Music for Francisco Goldman's SAY HER NAME: Julieta Venegas -- MTV Unplugged

This is my first attempt working with a new concept for this blog. I'm a musician, as I've maybe mentioned before on this blog, and I listen to a fairly wide range of music. I've been looking for a way to talk about some of the music I really like and a way to present some of the results of my continual search for great music that I've never heard. So I'm going to try as best I can to pair every book with an album of music that I think shares some of the tone and the mood of that book. Sometimes it will be music that was mentioned in the book, sometimes it won't be. Sometimes it'll be music I know something about, other times it'll be something I just found in the process trying to match some music with the book. It'll be sort of like coming up with a hint of a soundtrack for a book, only I mean to get some the tone of the prose more than music that would be appropriate for the movie version of the book. I want it to also be a way to think differently about a writer's style, putting in some kind of cultural perspective. We'll see how it goes. First up is Julieta Venegas' live album from 2008, MTV Unplugged, as music to go with Francisco Goldman's Say Her Name, the tragic story of the death of his wife Aura.

Francisco Goldman – SAY HER NAME

In May of 2005 Aura Estrada and Francisco Goldman were married near San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. It was a huge outdoor wedding, suited to the long distance that the guests had travelled to be there. I only dimly remember the particulars of that day: large tents housing the dinner tables, the never ending supply of tequila, the bride and groom floats that cheerily danced above our heads after the more serious march down the aisle. I can vividly recall Frank grinning so widely as to look even less real than the float, more like a child's drawing of a happy face than an actual person. Leading him around this happily entranced figure was the youthful Aura, who, in contrast to Frank's otherworldly look, was very much in her element, dancing lightly around the grass and among the guests as though in her own home.

That was the first and last time I saw Aura Estrada. She died on July 25, 2007, in the unlikeliest of accidents on a beach in Mexico, just after her thirtieth birthday and just before her and Frank's second anniversary. This is the tragedy that opens Say Her Name, a book that that serves as a memorial to Aura, a memoir of love and loss and a meditation on the mystery of other lives.