“ Nightmare, uncertainty, turmoil, chaos.”
Those are the words that Jimmy Gomez, aka Taboo, told LAist he’d use to describe the night the Eaton Fire broke out, when he and his family had to evacuate their home.
Best known as a member of the Grammy-winning hip-hop group the Black Eyed Peas, Taboo is originally from Boyle Heights, but has lived in Pasadena with his wife and children since 2017.
For 10 years before that, Taboo and his family also called Altadena home. Two of his sons went to the elementary school at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, which was destroyed in the January 2025 fire.
”We were all trying to get down from our area, and it was kind of like gridlock. We had never witnessed that before as a family, let alone in our community,” Taboo says of the evacuation. “We saw the fire right on the mountaintop [in the San Gabriel Mountains] and we made amends to say goodbye to our house.”
Writing ‘Stand Strong’
“Stand Strong” grew out of conversations Taboo and his then 8-year-old daughter Jett had while the family stayed the night in a hotel with their two dogs, not knowing if they would have a house to go back to. (Ultimately, their home was spared. They returned a month later, but had to replace nearly everything inside because of smoke damage.)
The two also collaborated on a song called “Más Melodía,” for the third season of DORA, the reboot of Dora the Explorer, on Paramount+, which Taboo and Jett guest starred in. But Taboo says this time was “more speaking from the heart, a little bit more of a testimonial that my daughter wanted to advocate for the youth.”
That’s why Taboo says the song starts with a spoken-word introduction by Jett, “ because she set the tone for this whole song,” he explains. “She's like, ‘I just wanna talk from the heart, dad, and say what I'm feeling and just be there for my friends.’”
The introduction says, in part, “When you’re a kid, you just want to live the kid life, but last year was a really hard time. During the fires, I would hear about friends and families losing their homes.”
The rap that follows includes questions about who should be held accountable for the Eaton and Palisades fires. Taboo shared a version of the rap in an interview with LAist last July.
Taboo says writing the song with Jett was cathartic.
“We needed a better way to use our time than to just sulk,” he says. So they started ping ponging ideas off of each other, “ And it just became something really fun because [...] when you're in a moment of chaos and disorder and dismay and uncertainty, you need to find ways to take your mind off of it. And fortunately, Jett and I found that.”
Involving community and giving back
The final version of the song’s chorus also includes words and vocals by artist Angelica Nicole, and voices of some of Jett’s friends and members of Pasadena’s Mayfield Senior School choir who were also affected by the Eaton Fire singing, “Pasadena strong, Altadena strong, stand strong.”
“We just created this beautiful mosaic of sound and testimonial,” Taboo says. “ The most powerful component to the inspiration of this whole healing song was her being a kid, me being an adult with no answers and just feeling so vulnerable.”
This week, one year after the fires broke out, Taboo and Jett performed “Stand Strong” at “A Concert for Altadena,” benefitting the Altadena Builds Back Foundation. The song’s release is also part of an initiative designed to raise funds for a local middle school softball team.
