bandsplain's yasi salek's life in ten tracks featuring madonna, blink-182, and more
the podcast host on the songs associated with her strongest memories
Yasi Salek, host of the podcast Bandsplain, has made a career out of loving music. She’s talked The Smiths with passerby Naomi Fry and Soundgarden with Hanif Abdurraqib. But before she was a podcaster, she was a kid in Torrance, CA, singing along to Madonna in the car 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.
Pavement
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.
blink-182
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.”
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Carousel is such a blink deep cut! Nice.