R and B. This was a song those stations played. I really liked it even though I had no clue who I should be.

1995 - Rape Me, Nirvana

It’s past midnight because that’s what my digital alarm clock reads. I can’t fall asleep. I turn the radio on my clock. For whatever reason, I flick through the channels, searching for something. I hear the opening palm-muted guitar notes, then the opening verse. It reminds me of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” from the Nevermind album I had borrowed from my older sister, Mariana. This time, something clicked inside me. A cog turned. This was the music I felt bubbling within me. The angst. The ugly distorted beauty of it all. I was a rocker in spirit from that day on. And I found my first artistic idol.

2000 – Garbageman, The Cramps


My college years. Still living at home, taking the train all the way to Daly City to attend film school. I’m writing short stories and film scripts in which startling moments of life that are full of life can happen in a boring-as-fuck suburb like Fremont. I’m starting to feel like something is fundamentally wrong with suburbia as a construct but intellectually I still lack the language to elucidate. But I was having startling moments of life that were full of life in Fremont because of my punk-rocker-outsider-type friends, especially my first serious girlfriend who was One half hillbilly / And one half punk. (And she was so much more.) I’m getting loaded regularly. Experimenting with my mind on occasion with drugs. I’m discovering classic cult films, great books, and astounding bands like The Cramps to nourish me, to sing back and paint the world I feel. My friends helped to open these worlds for me.

2001 - Everything in Its Right Place, Radiohead

Here’s a recipe for depression:
• read Derrick Jensen’s The Culture of Make Believe,
• read George Orwell’s 1984 while visiting Peru, your ancestral homeland
• listen to Radiohead’s OK Computer and Kid A a lot
• ¬while visiting your expansive family in Peru, a place where you are a tourist, become keenly aware, for the first time in your privileged life, of all the death, destruction, and tantamount change that was wrought on that land by a group of greedy Spanish conquistadors who believed their God was the right one.

And the world is never the same after that summer.

2006 - El Desierto, Lhasa de Sela


Weeks before Valentine’s Day in 2006 my girlfriend Julia broke up with me. I’m 26 at the time. We parted at a time when I was beginning to assume a future inseparable from her. Other than loving life in San Francisco, I am lost in every way: unsure of what work I want to commit my one life to; no heart to rest mine beside. So I quit my job to backpack alone through South America. I dreamt of winding my way to the Atacama Desert. I longed to walk into the desert. I wanted to vanish in it.

Besides my books and journal, my one true companion on those long, grueling bus rides across the continent was my iPod shuffle. Lhasa de Sela’s La Llorana was on steady rotation, including this song containing this verse:

He venido yo corriendo olvidándome de ti
Dame un beso pajarillo no te asustes colibrí
He venido encendida al desierto pa quemar
Porque el alma prende fuego cuando deja de amar.

[Quebrada del Diablo, Atacama Desert]

2008 - Maloyan Devil, Bob Brozman & Djeli Moussa Diawara


July 26, 2008. Saturday night in the Mission. With my camping backpack strapped around me, I’m marching to the 24th Street station to catch a train to SFO. I’m heading to Thailand and Cambodia for three weeks. To kick off my journey on a righteous note I slip on my headphones and pick a song at random on my iPodito. Of all the 120 songs this beautiful but haunting blues number plays. It startles me. Does this song portend what lies ahead for me?

By then, an ominous swollen lymph node had popped up by my left clavicle.

2009 - Of Wolf and Man, Metallica

Friday mornings, before almost every single one of my twelve chemotherapy infusions, this song blared from my headphones as I marched out of my flat on Dolores Street to San Francisco General. My spirit roared to the nasty staccato riff that opens the song; the thundering snare; the opening verse: Off through the new day’s mist I run / Out from the new day’s mist I have come / I hunt, therefore I am / Harvest the land, taking of the fallen lamb. I was the wolf. My corporeal nemesis, Mr. Hodgkins, was my prey.

