Joey Burns looks pissed, and not just because he didn’t get his wake-up call in Stockholm.
Two weeks on the road can do that to you. Especially when you’ve spent most of that time talking about your music rather than performing it. People ask the dumbest things sometimes, and after a few days, even the smart questions start to sound the same.
Still, Burns, of the Arizona rock quintet Calexico, thought he was doing okay. Until Stockholm – and the call that never came.
“I missed my flight – can you believe that?” sighs Burns, who speaks laconically and can sound sarcastic even though he means to be sincere. “Got to Dublin hours later than I should have. Not much sleep. What happened to Scandinavian efficiency, that’s what I’d like to know?”
Over coffee, we learn the hotel mix-up isn’t really the source of his discomfort – a discomfort etched in his brow and on the pinched lines beneath his eyes. What’s truly irking Burns is talk of Calexico’s ‘political’ new direction, something that’s been cropping up incessantly on the promotional tour the singer is conducting on behalf of the band’s latest record.
The received wisdom runs a little like this: after three albums of Morricone-flavoured indie-rock (Burns shudders at ‘Americana’), Calexico have joined the culture wars with an anti-Bush polemic called Garden Ruin. It’s a good angle, spoiled only by the fact that it’s largely without foundation.
“I think that people are perhaps looking for things that aren’t there in the music,” says Burns. “When someone listens to your record and writes about it, they look for the most obvious thing and amplify it. But that element of social commentary has always been in our work – we haven’t changed direction.”
Politics “aren’t Calexico’s thing” Burns maintains. Nonetheless, he admits to feelings of dismay over the current climate in the United States. He lives in the town of Tucson, close to the Mexican border. Steeped in maracas and Latin horn sections, the Calexico songbook embraces and celebrates the region’s melting pot of traditions. Such open-mindedness, says the singer, seems increasingly like an aberration.
“America’s getting more conservative, more suspicious of outsiders,” he declares. “For instance, there’s a backlash against Mexican migrants, despite the fact that the economy – at least where I live – would collapse without them. My folks, they’re Bush voters. They’re getting older; they worry about things. Bush says he can make them feel safe again. That’s a very powerful message in today’s America.”
You get the same answer – a qualified denial, mixed up with a reluctant agreement – if you ask about Calexico’s re-discovery of classic pop. Largely devoid of the Tex-Mex flavourings of previous Calexico records, Garden Ruin is pegged as the band’s ‘back to basics’ LP.
Burns wrinkles his nose: “We did the record in Brooklyn and I’m sure some of the New York ambience seeped in there. I’ve been at this ten years now. You’ve got to try different things as an artist. Did we set out to write a pop record? No. Have we, in fact, written a pop record? I can’t tell. I’m still too close. My head’s spinning. I need sleep. I wish I’d made that flight from Sweden on time.”