Calexico Collective Stay on Move

By Gary Flockhart

FEW bands are as hard-working as Calexico, the Tuscon, Arizona outfit who haven’t stopped moving for about ten years now.

“A band has got to keep changing and moving or it will get bored and break up,” insists John Convertino, their drummer.

Even when they’re not out on the road touring, they’re recording for themselves or with other bands, such as Iron And Wine.

It’s a work ethic that guitarist and vocalist Joey Burns and Convertino – the engine that drives Calexico – have maintained ever since they worked with another endlessly productive individual, Howe Gelb, with whom they constituted rock band Giant Sand for a decade.

Case in point – since their fourth album Feast Of Wire’s release in early 2003, Calexico’s work ethic has birthed a live DVD as well as collaborations with Nancy Sinatra, Neko Case, Francoise, Gotan Project, Amparanoia and Marianne Dissard, while Convertino even found time to release a solo album, Ragland.

Since their inception a decade ago, many people have heard the band without knowing who they were listening to. Its Tex-Mex country rock sounds have featured on countless commercials and soundtracks over the years.

Most recently, the group featured as one of two house bands on the soundtrack to the Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There, ably backed up by My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, Iron And Wine’s Sam Beam and Willie Nelson.

But Calexico is beneath the radar no longer, thanks to two big releases in 2006 that gave them their biggest sales to date. That year’s Garden Ruin (Touch & Go) shifted around 45,000 copies in the US, while In The Reins, a collaborative EP with Beam, sold 92,000.

It has proved to be important in the set-up for the next album, Carried To Dust, which is released on Monday, and can be heard when they come to the Queen’s Hall on Thursday.

“I feel the main thread here is movement,” says Burns, alluding to all the musical exploration the band has undertaken to date, which has given them a newfound confidence. “I think we’ve been fortunate to have all these different projects.

“There’s a lot of imagination in the music, and I think that’s because it’s all over the map. It’s indicating its diversity,” he adds.

Noting that the process of creating the album was “less about the performances and more about the technique of recording,” Burns says the band “had a wide range of expression to choose from, and this time we were just loose and open to more beautiful mistakes.”

Convertino notes that the band were keen to make a radical break with their last album, Garden Ruin, though he accepts they will probably always be pigeon-holed.

“I guess, having done that now and still getting the same labels put on us is kind of like, ‘Well, what the hell. It doesn’t matter’, he says.

“Know what I mean? No, but it’s true. I think the big departure was with Garden Ruin and trying to streamline the songs more, develop that aspect of the band which was more of a pop sensibility and, you know, it was a challenge to do it that way.

“It was fun to do that, and people were always asking us if it was a new direction. It’s not necessarily a new direction, it’s just developing that aspect of it because we still love instrumentals and we still love ambience in our music and we love trumpets, so I think we still want to use those elements, and that’s what we did with the new album.”

He adds, “You’ve just got to keep doing what you feel like you’ve got to do, and I think for this record we really were. I think the going back part is just realising which songs we like to play live the most, and we wanted to try to write some more songs like that because when you’re out touring as much as we are, the songs that are the most fun to play live are the best ones.”

The band have always been down-to-earth sorts but, earlier this year, when the space shuttle Discovery took flight en route to the International Space Station, friends and family of the astronauts got to make musical selections to wake the pilots from their space sleep.

Commander Mark Kelly handed responsibility to his wife, Gabrielle Giffords, who saw fit to include Crystal Frontier by Calexico.

“It was cool,” recalls Convertino of when he heard the news the song had been selected. “I immediately could relate to it because I was named after an astronaut – John Glenn. My mom made this big deal about me being born on the same day he was splashed down from his orbit around the Earth in space. And she wrote him a letter, and he wrote back and said congratulations and sent an autographed picture.

“I thought that was pretty neat. I mean, when you think about it, he’s an astronaut. How much time does he really have to respond to fan mail? But he did,” he adds.

Interesting as it would be to know how Calexico’s experimental twang would sound in outer space, most of us will have make do with a trip to the Queen’s Hall next week.

Calexico, Queen’s Hall, Clerk Street, Thursday, 7pm, GBP 14, 0131- 668 2019

(c) 2008 Evening News; Edinburgh (UK). Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.