I was so pissed off to live.

2010 - Nutshell (from their MTV Unplugged album), Alice in Chains


Rejoining “the kingdom of the well”—as Sontag called it—was deliriously great at first, but there’s fallout to deal with. Fallout from lowering my head and pushing through grad school and that shitstorm in my life for over a year and a half and never stopping. Staley’s lyrics and wearied voice in this recording sounded like this feeling locked inside:

And yet I fight
And yet I fight
This battle all alone
No one to cry to
No place to call home.

2011 - I’ll Fly Away, Allison Krauss and Gillian Welch

Winter 2011. I’m in Taos, New Mexico for an artist residency. On the day I rented a neo-hippie white Volkswagen Bug to cruise out of Taos, past the Rio Grande Gorge, I see the land and gray sky open before me, nestled by the surrounding mountains. This song comes on my iPod. It’s all so piercingly beautiful—being alive, listening to this immaculate song in a land that feels like home. I cry as I drive. It was a great day to die.

2013 – Always, Atlantic Starr

For years and years I have loved this song. All that time, I think I secretly longed to find someone who I could dedicate this song to. I think I longed to grow into a man who could dedicate this song to someone. In Maria, my sweetheart, mi amorcita, the love of my life (and now my “domestic partner,” according to Kaiser Permanente), I’ve finally arrived there. When I listen to this song, I can easily daydream of us slow dancing to it, surrounded by our loved ones.



2014 – Achilles Last Stand, Led Zeppelin

Over the past four months, I’ve been a bit obsessed with this song. I still remember the first time I listened to it. What immediately struck me was Jones’ galloping bass line and Robert Plant’s voice. Familiar with every Zeppelin album before Presence, I was stunned by the tone of his voice; it’s like the fire in him was tempered. It was evident that this was a different Robert Plant. And it was: during the recording he was wheelchair-bound with a broken ankle and elbow from a serious car accident in Greece.

The rest of the song, with some of Page and Bonham’s most astounding work, is imbued with a soaring, unrelenting, and desperate power. By comparison, it makes “Rock ‘N Roll” seem mundane. The desperation, the-backs-against-the-wall power is what left me in complete awe of this song. I felt validated to read that Plant described Presence as a “cry of survival,” “a cry from the depths.”

Now at the cusp of 35, I feel like this song more than any other. My body’s getting creaky. It doesn’t heal as quickly as it used to, but I feel mighty in a way I didn’t when I was younger.

Meanwhile, the polar ice caps are disintegrating. “Colony Collapse Disorder”—the mass death of honey bees worldwide—has entered our lexicon. Our way of life on this planet is beginning to crumble at an accelerated pace that even we can see. Life is always full of suffering but we’re in for a load of it in this century—if we make it. You know shit’s bad when Stephen Hawking recommends we seek life outside Planet Earth within the next century if we wish to continue this human experiment.

So the outlook’s bleak. Our backs are against the proverbial wall. This is when we’ll see the absolute best and worst of humanity. This is when we’ll truly see what we’re individually and collectively made of, and I’m going down swinging. This is my fight song now.

My Top 10 Album Opening Songs

My boy, J-Oro and I, are at it again, coercing one another into drawing up yet another top 10 list. This time, we gave ourselves another difficult task: picking a mighty list of our favorite album openers. Check out his list here.

With over a century of recorded music to feasibly choose from, there is, inevitably, a galaxy of astounding songs I have never heard of—and never will—let alone songs that didn’t make my list. For this post, I found it helpful to think of it as a glimpse, a documentation of where I am at this point in my life—like those height chart markings cool parents make of their ever-growing kiddos.

In drawing up this list, I found myself biased toward opening ditties for great albums versus ones that are mixed bags, or otherwise lackluster. A great example of an outstanding opening song on a so-so album is Dokken’s “Unchain the Night” from Under Lock and Key. Great fucking song: George Lynch at the peak of his shredding might, strong vocals from Don Dokken, and a mindblowing solo. But the rest of the album, in my most humble opinion?: a shoulder-shrug egh. “Rusty Cage” from Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger is another example (please don’t kill me, Soundgarden fans!)

