Music is the beating of an internal life, one of feeling, the groove that links the mind, body, memory, into the unknown, the unconscious, the muse, the Holy Ghost being prompted to reveal solutions to wild problems and give form to the formless. Patty Smith, the writer and performer, says she listens to Bach when she writes so it abstractly informs her own process. Roberto Bolaño listened to Glen Gould’s Goldberg Variations while writing 2666 as did Thomas Bernhard when he wrote The Loser. Langston Hughes and Jack Kerouac listened to jazz for its rhythms and syncopations which you can feel in their work. Music speaks across arts as it speaks across place and time. Even its count recalls specific scenes over a period of life, of history, that allows the writer’s mind to be transported and immersed in an era. In my case, it is the mid 1980s. Anything after would break the spell, pull me out of time like a drummer playing too fast. Those songs aren’t just any songs that make up the age but speak directly to the character – the 20–21-year-old me and informs his worldview, his emotional and intellectual life, of anxieties, fears, desires, dreams, and hopes even as they change meaning from freedom through incarceration and its aftermath. Immersed in writing, these songs recall memories. People not thought of in years reappear as they did when you last saw them and speak to you of what’s missing from your narrative and how the emotions connected to moments now revealed by music. It gives you an honest reckoning of your story. It’s as if it arises from the music – “Sing to me o’ muse.” These songs reminded me, the older writer, how the narrator understands the boy at this unspoken level in his early 20s. I listened to many more songs, but as Borges said, any list is defined by its omissions, so we’ll just have to let the others go for a future time.
“Wish You Were Here.” Pink Floyd
The song about an absent band member confined to a mental institution was playing on my ex-wife’s car radio when she picked me up on my release day, reminding me I’d exchanged “my walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage,” realizing I wasn’t the singer, but the subject.
“Stealing.” Uriah Heep
A rock hymnal about a man on the run who stands on a ridge and shuns religion, while embracing his flaws like when I stood on the edge of bluff in a desert prison staring at the impossible future.
“I Melt With You.” Modern English
The only love song from the Cold War that makes sense of love in a time of nuclear annihilation filled with beauty and horror not unlike waiting for Vesuvius’ pyroclastic flow or wildfires ripping through neighborhoods or sitting alone in a bomb shelter that locks from the outside.
“Changes.” David Bowie
Time, change, and acceptance in a prophetic song you can sing to is classic Bowie that had its meaning warped for me after incarceration because I’d become one of those children “that you spit on as” I tried to change my world.
“The Time Warp.” Rocky Horror Picture Show cast
A party in transvestite, mad scientist’s castle where the disco era crashes head-on into science-fiction, camp, a costumed Hollywood musical extravaganza, full of carnal dance instructions, finding yourself in the frenzy, and the feeling you never want this night to stop, but dawn found me smeared with Columbia’s glitter and makeup in a double bed.
“Also sprach Zarathustra.” Richard Strauss
The music itself swells the soul but include Kubrick’s scene of a sun setting over the monolith below a crescent moon to the heartbeat of creation in the timpani as an apeman discovers how to make a weapons fades into a space station from the bone weapon spinning in the air and you have the awe I felt watching Haley’s comet from the desert bluff where I shunned religion.
“The Weight.” The Band
An almost Biblical narrative of being down and out rolling into Nazareth and given a sense that among the drifters, dharma bums, and road wandering losers, you can still get a hand to carry your load not unlike when I stood in the downtown bus station in the City of Angels after fleeing Vegas with my old army duffel bag waiting for a woman to help me carry my load.
“Hey, Joe.” Jimmy Hendrix
A folktale of adultery filled with masculine shame and resignation that his only option was to murder his woman and head to Mexico because that’s what society and his social code of honor expected from him, the same kinds of expectations that led a lot of us to prison.
“Kashmir.” Led Zepplin
The traveler of both time and place fills us with images of transcendence to a driving beat that makes us all ache for an enlightenment that could transport us beyond the high fence strung with concertina wire into mystic badlands to disappear like Lao Tzu.
“Bad Company.” Bad Company
Disillusioned soldiers desert Civil War battlefields to wander the American West with six-guns in their hands filled with longing, regret, and acceptance of their fate that we kids mimicked in our gunfighter fantasies out on the desert, but we wouldn’t understand what it meant to be bad company for years.
J.D. Mathes grew up a feral child in the deserts of the American Southwest who loved to read library books. He is a PEN America Writing for Justice Fellow, the result of which is Of Time and Punishment: A Memoir, forthcoming October 28, 2025. Other books of his include Ahead of the Flaming Front: A Life on Fire, an essay collection Fever and Guts: A Symphony, The Journal West: Poems, and Shipwrecks and Other Stories. Among things he’s done to support his writing, and two daughters have been a wildland firefighter on a helicopter-rappel crew, oilfield chemist, and in logistics at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica where he led the Southernmost Writers Workshop in the World. www.jdmathes.com
In his second memoir, Of Time and Punishment, J.D. Mathes recounts the months after his release from prison to a halfway house in 1986 where he tries to regain his place in the world by setting out to find work, reconnect with old friends, and create new relationships, along with his setbacks, humiliations, and struggles with alcohol.
