Named after the area of New Orleans where it was recorded, Algiers is Calexico’s first album on the Anti- record label and also their first studio album since 2008’s Carried to Dust—one of the last albums released by the seminal indie label Touch and Go. Little Village caught up with frontman Joey Burns as he was waiting for a table at the restaurant Cochon in New Orleans during a visit for a performance at Jazz Fest.
Little Village: Typically you record in Tucson at Wavelab Studios. What prompted the decision to record away from home?
Joey Burns: We’ve always wanted to record elsewhere but, I think it is because we are lazy, we never really made it happen. It takes a little bit of planning and we’re not very good at planning, so we wound up going with New Orleans because it is closer and we could do a lot more last-minute stuff. Craig Schumacher, the engineer from Tucson that we work with has got some great connections here through the Jazz Fest—which is going on at this very moment. He comes down here every year with his wife. After I had twin daughters and he survived throat cancer, we decided that we owed it to ourselves to take a little trip. And what better place to go to than New Orleans which is kind of the perfect embodiment of North and Southern Americas as well as having that European flair. This place just exudes improvisation and spontaneity and everything has kind of a gravitational pull.
L.V.: Algiers sounds not unlike other Calexico albums, so clearly you weren’t going for a New Orleans sound particularly.
J.B.: No, not on this record. Since this is our first record with Anti-, we wanted to go with more of an internal thing. Going far away from home would take us from our comfort zone and influence us to go a little more deep into the songwriting. When you’re out of your element it forces you to write, perform and record differently. That’s why we wanted to come here. It’s a bit of a risk going somewhere and not having a bunch of songs already finished being written, but I like the eclectic approach and spontaneity that caused. I picked up on that thread and followed it.
L.V.: Anti- Records is a very interesting label to me. It has such a varied stable of artists—Antibalas, Bob Mould, Booker T., Tom Waits, Joe Henry …
J.B.: … Devotchka and Neko Case are also friends of ours and they’ve been bugging us for years to go over there. We stayed true to our friends at Touch and Go; we’d been with them since 1997. We didn’t want to leave, it was more a matter of the record company couldn’t do it anymore financially.
With an impressive roster like Anti- Records’ we wanted to spend as much time as we could making this record to make sure it was the best-sounding record—but that was just us coming to New Orleans to see what we could tap into. So, yeah, you’re right, instead of it being about New Orleans and having locals featured on here, it is about us being in this time and space.
L.V.: You’ve managed to work with Pieta Brown recently—how did this come about?
J.B.: Pieta lived in Tucson for a little while and so we got to become friends there. I love what she does and I told her, ‘Yeah, I’m going to New Orleans, and do you have any ideas or lyrics—I’m totally open.’ You can never tell how those kinds of things will turn out. So, one night, I’m hanging out in Algiers in the studio which is called The Living Room—[she sent me] this great batch of words to a song called “Fortune Teller.” And, it just happened that the music I was working on that day would work perfectly with it. And, sure enough, we recorded a version of it the next day and we sent it to her and she was into it. We just finished it up right then and there.
And on the last record, too, she sat in and sang on a song called “Slowness.” She was visiting family in Tucson and offered to stop by and add her vocals to the song.
L.V.: Bo Ramsey added guitar to “Slowness” as well …
J.B.: Yeah … Pieta and Bo are incredible. I love what they do and I love where they’re coming from and the fact that they’ve kind of captured a regional spirit. I think it’s important to know that there are people who are doing what they’re doing. Keeping a connection to a tradition and a style but also carving their own path with it as well.
L.V.: And you contributed cello and accordion to her album, One and All—
J.B.: Yeah! I’m trying to do more recording with her—I think she could meet us somewhere like New Orleans or we could meet her up at her neck of the woods. It would be fun to go up there and record—I just love what she does. I’d love to go there in the winter time—you know—when nothing moves that comes with that kind of extreme weather. The thing I like about Tucson is that things kind of thin out when it gets hot and I’m sure that things kind of thin out when it gets cold up there. Like things slow down when it gets super-cold. That’s when I’d like to go—when you can feel things really deep to the bone and kind of shake you, you know.
L.V.: That would be a unique perspective compared to what we think about the weather up here!
J.B.: (Laughs) Yeah. It would be an interesting experiment to see what we would come up with. I guess people would still think we would sound like the Sonoran Desert of the Southwest but I would still be thinking about the plains and the cold landscape outside a window in Iowa City.
I buy into the idea that regionalism in certain songs stems from a certain place, but I like that our music also kind of goes elsewhere. Kind of unpredictable, which I think is important. Mix it up in life, you know?
Michael Roeder is a self-proclaimed “music savant.” When he’s not writing for Little Village he blogs at www.playbsides.com.
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