Arepas, Not McDonalds. An Interview with Cracked Latin Outside The Bitter End (NYC)

An interview with Luis Accorsi and Lane Steinberg of Cracked Latin. The band’s debut album, The World Is Cracked Latin, was one of the most challenging and far-reaching of 2009’s releases. They are a band so good, that they simultaneously threaten renown and obscurity. At present, they have at least my love, and plans to tour within the year.

Q: These songs are very complicated, a lot of changes. What is the songwriting process?

LUIS: This is how it happens. [Lane] comes over with these very elemental tracks. And then we sit there, we formulate what we’re gonna discuss, we try to make it be meaningful. Because the songs have some pretty serious meanings. And then Lane sees how crazy I am and he gets into it and then we start writing and there it is.

LANE: All the songs are really written in like 3 hours. We give ourselves a time limit. We have basic patterns. In terms of the actual songs, we’ll just come up with a basic dramatic idea, a lyric. We’re really guided by lyric motifs, they seem to always guide the music. A song like ‘Aceite,’ we were like, ‘Let’s write a song about oil’ and it just takes off from there. I take the songs back to my studio, and sort of sweeten them, extend them.

Q: Do you write with the band?
LANE: No, we write together, just with very elemental beats, and we build them from the ground up so that- It’s really funny that, we have the band, but we always go backwards. You know, we create the songs from the ground up in a really primitive way, and then we have the band come in and learn ‘em. And Charlie, our drummer, he writes out all the arrangements that we’ve sort of just come up with on the fly.

LUIS: See the basic essence of Cracked Latin is, obviously, this blend, this amalgamation of all these styles. Right? It’s music that, with all due respect to everything that is being created by young children that is all really super good – but if we were 20 we wouldn’t be making this music. I really think it’s only from people that have been musicologists for 20 years plus. In other words, I’ve had super projects that are there or here, and Lane has had like a giant career. And he knows about every style of music, and I know Latin, and maybe a little Italian. The next record’s gonna be Italian. (Laughs)

LANE: But we come in, like when we did the song ‘In Memory of a Departed Therapist,’ we were doing this stuff that was very sort of linear, sort of Cha-Cha stuff. So we sort of went to this Andean folk music type of groove, and then we just made it. The song really was based on a sort of true story, it was really a horrible story, about someone that Luis knows who was murdered.

LUIS: It was my therapist. She was a famous therapist, Kathryn Faughey, she was my therapist.

LANE: And what was crazier was that my wife worked in a nursing home that her son was in as a mentally ill patient. And he was kicked out, and he had been in the elevator with my wife. So Luis knew the therapist, and my wife knew the person who killed her.

LUIS: The rest of the story is that after that therapist, I was obligated to go see another therapist, and I half fell in love with her, like the guys from the Sopranos, and I had to run away from that one. ‘Cause that was heading for a big disaster. So that’s where you see, you know, you go to bed with a sultan, I go to bed with a demon. Every time I would leave the office I’d be worse than before because I would be so wound up because I’d been with the therapist.

LANE: The funny thing is that, we’ll be recording these songs, alot of times we’re just totally on the floor hysterically laughing when we come up with these lines. And we listen back to this stuff, and people think it’s crazy. And Luis said, ‘You know, it’s so joyful. It makes you feel really good.’ Maybe it’s due to the fact that we were hysterically laughing the whole time we made it. Even though a lot of the subject matter is kinda dark and complex.

LUIS: ‘International Accident’ was about terrorists that were in Columbia, and Chavez had the computers, and they were linked to the FARC, and all this subversive stuff that happens in the world.

LANE: “Caracas Shakedown” is really a very serious song.

Q: What has been the reception to the release of the album?

LUIS: It’s not very many months that this CD’s made. It’s been made two months. And its already got some attention. Folks from Matador were here [tonight]. The only thing is, once again, we have to be profiled as a band that: 20 year olds won’t be making this music.

LANE: It’s sort of disarming. On the surface it’s pretty inviting, I think, and when people get into it, once you get inside it, there’s a lot to get into, there’s a lot going on. It’s very dense. ….And so mixing it was just a complete nightmare, because you never know what to favor, there’s so much going on.

Q: So you haven’t traveled with the band yet? That’s gonna be a nightmare, huh?

LUIS: No, it’s going to be very exciting. Feeling like being the person that is in the front there, dropping that voice that is in my opinion, significant. I don’t care so much that I’m not a great singer, because to me, just knowing that we’re happening for me is the best thing that can happen. If we can make this really happen… I tell Lane, Look, if we could have five years to compose and work for five years, the body of work that we do will be a really substantial, important imprint for modern music.

LUIS: And we’re not like when you hear someone talking about Latin American music, and then you hear something that sounds like Western music, that’s no good. That’s not Latin. They’re selling McDonalds when you should be having arepas.

Originally published at www.sunonthesand.com