A pirate's life

Between touring their third studio album 11:11, headlining the West Holts stage at Glastonbury and being invited to perform at the White House, dueling guitar duo Rodrigo Y Gabriela were already having a pretty productive 2010 when not one, but two Hollywood blockbusters came a-knocking.

“Of course I thought, ‘Oh, I’m not sure about this,’” Rodrigo Sanchez tells me, “because it’s pretty different to what we would have expected, especially not being a mainstream act.”
The Mexican-born guitarist and partner Gabriela Quintero were invited by legendary composer Hans Zimmer to write music for On Stranger Tides, the fourth installment in Disney’s colossal Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise, and Shrek spin-off Puss In Boots, which is released later this year by Dreamworks.
“It was funny because we had two major things coming from Hollywood in a short period of time,” he recalls, “but the good thing about it was that we got invited by Hans Zimmer himself. He liked our music and he went to our show. Working with Hans, we knew we were going to learn a lot.”
The Pirates… soundtrack is one of over 100 film scores Zimmer has worked on, including Inception, Gladiator and The Lion King, for which he won an Oscar in 1994, but for Sanchez and Quintero, setting their musical talents to film was no easy task.
“It’s very confusing,” Sanchez admits. “It’s tough. It’s like a different world altogether, you think like, ‘Okay, it’s music, so it should be pretty fucking similar to what we do’, but it’s not! It’s a totally different ballgame. The way you have to come up with the music, even for the soundtrack, is so different.”
How did they get inside the beard-twiddling, bodice-ripping, swashbuckling world of Depp, Cruz and company?
“We tried not to do that,” he says, “because then you start doing stupid things! What was great from Hans was the fact that we didn’t have to belong to that world in any way. We focused on the fact that it’s a pirate film and we had to do music, we had to think about a real pirate, maybe. We know that the film doesn’t have real pirates, but to have your mind set for composition, for the writing process, that’s all we needed to know. And that’s the way Hans works most of the time, that’s why probably he’s very successful.
“For the whole thing we didn’t have to do any Latin flavour. Even the tracks that we have on the soundtrack, it’s just acoustic sounds, riffs but really rocking riffs. We played The Tonight Show With Jay Leno last week, doing one of those tracks, but we played it with half an orchestra and I think it sounded fantastic. It was so, so heavy with violins and I was doing the riffs with my acoustic but I used some distortion and it was so, so cool.”
In the most convenient coincidence since Pat The Baker’s masterstroke ‘Barack’s Brack’, Rodrigo Y Gabriela had already scheduled two dates at the Hollywood Bowl with the LA Philharmonic Orchestra before their appearance on The Tonight Show.
“It’s gonna be massive,” Sanchez says, “but the Leno show was a good feeling of what we could do, we had a one-day rehearsal and ideas just stared flowing. Although I had written the parts for the violins at the time we were rehearsing, I was adding much more stuff to it because it was like a fucking new world to explore.”
But before that, there’s a date in Marlay Park to prepare for, and Sanchez is adamant that it’ll be like nothing Rodrigo Y Gabriela have done on their old stomping ground thus far.
“We’re thinking to do something different, we might have some guests for that show.” he tells me. “We played two shows in the Grand Canal Theatre in November, so I think we should move into adding some new stuff to the show in Marlay Park. Let’s see what comes out!”

Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is out now on Walt Disney Records, and you can watch the Leno performance of ‘The Pirate That Should Not Be’ at rodgab.com. Rodrigo y Gabriela play Marlay Park’s @ The Park on July 31 with Seasick Steve. See the hotpress.com archive for more Rodrigo Y Gabriela interviews.