I also found myself leaning toward openers that I could not imagine the album without. Some examples that didn’t make my list: The Doors “Strange Days,” “Planet Claire” from The B-52s debut album, or “A.I.R.” from Anthrax’s Spreading the Disease. In building my portfolio of top 10 opening songs (I am starting to sound like my work self), the ones that really rose to the top were songs that helped to define their album—songs that were an essential component of their sonic alchemy. For me, a great opener is like a perfect interlude (think “Sunday Morning” by The Velvet Underground, or, to a lesser extent, “Airbag” from Radiohead’s classic OK Computer), the Rickey Henderson of a potent line-up.

All fluff and bluster, aside, let’s get to my Fall 2014 picks (in no particular order)!

1) London Calling from The Clash's London Calling

The title track for The Clash’s classic album. “London Calling " does everything an opening song should do: it sets the underlying emotional tone for the rest of the album; it gets shit going. The song is infused with a foreboding seriousness that other more playful songs like “Clampdown” or their cover of “Brand New Cadillac” lack. “London Calling” is a dystopian anthem. Along with “Lost in the Supermarket,” I think it is the heart of the sprawling, eclectic album. And over thirty years later, the opening song still seems prescient, capturing an ominous tone that our civilization, including metropolises like London, cannot shake. Beatlemania is long, long dead. All that’s left is to howl at our inevitable doom like Joe Strummer does in this gem.

2) Holy Wars…The Punishment Due from Megadeth’s Rust in Peace


It seems fair to begin the write-up for this scorcher by thanking crank and alcohol and god knows what other drugs Dave Mustaine was consuming during the recording of this thrash metal classic.

This 6:33 humdinger of an epic starts off motoring with the classic Megadeth line-up of Mustaine, Friedman, Ellefson, and Menza at play. Like the following song, “Hangar 18,” Mustaine’s lyrics isn’t exactly the meat the listener comes for (though the opening verse: “Brother will kill brother / Spilling blood across the land / Killing for religion /Something I don't understand” encapsulates the song). Instead, of course, listeners like myself get drawn in by the virtuosity of Mustaine’s playing. Backed by Friedman, Ellefson, and Menza, he grabs our throats and compels us to listen with his unorthodox songwriting, the emotional despair and bite in his snarl, grunts, and wails, and his guitar playing. “Holy Wars…The Punishment Due” almost always makes any list of top Megadeth songs (it’s usually #1) and one of the big reasons is his solo in this song. 4:56 – 5:40 is just—jesus fucking christ—jawdropping.

And from there, the final minute of the song just barely holds on. Like every astounding Megadeth song, “Holy Wars,” somehow or another, teeters on the edge of completely derailing from its manic, frenetic pace.

3) Fight Fire With Fire from Metallica’s Ride the Lightning

God I love this song for so many reasons: the lilting acoustic introduction, like a sunshiny day with not one cloud in the sky before 184 beats per minute of brute and doom destroys it. The intro is like Bambi Meets Godzilla, Metallica-style:



I dig “Fight Fire With Fire” because it is clear, from that song alone, that Metallica musically took leaps and bounds from 1983’s Kill ‘Em All to the classic Ride the Lightning a year later under Flemming Rasmussen’s producing. It is unimaginable to think of “Fight Fire With Fire” being a part of Kill ‘Em All, which is more raw and juvenile.

“Fight Fire With Fire” is a brutal, resoundingly mighty and grotesquely beautiful song which perfectly captures Metallica’s relentless power and precision; it’s a 4 minute and 45 second blitzkrieg of pounding double-bass notes, serious shredding, and grunting and shrilling. It’s Black Sabbath on high octane. I suspect it will always be a song that few can surpass in its savage, tightly-honed power.

