The Stool Pigeon

“We have many coats that we wear, and many hats that we try to squeeze into the luggage trunk when we go out on any given tour,” says Calexico’s Joey Burns. “You go on the road and you open it up all these instruments fall out - some are broken, some are dusty. The thing that’s exciting is the element of chance. Calexico is about not confining itself to one definition. As a result, we’re always finding new musical inspiration - from other bands, or areas, or sitting in the lounge for too long listening to bad radio.”

Calexico are one of those groups that people think they know. I interviewed Joey and John Corvertino a couple of years ago when their album Garden Ruin came out and, like many, I wondered what had happened to the trumpets. It was a mute point, if you’ll pardon the pun, and singer and guitarist Joey (Calexico’s unstoppable force, to drummer John Convertino’s immovable object) took umbrage. Today I’m on the phone to Joey on a rare beautiful day in the UK. It’s 9am in Tuscan, Arizona, and he’s already dropped his girlfriend off at work and watered the plants. He’s more relaxed today, and he even performs a song down the phone; just his rich, disembodied voice and the gentle plucking of an acoustic guitar. For a Calexico fan, this is a unique and unforgettable moment. You can stick the internet up your ass, Graham Alexander Bell is where it’s at.

The band’s new album Carried to Dust has been invigorated by travel, especially thanks to an overdue sojourn to South America. Despite what most assume, the band never got to extensively travel in that heartland before.

“It was a breath of fresh air for us,” he says. “We met people in Buenos Aires who were very forthcoming in their giving, then we took a ride with the promoter down to Valparaiso, through all the vineyards, and hooked up with Victor Jara, a protest singer and activist. It was very intense. The first song on the album [‘Victor Jara’s Hands’] is about his work. It applies to all countries: yours, ours, what’s going on around us.”
Calexico began life in 1990, when another Bush was incumbent in the White House, though it’s just recently that they’ve become overtly political. Do they feel as though they’ve been forced to speak up?

“I don’t think ‘forced’,” considers Joey. “You get inspired to do something or say something or get involved. You can’t help but not notice, especially travelling around in Europe, back and forth, and then South America, Australia even, Japan, New Zealand. You just notice the differences on prime time: the BBC, or CBC in Canada. You get a sense of the people’s disquiet. And then you talk, and you get an earful when you’re in Europe. It seems that in the UK, you have a lot more acceptance of protest, whereas here in the United States over the last eight years, you can’t mention anything that questions the administration... it’s just absurd.”

So what’s different now to when Calexico began?

“I think extremism is more prevalent. Extremism has made it difficult for there to be any kind of negotiation. It’s not just Bush, it’s his whole cabinet, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and all of the major corporations now that are trying to cover up and backtrack.”
And what of Barack Obama?

“For a country that prides itself on having so many different choices at the supermarket, and in the market place in general, it’s really odd that there’s only two parties. But I think Obama has great qualities, of course - he’s inspiring a lot of people to get out and vote and potentially do something rather than expect something.”

There’s a lack of optimism in his voice, and the last album was called Garden Ruin, the new one Carried To Dust. It’s hardly the stuff of whimsy.

“The title ‘carried to dust’ was John’s idea. He’s a huge fan of the writer John Fante [who wrote Ask the Dust]. He was working within the realms of that and thought of ‘carried to dust’. I guess it depends on how you look at yourself and dust. And here in Tuscan you can’t escape it.” He laughs. “You kind of acknowledge it in more ways than just one.”

“After four years, you don’t notice the dust,” said the celebrated late fop Quentin Crisp, who never cleaned his apartment. That’s not what you mean is it?

“Steve Albini was talking at one of these home recording conferences, and he said the CD is going to turn to dust,” Joey continues. “And you look at the CD and you go, ‘Wow, it’s doomed.’ Also Jim Dickinson, a producer who records in Memphis, said, ‘The reason why musicians are so concerned about recording music is that it stems from their fear of death.’ It’s an interesting concept. Ha ha. I thought about that a while.”

So back to the trumpets. The band recently had their music co-opted by Taylor Hackford (who scored The Dark Knight with Hans Zimmer), for a movie he’s making. “There wasn’t one full on trumpet song used,” says Joey proudly. Hackford even plumped for an acoustic version of a track that has trumpet on the album version. He thought our music worked so well for the cinema. And he used some of songs as a temp for the score to kind of get the feel of our musical world. It was more the special and ambient music with a quieter dynamic. It was the biggest compliment I have received since working with Willie Nelson, I think.

“Those people who are sitting far away who have a somewhat pale idea of what we do, they hear the trumpet and go, ‘Oh yeah, it’s that band that has the mariachi thing. They live in Tuscan, that’s close to Mariachiville. And I get it. I’m cool with it. I’m not fighting it.”

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