Interview: Calexico

Tucson, AZ-based folk-rock outfit Calexico is currently finishing up a European tour in support of its recent September release, "Carried to Dust."

SoundSpike contributor Maya Marin sat down with front man Joey Burns to discuss the making of the new album, the variety of guest artists and much more.

Calexico goes above and beyond what most people expect of a band, which is to put out their own records and tour. You continually cross borders, musically and professionally, playing with lots of different musicians and working on different projects simultaneously. Do you think there's an inherent restlessness at work here, or might you run the risk of getting bored otherwise?

No, I think that we're just really forcing it and we're excited. We're just as good at multi-tasking as all these people here in this great city of Los Angeles. It's a social aspect, too, to the music. It's inviting. We meet a lot of people. A lot of the musicians that we play with are from different countries and it's exciting too. It's a great opportunity and I feel like the music itself is open and there's lots of room for other guests. Also, I think it's just a natural thing for musicians to want to collaborate.

It's not surprising that you have a lot of guest artists on your new record. For example Sam Beam [of Iron & Wine] whom you've worked with in the past with great success, Pieta Brown, Spanish singers Amparo Sanchez and Jairo Zavala. I read that you sort of work with whomever is passing through town at the moment, which calls to mind the Old West idea in those old serials where whoever steps off the stagecoach is the guest artist of that week. That's what it reminded me of.

You can attach your own picture. For us, a lot of this comes from traveling ourselves--getting to go to Europe or traveling through the States or North America. You meet people. You get excited. You have a lot similarities and you wind up exchanging numbers and then all of a sudden you start sending and receiving musical tracks through the mail, which is also very exciting, or like Jairo and Sam Beam and Pieta, they just happened to be coming through town. The collaborations are not that complicated. It's very easy and natural. In fact, the easier it is, usually, the better the results.

Were the songs written with these guests artists in mind or had the songs been written prior and you thought so-and-so would be great for this?

Exactly. It was the latter. There were songs that were written or songs that were on their way to being written, like with Pieta, that song "Slowness." I was thinking that it would be great to do something with her because we've worked once before together. She lived in Tucson a number of years ago. I knew that she was coming through town and we'd been talking about trying to do an EP or a recording again with her, so I just felt like, since we'd been talking about it, we might as well do something, so I wrote a song with her in mind.

I believe you're working on her album as well?

Yeah, we've been talking about doing that and we recorded a Woody Guthrie song, "This Land Is Your Land," and Iris DeMent, Bo Ramsey, John Convertino and myself all played on the song. It's a great song.

You seem to also constantly reinvent your own songs as you play them from show to show. Do you use the stage as a way to figure out the best arrangement or instrumentation for songs? For example, you've got "The News About William," which has been around for a while, but you've just now recorded it for "Carried to Dust."

John and I wrote the song for a tour-only CD. We do these CDs that we sell only at the shows as a way of saying thanks to the audiences that come and to show a different side of what we do. It was such an interesting song. John kept commenting that he thought it was one of the best things we'd done in the studio lately, so I thought, "Why don't we play it live?" Once we started playing live, Martin Wenk, our German trumpet player from Berlin, asked why we weren't recording that for the new record, "Carried to Dust." I said, "I don't know. I guess I forgot about it." There were a lot of songs coming in, so he reminded me and he had gone out and bought a French horn. That's a difficult instrument to play. He practiced and practiced so he was really adamant about doing it. I'm really glad we did because it's a really special song. It was originally an instrumental and then I added some words and Martin added some French horn and it became something completely unique.

Playing live, it's a great way to take the songs and adapt them to see how they fit. The song "House of Valparasio," we've been playing that and, at first, it sounds too soft for the crowd so then I--I think we were in Edinburgh, Scotland at the Queen's Hall and I started playing it louder, almost thinking, "How would Neil Young approach this song with Crazy Horse?," and I was enjoying it. At the same time, just a few nights ago in Portland, I thought, "Why don't we start off really quiet, just with voice, guitar and the trumpets, and then the band came in the second half of the song?," and it seemed to work really well. So we're constantly changing and morphing the songs to see how they fit best for our live audience.

Do you ever wish you could go back and record a song after you've found a bigger, better way to arrange it?

Sometimes, but a lot of friends that we have, they come to the show and record the live set, and so then we do have a recording of it, and sometimes they wind up on some of these tour CDs or [in] other places.

You mentioned the French horn as something Martin learned to play. Are there any other new instruments that you experimented with on the new album?

Yeah, the song "Two Silver Trees" is one of those songs that was really struggling to get a nice mix going, a nice version, and it wasn't until we were working with Nick Luca who works at Wavelab--he was working with a local band there in Tuscon called Mostly Bears and they had a Chinese gu zheng, which is kind of like the harp or the Japanese koto. The melody that's in "Two Silver Trees" is very much based on a very pentatonic scale, which you might hear in music in the East, and I asked him if he could play that and he said of course. He not only played it, but he got the nuances with the vibrato and you kind of bend the string behind the bridge ...

So that's the instrument that opens the song?

It is, and it's a fantastic rendition. That song wouldn't have come to life without Nick Luca and Mostly Bears being in the same studio and working in Tucson, which is an odd place, if you think about it. It's so far away from the roots of these instruments, but that's what I like about it. Tucson is a very laid back town and I think, more than anything, the vibe there is conducive to making music and having enough time just to sit with songs, not feel pressured to go in the studio and get it done and get it out there. It took us maybe eight months of going in and out. At times, we would go on tour to Europe or Australia or South America, and then we'd come back and maybe we'd scrap some songs or redo others. We just kind of took our time with this. We didn't want to rush it.

I read somewhere that someone made a very poetic statement that the Tucson landscape was an invisible member of the band.

