I love listening to music when painting, driving and exercising and sometimes even while writing. I get inspired and certain feelings are triggered. When I listen to Cafe Tacvba, my favorite Mexican rock band, I’m inspired to be bold in my creativity.
I admire them for the freedom they take musically and lyrically. They are bold and imaginative as they take the liberty to fuze Mexican folk, electronic, punk, pop, progressive, futuristic, and pan-national ideas with alternative and classic rock. Their lyrics are just as inventive. And that description is just scratching the surface of what they do.
I heard my first Cafe Tacvba song, Dejate Caer, when I was studying abroad in Mexico City in my early twenties. I was at once mesmerized and made it my mission to find everything they’d ever come out with. I found so many more favorites and continue do so with every album they’ve released since then.
During my stay in Mexico City I enjoyed writing short stories and creating art, but I was determined to become a pediatrician, so I didn’t take my interests seriously and only seldomly indulged those itches. Yet every time I listened to Cafe Tacvba, my desire to write and paint grew stronger. Their music struck a chord with me and worked some kind of magic in letting out my truest inner self. I eventually accepted writing and painting as important passions in my life and I give them the necessary time and space. I’m also making a difference in children’s lives, just as I wanted to back then, although it’s through the gift of inspiration, literature, and education instead of medicine. I like to call it medicine for the soul.
Cafe Tacvba works like magic for me. I listen and I create. Do you have a band or a song that moves you?
Can you find how their song Las Flores inspired a page in Sami and the Orange Balloon?