4) Nutshell from Alice in Chains' MTV Unplugged album


“We Die Young” from their debut album, Facelift, could have made my list, but this song can really get to me.

Back when I was a squirt in high school, my favorite Seattle bands were in this order: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains. In Life After Lymphoma, it’s now Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden (please don’t kill me, Soundgarden fans!), and Pearl Jam (please don’t kill me, Pearl Jammers!). Musically, I think, without question, Soundgarden was the superior band of the four but I think Alice in Chains was extraordinary because of Layne Staley (Jerry Cantrell’s no slouch either). From the get-go, when they were in their early twenties, Alice in Chains’ music revolved around death and self-destruction. Write it off to a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I find Staley to have been an extraordinary vocalist both for the power his voice wielded in its vulnerability and the darkness their songs delved in. There will never be another singer who will sound like him.

Few songs more nakedly show this heart and vulnerability than their acoustic version of “Nutshell.” I listen to Staley sing the opening verse and chorus and I can’t help but sense that he already knew he was done for, that his time was quickly extinguishing and yet, there he sat, boldly singing in a front of a crowd in an intimate setting without cracking. I’m still unsure how a human can do that—how they can sing their pain so plainly and not cry or crumble. But Layne did it here, and on several other songs on this album, notably “Down In a Hole” and “Would?.” (I still get the chills when I watch their recorded performance and he stares back at the camera.)

After listening to “Nutshell,” that live audience must have known they were going to be in for an enthralling, emotional purging. It was an extraordinary performance.

5) The Golden Age from Beck’s Sea Change
Though I rarely ever listen to Sea Change, I couldn’t think of a more perfect song to open the album, a melancholic, acoustic-heavy one that chronicled Beck’s breakup with his then-fiancée, whom he had been with for nine years. After Beck sings the opening line, who isn’t ready to slash their wrists? “The Golden Age” captures that numb, debilitating fog of sadness that envelops us when our hearts are broken—and in a lilting, almost lullaby fashion.

6) De Cara a La Pared from Lhasa de Sela’s La Llorona


Speaking of once-in-a-lifetime singers, Lhasa de Sela is a voice we will never hear from again.

Like “Fight Fire With Fire,” “De Cara a La Pared” is one of those songs you can’t fucking believe exists when you listen to it the first time. It is a haunting, haunting song. Lhasa sounds more like a ghostly, not-of-this-world llorona than a human being in this song with the sheer beauty, grace, and emotional depth of her voice. I rarely listen to songs from her La Llorona or The Living Road albums, but when I do, sometimes I do wonder if she was not of this world. Maybe the breast cancer that took her at age 37 was some sick, humanly way of checking out of Planet Earth after she’d graced our species with her recordings, presence, and performances? When I listen to songs like “De Cara a La Pared,” “El Desierto,” y “Con Todo Palabra” I still question how a human could have such a beautiful, haunting voice.

7) Everything In Its Right Place from Radiohead’s Kid A


I still remember the evening I first listened to this song. I bought the Kid A CD (remember those?) at the Virgin Megastore (remember those?) that used to be on Market Street in downtown San Francisco. After I bought the CD, I popped it into my discman (remember those?), then walked down Market to the Embarcadero Center to watch Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream. I remember being swallowed by the opening electric piano notes, the digitized scratching of Yorke’s vocals, thinking holy shit, this is not OK Computer, then hearing him sing “Everythiiiiiing” four times and being floored by his third incantation of that single word. It was just one word, one goddamn word, but with that hypnotic, drowning background that felt like the sonic replica of Stanley Donwood’s cover artwork, my heart dropped. I probably blinked hard as I slithered past all the people walking along the sidewalk, thinking I can’t believe what I’m hearing just as I looked up to the dark, overcast sky above the downtown skyline and thought, my god, this is it, our future, caught and recorded for us all to hear.

