Life in 10 Tracks is a feature series that is all about being injected into a moment in someone’s life through music. In it, passersby reminisce on the tracks that remind them of bad haircuts, breakups, and all of the joyful, poignant moments in between.
Yasi Salek, host of the podcast Bandsplain, has made a career out of loving music. But before she was a podcaster, she was a kid in Torrance, CA, singing along to Madonna with her mom and saving her allowance money for CDs. Here, she shares the songs associated with some of her strongest memories, from first love and first-generation iPods to bad breakups and looking for the divine.
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Madonna was my first favorite artist because my mom always loved her. I don’t remember a time before Madonna. We’d sing along together in the car. My mom is very glamorous and larger than life too. I got her to buy me this denim mini skirt with leopard patches and white ruffles underneath from this store on Fairfax in West Hollywood that doesn’t exist anymore called For Kids Only. I would tape Madonna’s music videos, “Like A Prayer” and “Express Yourself” and “Cherish,” off Vh1 and watch them over and over, dancing along in my little mini Madonna outfit.
“Like a Prayer” by Madonna / Listen to the album Like a Prayer (Sire Records, 1989)
Nirvana was a big deal for me obviously but more life changing was Hole. I found the Live Through This CD sitting on the top of the garbage can in the locker bay at school (god). It’s hard to explain how important it was at that age to see and hear Courtney Love, to see a pop star like that, to be shown a different way to be a woman in the world — imperfect, feminine, messy, glamorous, angry. It opened the world up in a way.
“Violet” by Hole / Listen to the album Live Through This (DGC Records, 1994)
This was one of the first bands I found on my own, not through MTV or friends or whatever, but through a book by Gina Arnold called Route 666: On The Road to Nirvana. I saved up my allowance money and bought the album Let It Be and then I found Pleased To Meet Me on vinyl at a garage sale by my house for $1 like a week later (god). I still have it. I think “Alex Chilton” really perfectly captures that feeling of connection you can have with music, especially as a teenager — but it can happen anytime. In a lot of ways it feels like falling in love, in the sense that falling in love is just witnessing a projection of yourself in the other, which is ultimately just a projection of the divine.
“Alex Chilton” by The Replacements / Listen to the album Pleased to Meet Me (Sire Records Company, 1987)
I grew up in Torrance, which is in the South Bay near LA, and pop punk is my birth right. I think being a teenager is really lonely because it’s this time where you’re so desperately preoccupied with projecting an identity that probably doesn’t match up with your actual Self (well I was anyway). This song is about loneliness. I used a line from this song as my senior yearbook quote: “School life was a woken dream.”
“Carousel” by blink-182 / Listen to the album Buddah (Kung Fu Records, 1998)
I got really into ecstasy in high school and discovered the profound sadness that could exist folded into this kind of upbeat electronic music.
“Better Off Alone” by Alice Deejay / Listen to the album Who Needs Guitars Anyway (Violent Music B.V., 2000)
When I was 21 I lived in San Francisco and I was deeply miserable and I would walk and walk and walk around the city every day with my first generation iPod listening to this song, and the whole Slanted and Enchanted album really, wondering when this pre-production would be over and my life would start for real.
“Summer Babe (Winter Version)” / Listen to the album Slanted and Enchanted (Matador Records, 1992)
I missed a huge chunk of contemporary music in the like middle of the aughts, basically all I listened to for several years was The Diplomats and The Smiths. I think it’s good to take long breaks from paying attention to the outside world.
“Dipset Anthem” by The Diplomats / Listen to the album Diplomatic Immunity (UMG Recordings, Inc., 2003)
My first love was in high school (shout out Patrick Dugan) but my second real, true love didn’t happen until I was 30 and this song came out around that time and whenever I feel dulled or bored or nihilistic I put it on and it draws a little blood back to the surface of my life because it reminds me of all the feeling life can bring up and out in you:
Get a little closer, let fold
Cut open my sternum and pull
My little ribs around you
The rungs of me be under, under you
That’s how love feels right? You want to cut yourself open and absorb the other person. Not sure it’s healthy but we’ve all gotten too healthy for the wrong reasons in my opinion.
“Fireshrine” by Purity Ring / Listen to the album shrines (4AD Ltd, 2012)
I went through a really bad break up in 2013, the kind where the fallout is absolutely outsized compared to the actual importance of the relationship, just because you are brittle and tired and worn down and it’s the last crack in the structure that makes the house collapse. Anyway I still wasn’t right in 2014 and I spent months in bed listening to this song (and album) on repeat. I love it still because to me it sounds like surrender.
“Ultraviolence” by Lana Del Rey / Listen to the album Ultraviolence (Interscope Records, 2014)
This is the last song that made me feel a profound, almost spiritual high when I listened to it. I look for god everywhere but especially in music and I did recently find it here.
“Loud Bark” by Mannequin Pussy / Listen to the album I Got Heaven (Epitaph, 2023)
words and images provided by yasi salek, edited by meghan racklin