Keeping the home fires burning

Joey Burns is house hunting in his adopted hometown of Tucson, Arizona. The Calexico vocalist and mult-instumentalist has lived in the hot, dusty border town since the early 1990s when he moved there from LA with Giant Sand bandmates John Convertino and Howe Gelb. Since forming Calexico in 1996 with himself and Convertino at the heart of the band, he has become inextricably linked with the town and its music and is now hoping to put down some permanent roots.

“I rent at the moment and I’m looking to buy a place here,” he says. “I’d like something in the centre of Tucson but prices have gone up a lot recently. I might build something myself but it would have to be very simple and minimalist with concrete floors. And I’d like it to have a basement too. Nobody takes advantage of going down into the ground in Tucson, which is kinda strange. It makes so much sense in this heat.”
The affable and seemingly mischievous Burns tells of a joke he played on his parents who visited him recently.
“I said I’d let them take a look at this place I was thinking of buying,” he explains. “I told them to go down the street, turn left at the county jail, go down past the trailer park, turn right at the junkyard and right across the street from the landfill, beside the methane gas plant is a trailer – that’s it! I don’t think they were too impressed. But they said ‘whatever you do – let us know’.”
Despite his longing for a place of his own, Burns’ home is more likely to be on the road these days. Following the success of last year’s Feast Of Wire, Calexico’s fourth full-length album, their pulling power has grown dramatically. They have little problem filling venues like the Royal Festival Hall in London and Dublin’s Vicar St. where they play next month.
“We did something like 250 dates last year,” Burns says. “I’ve had the best time ever playing in Europe. It’s a lot different from the US where we fall between the cracks. When people hear elements of mariachi music played by white guys it’s not accepted as American Music and they’re not into it as much, even though people in the indie rock scene know where we’re at. But in Europe, especially in places like Germany and Spain, they love South American music.”
Named after a border town located between California and Mexico, Calexico are the embodiment of left-field, experimental Americana in all its myriad strands and textures. But unlike other exponents of the genre, their music is grounded deep in the rugged landscape and mythology of the southern border states. Not surprisingly it has a strong Tex-Mex flavour, but that’s only part of the story, as Joey is keen to stress.
“It’s interesting for me to see how we’re perceived,” he muses. “I did some press with people in England recently and they were asking ‘are the mariachi band coming back with you this time?’ We only did that a couple of times but it sticks and it’s expected of us now. That’s why I’m really looking forward to doing something completely different for the next album. Feast Of Wire has done so well especially songs like ‘Black Heart’ and ‘Not Even Stevie Nicks’ but it’s time to change things. Part of me wants to do a song-based acoustic album and part of me wants to get more electronic or experimental. It’ll probably encompass all of those elements but I’m really into the singer songwriter thing at the moment.”
From the beginning Calexico’s music has been consistently described as cinematic – something film-makers have been quick to cotton onto. The song ‘Pepita’ (from Feast Of Wire) provided the soundtrack to the Adidas ad featuring Muhammad Ali, and the band recently finished filming a scene for Collateral, the new Tom Cruise movie directed by Michael Mann, as Burns explains.
“I got the call on New Year’s Day from our agent who said they wanted to use one of our songs and they wanted us to be part of a huge ensemble. We were all costumed up for what turned out to be three days of shooting the scene again and again in a bar in East LA called El Rodeo. They said they were gonna pay us a lot of money but after the Screen Actors Guild fees and the taxes and whatnot come off it wasn’t as great as it sounded. Then they wanted to license the music for next to nothing. We said ‘no you gotta pay us’. But it was a lot of fun and was great meeting people like Michael Mann. I think he’s going to do the movie of Miami Vice and we talked about doing some music for it.”

Calexico play Vicar St., Dublin on April 14