Role Models: Rodriguez Sounds Like the Rez to Hataałii

I was probably five years old or so when I first listened to Rodriguez. My dad had this old Jeep  Liberty with the seats all torn up and shit. It smelled weird but it wasn’t too bad. He and my older brother (who is about eight years older than me) would sit up front, and I in the back. It was just the three of us for a little bit. My mom was pursuing her PhD at ASU. Me, my dad, and my older brother lived six hours north of Phoenix, in Fort Defiance, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. We lived in this double-wide trailer in what I didn’t know at the time was a bad neighborhood. Rio Puerco.  

Anyway, we would drive back-and-forth from the reservation to Phoenix to see mom. My dad and my older brother always wore tank tops and those black sports shades that army people/cops always wear. And I was always in the backseat. Small enough to not really see out the window that well yet. Sometimes I’d take my seatbelt off and lay horizontally across the backseats to sleep if it was a nighttime journey. I don’t know why my dad let me do that. The window tint film was all melted and bubbly. I remember thinking that the bubbles looked like ships in the sky. I’m not sure why I’m writing more about that damn Jeep than Rodriguez. Maybe I’m just now realizing how much that Jeep fit the strangeness and sadness of that period of my life. But my dad did play Rodriguez sometimes on those drives. The drive is about six hours, but I’ve seen just about the entire trip underneath a sunset. The true desert with saguaro silhouettes. My dad and brother both had really long hair, which they would put in a ponytail. 

Years later, I was going to this boarding school in Farmington, New Mexico. The bus would pick up kids from all over the reservation and bus us to Farmington every weekend. The trip from Window Rock was about three hours, and very pretty too. It was always in the evening. In the winter, we’d get to the dormitories after dark. It’d get pretty cold up there, and I used to wear boots and a flat-brimmed felt hat. There were only about 10 of us on that whole bus. We were all close, though. The route went past Shiprock sometimes. And sometimes over the high NAPI farms, where you could see the Colorado Rockies 70 miles to the north. And on that NAPI route you could still see Shiprock piercing up through a horizon somewhere. The route was very barren but for miles of desert landscape. Not saguaro desert, but shrubland and mesas. I think it’s called the Colorado Plateau. I was listening to a lot of Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait at the time, and plenty of Paul Westerberg. I was about 16, and had completely forgotten about Rodriguez by that point, until I watched that documentary about him in my dorm room. I was hooked again and have been ever since. 

It felt like nostalgia, to rediscover a sound from way back when I was a child. I can’t remember most things about my childhood, but I can remember the distinct qualities of Rodriguez’s music that drew me back in. I grew up listening to KTNN a lot, which is a radio station on the Navajo Nation that plays a lot of country, and country sung by Native people. But there’s something in Rodriguez’s voice that immediately led me to believe that this was another Native person singing, and I feel like that might’ve helped pull me into his music. But this wasn’t country music — it was, like, inter-dimensional or something. 

Fast forwarding to the last four years, I moved to Albuquerque to go to the University of New Mexico. I think these past few years have been very pivotal for me in many aspects. I had only grown up and been around other Navajo people up until I moved to Albuquerque. It’s a very awesome place. Lots of nastiness and interesting people. The winters get very cold, and the summers get very hot. I ride the buses around; it’s a free transit system. I like to listen to Rodriguez and check out the city. It’s nice when it rains or snows here, too. I like to think it brings out a certain spirit or character when it rains. 

I think it was important for me to discover who Rodriguez was, because he was the first person I could be inspired by musically who sort of looked like me. I only idolized white songwriters up until I knew who Sixto was. He resembled a lot of what being Indigenous American meant to me, not only in his songwriting but in his speaking cadence as well. And that has made me feel a little bit better about doing what I do. There was never really anyone who was Native putting out music that I enjoyed listening to, let alone any Navajo people. I grew up performing traditional Navajo songs around the reservation when I was a kid. My mom is very culturally traditional in the Navajo sense, and so I’ve always liked listening to traditional/ceremonial Navajo songs. But outside of that, there was not much out there. I know there are some very unrecognized country and folk songs by native artists, which I’m just now getting into, but I only ever really listened to Mac Demarco and The Replacements growing up. I’ve had a lot of inner-conflicts about who I am, but I think everybody goes through that. I’ll always be proud of where I come from; it’s just who I am is what I gripe about. And I like to think making songs is good for that.  

I like to listen to that song “Cause.” The lyrics go: “Cause I see my people trying to drown the sun/in weekends of whisky sours/Cause how many times can you wake up in this comic book/and plant flowers.” 

The music Rodriguez makes sounds very desperate and sad to me, and I think it matches well with what I’ve seen growing up on the Navajo rez. Gallup, New Mexico, too. Albuquerque, even. I’ve seen a lot of sadness in people everywhere, but I like to think that there’s a Western sadness. A lot of people on the reservation are very sad, because they don’t really have anywhere to go or anything to do. No one to go to, or be. There’s some poor infrastructure, and a lot of stray dogs everywhere. I think the reservation might have retained some of the cooler parts of the past and inherited the bad parts of our time. But the land is really phenomenal. There are plenty of sad stories there, and some really good ones. I’m just trying to paint a picture, because when I listen to Rodriguez I’m usually in motion and looking at certain things. But it really is all about the people. 

I like how sad songs can almost capture the seemingly impossible, inner complexities of characters. His songs are very sweet at times, too. Just good acoustic chords and some string arrangements could get a really good point across. But with lyrics, it’s like you can almost touch the impossibility of nature outside of the human experience, and that meeting of points is a fascinating and beautiful thing to me. Some of his songs are really simple, too, and that gives me a lot of hope because I’m lazy. I don’t know. I just like it when someone sounds like mesas or far away fat clouds, which Rodriguez’s music does. But with the added lyricism, it sounds like the Rez to me.

I think that I’ve learned the better parts of my songwriting style through examining the way Rodriguez’s lyrics twist and scatter, but circle back. In trying to replicate his style (and many others’, of course), I’ve come to realize that it’s too hard to try and write like someone else, and you should just try to find out what’s special about your own style and build off of that. I think that either way, if you write the truth, other humans will recognize it in there somewhere.