And the rest of Kid A—which Thom Yorke explained was partly about "the generation that will inherit the earth when we've wiped everything out"—never relents. Like any great, great album, Kid A is a timeless artifact of our time on this planet. (And that night in the city was a brutally bleak one that I might never forget.)

8) Little Child Runnin’ Wild from Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly soundtrack


In its own way, this song can slay me, too. Curtis Mayfield’s voice just kills me; his voice was exquisitely beautiful in its falsetto range, clarity, emotional control but most especially in its vulnerability and sense of honesty. (Back when I was in my early twenties, singing Motown and disco songs to myself in my car as I drove around suburbia, I used to wish I could sing like James Brown or Jimmy Ellis from The Trammps. But now, no question, I wish I could sing like my boy, Curtis, if I could come back as a full-fledged soul brother.) Mayfield’s lyrics, singing, and his funky-soulful backing tapestry is an immaculate intro to this classic album that seemed to capture and define the rhythm, sadness, despair, frustrations, and beauty of the inner city landscape in the 1970s.

And the last minute of the song starting at the 4:30 mark: wow. It’s overpowering with the beautiful interweaving of the saxophone solo with the outro strings. Textbook example of how an opening song sets the emotional tone for the rest of the album.

9) Welcome to the Jungle from Guns N’ Roses Appetite for Destruction
What an iconic song, man: the opening guitar notes, Axl Rose’s seemingly neverending howl, and then the nasty-crunchy opening riff. With “Welcome to the Jungle” as the opening act, Guns N’ Roses sets the tone for the debauched glamour that few, if any other albums, more perfectly captured than Appetite for Destruction. After this album—which could simply not be the same without its opening song—Guns N’ Roses was, without a doubt, atop the rock ‘n’ roll world in 1986. Rose’s snarl, his don’t-give-a-fuckness, along with Slash’s sheer bad-assery, was the face of mainstream rock.

And who can forget the song’s breakdown starting at the 3:21 mark?: the driving bassline, the percussion, the crescendo of distorted guitar notes ala the song’s beginning building up to Axl Rose’s singing the classic, classic “Ya know where ya are? You’re in the jungle, baby. You’re gonna diiiiiiiiiiiiiieaaaaah!” (According to legend, a crazed stranger said this to Axl Rose on a schoolyard in Queens years before Guns N’ Roses existed.)

Ever since I discovered this album in its entirety back when I was 28, I have quietly advocated that “Welcome to the Jungle” be played at pediatric wards across the United States for every newborn infant to hear. Few songs could be more bitingly forthright about what awaits.

10) Mouth for War from Pantera’s Vulgar Display of Power
Que puedo decir, I love me some metal. It was oh-so-tempting to put “Brown Sugar” or “War Pigs” or “Purple Haze” here (great pick, Goldman!), but this song does a better job of capturing what my spirit is drawn toward lately. This song’s so bad I don’t even give a fuck if Phil Anselmo is a racist bigot motherfucker from Texas; this album pretty much rules. “Mouth for War” is delicious slaughter. Vulgar Display of Power captured Dimebag Darrell (RIP, brotha) at his absolute peak, synthesizing his distinctive groove metal leanings with some absolutely decimating thrash riffs. For that, you need look no further than the 3:06 mark of this opening song, which can be summed up with two words: HOLY FUCK.



No scientific study has been conducted to prove this, but I shit you not, every single time that part of the song blares through my iPod headphones, my pedaling pace or Elliptical speed at the gym significantly spikes. In my head, I always want to roar with my entire being but since I’m signed up to the Social Contract, I keep it inside (though I often thrash my head to get some of my energy out).

Tough cuts:
-“Brown Sugar” by The Rolling Stones
-“The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife” by Charles Mingus (a bedazzling kaleidoscope of sound)
-“War Pigs” by Black Sabbath
-“Bonded by Blood” by Exodus
-"Mysterions" by Portishead
-“Achilles Last Stand” by Led Zeppelin
-“The Call of Ktulu” by Metallica from their S & M album