Rock star: Jaya Saxena on Other Music, gemstones, and building solidarity

“Other Music is like a fun, messy library for music. You almost never find what you were looking for, but you always find something you never knew you wanted.” Jaya Saxena was 17 when she was asked to describe her favourite record store in Teen People magazine's Summer Music Special of 2004. Now in her 30s, Jaya is a published author of non-fiction, and a Senior Writer at Eater.com. Like my earlier guest, Lisa Wong Macabasco, Jaya writes about food and culture. She's not a restaurant critic, she's an essayist. Similarly, she's not a geologist, but she loves gems and minerals (the subject of her book, Crystal Clear!).

When I found Jaya, she had forgotten she was in Teen People, so I had to jog her memory with the details. “I was around a lot of adults who worked for these magazines,” she told me, “so I probably did talk to someone.”

Jaya spoke with me in October, 2021. She told me about Other Music, her career, and how she's building solidarity with peers in her industry.

Digressions: indie sleaze bands (The Bravery, The Strokes, etc.), brick-and-mortar stores and CDs, online safety, queer identities and being "born this way"

Podcast notes:

Find Jaya's work on her site: www.jayasaxena.com

Get her books: www.goodreads.com/book/show/33589940-basic-witches (with Jess Zimmerman)

www.goodreads.com/book/show/52593434-crystal-clear

www.goodreads.com/book/show/26114400-the-book-of-lost-recipes

www.goodreads.com/book/show/30009779-dad-magazine (with Matt Lubchansky)

Find me on my site: www.annasoper.ca

And on Twitter and Instagram: [at] TeenPeoplePod
And on Tumblr: www.teenpeoplepod.tumblr.com

Music:

Intro: Mild Wild, ‘Line Spacing’. CC BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

Outro (2000s Indie Sleaze Disco-Rock riff) © Anna Soper

Teen People is recorded in Kingston/Katarokwi, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and the Huron-Wendat.