Calexico

With their eighth LP, Edge Of The Sun, released in mid-2015, Australian fans have been anticipating their return, and they’ll be back next month for a run of dates around the country. The BRAG speaks to co-founder and frontman Joey Burns, who says Edge Of The Sun material will dominate the tour setlist.

“As well as some older songs,” he adds. “You never know really. If there’s anyone around willing to sit in, it’s always fun to do some interesting cover songs with friends.”

Unsurprisingly to Calexico fans, Edge Of The Sun is a stylistically and instrumentally diverse record. The opening sequence of songs – ‘Falling From The Sky’, ‘Bullets & Rocks’ and ‘When The Angels Played’ – eases listeners in with subdued folk rock opulence. From there it branches out, taking a more adventurous, Latin-inscribed route on songs such as ‘Cumbia De Donde’, ‘Beneath The City Of Dreams’ and ‘Moon Never Rises’. Having made eight albums, Calexico have no cut and dried approach for developing each new one, but there’s a general urge to move away from what’s come before.

“That usually informs what we’ll do next or where we’ll go next,” Burns says. “In 2012 we put out Algiers,which we did some of the recording and writing [for] down in New Orleans. It was in the wintertime and I think that season had an effect on the songwriting. Also being in that area where there’s a lot of humidity, there’s a lot of history and culture, and a close proximity to Cuba – one of my favourite music forms is Afro-Cuban music – that record eventually became kind of introverted and mapped out more of an internal landscape. So it had this overall subtle approach to the sound and the mixing and some of the instrumentation.

“This time I wanted to turn the lights on and turn up some energy and I couldn’t think of a better way than to go to Mexico City, which is another place I’ve wanted to spend more time in. I went there with John [Convertino, drummer and multi-instrumentalist] and our good friend Sergio Mendoza, who plays keyboards with us. It was fun to go to do some writing, to record those sketches, [and] some of those sketches became actual tracks for the record.”

In the spirit of making a more energetic record, the band invited a number of guest vocalists into the studio to contribute to Edge Of The Sun. Early in the tracklist, there’s a trio of names indie rock audiences will be familiar with: Ben Bridwell (Band Of Horses), Sam Beam (Iron & Wine) and Neko Case. However, the more conspicuous vocal additions come from Spanish musician Amparo Sanchez (on ‘Cumbia De Donde’), Guatemalan singer-songwriter Gaby Moreno (‘Miles From The Sea’ and ‘Beneath The City Of Dreams’) and Mexican indie-pop performer Carla Morrison (‘Moon Never Rises’).

“The idea of asking people to come and sit in was one of the final thoughts of making the record,” Burns says. “The song ‘Bullets & Rocks’, after recording this idea and I put some scratch vocals on and doubled those harmonies, I was reminded of the feel and the sounds of working with Sam Beam of Iron & Wine. So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just reach out to him.’ I sent him a text and he wrote back, ‘Hey, I’ll do it next week.’

“I’d never met Ben Bridwell of Band Of Horses, but I’d been a fan. Ironically, he even lived in Tucson at one point. Carla Morrison is a very popular singer from Mexico. She works with the same label and manager as Sergio. The same thing with Gaby Moreno.”

As its title suggests, ‘Cumbia De Donde’ is a flirtation with the dance-oriented Latin American folk music, cumbia. Along with Sanchez’s vocals, the track makes use of drum loops and synthesizers. It’s not entirely unfamiliar territory for Calexico, but it’s nevertheless a brave songwriting experiment.

“It came about because [Convertino], who had just recently moved to El Paso, Texas, needed some time before he could get to the studio. So the first day was just the bass player, myself and Sergio Mendoza. We wound up just making up some ideas based on cumbia rhythms.

“We’ve always had a lot of influences just by virtue of being excited about different kinds of music and styles. We’ve worked with Amparo Sanchez for many years. She’s the one who actually took John and I to Cuba many years ago to do some recording.”

Burns’ knowledge of American and Latin folk music is undeniably vast, but his musical education has by no means come to a standstill. “I just got four boxes of vinyl records from my aunt that she collected since the ’60s, and it’s really interesting. She had several mariachi records, there’s also the bull fights of Spain, she had a Françoise Hardy record, she had some things from Japan – quite a few koto records, which I was very excited about.

“There is a sense of travel or exploring – LPs were little windows to different worlds around the planet. My parents’ collection was similar. So I spent a lot of time hanging out with the record player and headphones, and I think that rubbed off on me as a kid.”

[Calexico by Paco Gómez]