MBW’s Key Songs In The Life Of… is a series in which we ask influential music industry figures about the tracks that have – so far – defined their journey and their existence. Compiling the playlist of their life this time is Influence Media Partners founder Lylette Pizarro. The Key Songs In The Life Of… series is supported by Sony Music Publishing.
A work/life balance is important. And sometimes it can be unexpectedly useful in pretty niche spaces.
Influence Media Partners founder Lylette Pizarro, for instance, used it as the framework for the seven tunes she names in MBW’s Key Songs In the Life Of… feature.
She’s picked tracks that have played a big part in her career to date – as well as some that don’t just connect her to family members but were recorded by family members.
After starting out in artist management, most notably as part of the team that drove Kelis to her early 2000s commercial peak, and then flourishing in the culture/brand crossover at RPM GRP, Pizarro set up Influence Media in 2018.
Since then, Influence – run by Pizarro alongside Lynn Hazan – has managed music investment funds (with backing from BlackRock and Warner Music Group) to acquire catalogs involving artists including Future, Blake Shelton, Julia Michaels, Enrique Iglesias, and more.
Most recently it launched a frontline label, SLANG, headed up by Influence Media Partner and Founding Advisor (and Pizarro’s husband), Rene McLean.
Regarding her Key Songs selection, Pizarro says: “It was incredibly hard; I felt tortured at times. But, also, for all of us who love music, it’s a beautiful journey. Honestly, I was listening to certain songs with tears in my eyes thinking back to such beautiful memories.”
Those memories include world exclusives from Eminem, being blown away by a young Lauryn Hill, and listening to a whole lot of Latin music in the Bronx…
This goes back to growing up in our first home in the Bronx. I was about 11, so these are really early days.
When I hear these records and I think back to that time, I can almost smell the air. I remember my grandmother cooking classic Latin dishes that took a whole day to make. I think about the summers and the air conditioner units in the window. I’m sure you could feel summer differently then than we do now.
My parents loved music and they would play everything, from Stevie Wonder to Neil Diamond. But Latin music owned our household and that meant everyone from Ruben Blades to Gran Combo to Johnny Pacheco to Hector Lavoe: that was what our home was filled with.
Listening back to some of those records was wild, but I had to settle on one song, and this is just so brilliant. The original is by Beny Moré, which we would also play. But the rhythm and the delivery of the vocal on this version, it’s beautiful.
2) Nina Simone, Feeling Good (1965)
I spent most of my childhood between the Bronx and Harlem, but I ended up going to High School in the city, on the Upper East Side, which widened my musical palette.
It was the early ‘90s, and I was already obsessed with Wu-Tang and Mary J. Blige. Then my classmates introduced me to Phish, Nirvana, and INXS. It was a beautiful time in music.
But there was one classmate who was wise beyond her years. She showed me that there were other worlds within New York that I didn’t know existed, including jazz clubs. Most importantly, she introduced me to Nina Simone.
I remember hearing Feeling Good and realizing just how powerful that was. I can almost still feel it now.
It was the tone of her voice that made me feel something so deep. It was just different. You can feel her pain, her journey, and her fight in every sound. That, coupled with her bold activism, was unlike anything I had experienced before.
3) Fugees, Killing Me Softly With His Song (1996)
In college [Cornell University], I would hang out with my friend Alex Gale, who was in a band called Dujeous [and is now at Apple Music], and my other friend, Noah Kerner, who was a DJ.
They were from New York, so we would talk music and stuff, yeah, and they introduced me to a song by a girl named Lauryn Hill, who was at Columbia University at the time. I remember thinking, ‘What?!, she made this song and she’s our age?!’. And she was from New Jersey!
So I borrowed – and never gave back – Alex’s Fugees CD. That whole album had a combination of so many sounds and ideas that I had never experienced before – and certainly never heard on one record before. I played it over and over again.
Because of the way time and life work, Lauryn and I ended up living in the same neighborhood and becoming friends. Thanks to that, one of the highlights of my life was that we got to go to the Global Citizen Festival, which she headlined last year. And seeing my two children singing along to her songs in the rain in Central Park was a really special moment.
To this day I don’t know if she knows what her music has meant to me – maybe she’ll find out through this!
4) Kelis, Milkshake (2003)
This is connected to me changing as a young executive and learning about the music business.
I was day-to-day manager with Rene for Kelis during the Milkshake period and the Tasty album. That experience taught me so much.
We were working really hard to break Kelis as an artist in the US. The rest of the world had accepted her, but the US maybe wasn’t ready for the sound. Eventually, Milkshake did it, but it took a really big commitment to break that record.
It was all hands on deck, and I learned so much about the journey of breaking music during that time: how different audiences respond, when people are ready for something, and when they’re not ready for it.
Because of that experience, I will forever feel connected to Milkshake.
5) Eminem, Lose Yourself (2002)
This is around the same time, but something very different.
Rene and I used to own this music conference where we would fly in hundreds of DJs who really had their pulse on culture and were responsible for breaking music.
In 2002 there was this really powerful movie called Eight Mile coming out. We were close with [Eminem manager] Paul Rosenberg and his team for many reasons, and at least partly because Rene was part of the original team that introduced Eminem. They were big believers in what we did.
Our conference was about small, intimate live showcases, and that year, because he supported us, Paul wanted to basically premiere Eight Mile at the conference. Then, afterwards, Em did a special underplay for a few hundred people, the DJs, and just some of the folks on the island of Puerto Rico, which is where we were that year.
They were all hearing this song, Lose Yourself, for the first time and it was an instant, automatic connection; it gave you chills to watch.
6) Jackie McLean, Omega (1963)
So, this brings us closer to my family life and my life as a mom.
My husband, Rene, his granddad [Jackie McLean], and his dad [René McLean] are really accomplished jazz musicians, so I thought it was important to introduce jazz to my children.
What’s interesting is that my kids love everything, all types of music – but at the same time, every now and again, they would say, ‘Mom, enough with the jazz!’ [laughs]. I’m like, ‘Guys, this is an important part of your legacy; it’s important that you know these songs’.
Later on, a friend who had dropped them off said that he was playing satellite radio in the car and Zoe, my daughter, had picked out a song and said, ‘Hey, this is my granddad.’
And then, this year, Zoe surprised me at a Black History Month Performance. She performed a tap dance solo to this particular track and blew me away. To see her do that, paying homage to her legacy, was a full-circle moment.
I wasn’t sure I’d got through to them, but I got there!
7) Bill Withers, Lovely Day (1977)
This was hard. One choice left: Should I go back to different work experiences? Should I connect it to something I’m doing currently?
In the end, I asked my kids, when you think of me, what song do you think of? And they reminded me of a tradition: every morning I would start the day by playing Lovely Day by Bill Withers for them; that’s the way I would wake them up.
It’s something that’s very joyful to them, and that was really intentional. I remember waking up to the terrible sound of an alarm, the stress, hustle and anxiety of it – and I wanted to change that for them.
Every time you hear that song, it can change your mood, it can change your day, it’s so powerful. And now that’s the song they associate with me.
I played a lot of music to them and with them when they were little, but they both said, ‘No mom, this is the one we think of when we think of you.’ I’m happy with that!
