07 April 2022 15:46
Dust has a noble tradition in American music. The dust storms that prompted farmers to flee Oklahoma to California in the 1930s, the same as those told by John Steinbeck in the novel Furorewere the centerpiece of the Dust bowl ballads, Woody Guthrie’s folk masterpiece. In 2005, however, Bruce Springsteen invoked dust and devils by portraying a bewildered US soldier in Iraq in the acoustic ballad Devils & dust.
There is another US group that comes from dust and always returns to dust: Calexico. The band founded in the mid-nineties in Tucson, Arizona, by Joey Burns and John Convertino feeds on the desert sand that crosses Arizona and Northern Mexico. His frontier music also enhances the mestizo tradition of the southern United States, fishing from Latin America, starting from the cumbia tradition, but also from Cuba and obviously from Mexican mariachi. And it is no coincidence that one of the best pieces of the group’s new album, The lookerto be released on April 8, is entitled dust cumbia and songs of dust in hair and shoes and of the arrival of the monsoon season.
The rest The looker it is a return to the origins of the band, which had long been missing in Tucson because for some years Burns and Convertino moved respectively to Boise, Idaho, and El Paso, Texas. In the summer of 2021, in full pandemic, they got together with old friends and collaborators to work on new songs. They settled in the home studio of longtime collaborator Sergio Mendoza and in the wake of memories they wrote a love letter to the land that inspired them for twenty years. Many of these pieces are sung in Spanish, even more so than in the past, and they sound cheerful. They certainly don’t look like a result of the lockdown.
“We hadn’t seen each other for a long time, so it was cathartic to find each other again, like a party. We really missed being on stage, having a connection with the audience and with the other musicians. This is why we made a record that follows our way of being on stage ”, says Joey Burns in connection from a hotel in Los Angeles, the city where he was born and where his daughters currently live. He is wearing a blue puffer jacket and a black basketball cap.
“I wanted to write songs that could rally people. And nothing can do it better than rhythm. This is why the songs on the disc are so danceable. Our friend and tour partner Sergio Mendoza had built a studio in the backyard, and we chose to do the whole record there: we cooked, played and just stayed together. It was July, monsoon season, and from what I remember it never rained so much in Tucson: it felt like an act of god. When that happens, the desert changes from brown and dry to wet and green. All kinds of animals come out: I have seen many butterflies and also trombidiidae, species of small red spiders. At one point, we had to stop recording because the rain hit the studio roof so hard that the noise drowned out the instruments. We stopped to watch the cascade of water falling on the desert. dust cumbia it speaks precisely of this, of the awakening of the desert ”.
The looker represents well the musical tradition of Tucson, and it is no coincidence that many choruses are sung in Spanish, as Burns confirms: “The previous album, The thread that keeps us, had a very Californian and indie-rock spirit. This time we wanted to do something different. During his tenure, former President Donald Trump had uncovered all the racism and hidden hatred in the country, and we wanted to respond with a hymn to inclusiveness, to celebrate the beauty of the Tucson community and the Sonoran desert. But also retrace the history of our band, in which people from different backgrounds enter and leave such as Gaby Moreno, who was born in Guatemala, or Camilo Lara, who is from Mexico City, or Sergio Mendoza himself, who was born in Nogales , on the border between Mexico and the United States “. The musician speaks in a relaxed way, pronouncing the words a lot. He often laughs, he seems to enjoy himself during the interviews.
Another song that stands out from the very first listen is Cumbia peninsula, which speaks of people on the run and an endless search. It is a cryptic text. Is it a song about migrants crossing the border between Mexico and the United States? “Honestly, I can’t tell you exactly what it’s about. I like to write for others to find meaning in what we do. I’ll give you an example: in 2021 Robert Plant and Alison Krauss covered one of our songs, Quattro (World drifts in). According to their interpretation Quattro it spoke of migrants who left everything behind looking for a better life. But I actually wrote it with the natives in mind tarahumara, originally from the Mexican state of Chihuahua, for whom running long distances serves to communicate between different villages, but also to drug traffickers who force people to work opium and heroin in northern Mexico. There is no right or wrong interpretation of the music, they are all fine. Cumbia peninsula, for example, I composed it thinking about how technology connects us but also makes us dependent. We are like children in a toy store who can’t get out. I was also thinking about political extremism, about the climate crisis, about my friends. All of these themes are within the song, but filtered through abstraction. And I like the contrast between the festive music and the dark lyrics ”.
Calexico have a fairly close relationship with Italy and will return to our country for two concerts (on April 26 at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome and on the 27 at Alcatraz in Milan) for the first time since the pandemic. “I miss your country, can’t wait to go back,” says Burns. “The last time we were in Italy I met Dori Ghezzi, wife of the singer-songwriter Fabrizio De André. She gave me two CDs, the collections In an obstinate and opposite direction, and he told me the story of their kidnapping in Sardinia and other stories. De André’s music struck me a lot, especially the songs from his early career and those of My cross. I’ve never told anyone, but those songs inspired Cumbia peninsula, in particular the changes of agreements. I love his voice, his timbre, the way he tells stories. After my meeting with Dori we had thought of participating in a tribute to De André, but we were unable to organize ourselves. Then we are friends of Vinicio Capossela and guitarist Alessandro ‘Asso’ Stefana, who in their own way are carrying on that songwriting tradition “. But the influences of The looker they are a lot. “In the studio we listened to everything from reggaeton to Arcade Fire, from Bomba Estéreo to rapper Lis Nas X, which I discovered thanks to my daughters. I took inspiration from him to write the chorus of the song Constellationfor example”.
What should you expect from the US band’s tour? Certainly a lot of people on stage, explains Burns. “There will be seven of us, a small orchestra. Others will sing with me, especially helping me with Spanish. We wanted the richest sound possible, a return in style. Obviously we will do several songs from the disc, but also songs from our old repertoire. We are also trying a famous cumbia called affectionatebut also Dear god by Xtc, a band we love very much. They are very current. Seeing what is happening in Ukraine I thought about the verse of their song Generals and majors: ‘The generals and the majors always seem so sad, unless they go to war’ ”.
Besides the dust, there is another thing without which Calexico’s music could not exist: the frontier. The name of the band itself evokes the Californian city of the same name on the border with Mexico. And the frontier is also evoked in this record, in the song Step , whose words are signed by the songwriter and poet Pieta Brown. “We fight for a border that is difficult to understand and harder to find than the truth in these lands,” she reads the song. El Paso, the city where another border singer lives, Cormac McCarthy, who has always been a source of inspiration for the band.
“People tend to be more open-minded if they live on the border between two states. That opening is important to us, we have always nourished ourselves with it from an artistic point of view. And then it’s natural to migrate, animals like humans do. When I first moved to Tucson, I immediately felt the influence of the Europeans who founded it. I realized it had nothing to do with other places I love like Kansas or Montana. I like spicy food, variety, the circulation of ideas and art forms. Borders are just symbols. Instead of thinking of them as limits, I like to think of them as an open window to something, ”concludes Burns.