Yeah, it could be, and it could just be that space. I think the same thing applies for the West in general, whether you're in Idaho or Oregon, California, New Mexico or Nevada. I identify with this place, this greater place.

It reflects in your music, definitely. You've also said that the record's title was inspired in part by John Fante's novel, "Ask the Dust," which is a work that's so congruent with your sound, atmospherically and stylistically. It made me wonder why Fante hadn't been cited as an inspiration earlier. Are you a long-time fan of his?

I'm a fan through drummer John Covertino. He's been a huge fan of Fante's for a long time, and also Bukowski, and he's turned me on to those writers. There's always been a literary thread in some of these albums over the years. We've even done some background music for a writer named Lawrence Clark Powell, who was the main librarian here at UCLA's library. In fact, there's a wing named after him. He retired in Tucson, taught at the university, wrote some books, and through very close friends, we wound up doing some music for some of his books where he's reading and talking about the Southwest. So there is that connection there.

Fante is an interesting character. He's kind of a modern character, I would say. He's a precursor to Charles Bukowski, in some ways. He's a real passionate Italian immigrant coming to the big city trying to make it big and has all these hopes and dreams, but always stops himself from following through, whether it be with his work or with his love. He falls in love with this Mexican-American woman in a nearby cafe and she eventually winds up leaving him, so there is that push and pull. She winds up going with another writer out to the California desert near Joshua Tree. John Fante literally struggles with this emotional and literal earthquake which happens in Long Beach. Having grown up here in the South Bay, getting to go to places like Pike's Place, I can visualize some of these places. And of course John, he's kind of like our Jack Kerouac figure in the band. He's a very intuitive soul. A lot of stories and a lot of this music stems from his aesthetic, so the fact that he's chosen this title, "Carried to Dust," I think it's very fitting. It sounds like a novel, too, and I think that was part of the goal.

Someone made the observation to me just recently that the songs in "Carried to Dust" seem like different chapters in a novel, or different scenes in a road movie. Do you feel like there's a narrative running through the record?

There's got to be. We're the same people making these songs. We're traveling all the time. There are so many guests, so there is that sense of newness every song or so. Not only that, but there's a lot of instrumentals and these segues, or what I call snippets ... songs like "Sarabande In Pencil Form" or "Falling From Sleeves" ... they work very much in the way that a transition would work in film or literature. Those elements are really important. In studying music, both jazz and classical, in school in California, I soon became a big fan of the transition, studying Beethoven or just going to see my favorite band, The Minutemen, play in San Pedro or here in LA in Hollywood. It was those moments when the band or the artist would leave the known motif or melody or the main line, and they would just experiment or improvise, not so much in a jazz way but in a very deep, primal way. We do it--we daydream. That is improvisation, so that element is very apparent in our music. We embrace it, the mistakes and all.

Your music is very cinematic in feel, so it's not surprising that you would have contributed music for films such as Michael Mann's "Collateral." You also worked on the score for the Bob Dylan biopic "I'm Not There" and I believe you're currently scoring the soundtrack for a movie called "Love Ranch"--all very different projects. What attracted you to them?

I think just opportunity, again. We're musicians. We live in Tucson and there are a lot of musicians in our group, so it's great to have work and we feel really lucky. They're all unique in their own right and I think it's a great challenge. It's very similar to the collaborations that we do with other artists, where you back up somebody and they've got this ball of ideas that they want you to give some reflection to. They want to see how you would interpret their ideas and songs, the movement, shapes and colors. So, if you think about it in that respect, it's really not that dissimilar. It's more in a similar line.

It's been really fun. We've had songs that are recorded on records used in films and student films, commercials. "The Sopranos" used one of our songs--a more mariachi-influenced song, "Minas de Cobre." That's great and we do have that connection to the region and the influences culturally and musically but this latest film, "Love Ranch," we got a call from the director, Taylor Hackford, and it was the film composer, James Newton Howard's request to get us involved. We came out to Los Angeles and we saw the film and it was really good. After meeting with James and his assistant, Chris Bacon, I really feel like they wanted the involvement of Calexico for all the right reasons. It wasn't just to have some fanfare or to have a certain aspect of the band. It was more about the core. It was about John's drumming, his nuances, his subtleties with his brushwork and his playing the marimba, some accordion and my playing upright bass, cello, some acoustic guitars. It was more about us, and it wasn't about all the layers, which I like, but every now and then it's nice to do something more minimal. I think it works well with the picture and, so far, it's been going really great.

You're currently on tour. Do you have any guest artists on tour with you?

We do. We've got this six-piece band. Probably the number one question I get asked every time I pull up to a venue is, "Did you bring the mariachis with you?" I have to tell them that that's for a special occasion and we can't bring them to every show. But we do bring with us Jacob Valenzuela, who was born and raised in Tucson and plays trumpet, and Martin Wenk from Berlin who plays trumpet. Those two, combined with Volker Zander on the upright bass and the pedal-steel player from Nashville, Paul Niehaus, and John and I, it makes up that full dynamic range.

After making this record and working with a musician from Madrid, Spain, I wanted to bring Jairo Zavala to the States and he's been touring with us in Europe a little bit too. He adds a lot of new energy. He's a very positive person. He's a family man--he's got two kids--and he's a pretty popular guitar player in Spain. He plays on the late-night television circuit, and he's got a great energy and ups the ante for us. He makes it that much more special. We're not just doing the same thing. We've got a new musician, and every now and then--like, Pieta Brown and Bo Ramsey sat in with us in Chicago. An up-and-coming saxophone player in New York City, Patrick Wolf, joined us on stage playing tenor sax. We just try to do things every now and then to make it special. A lot of times at these music festivals when there are a lot of bands and artists around, it's easy to ask someone to learn a song and play it. People love it.