Every music lover has a soft spot for the almighty supergroup, especially when the musicians involved are highly talented and playing together because they actually want to rather than for the sake of publicity. Such is the case with Spanish Gold, the new trio featuring Dante Schwebel formerly of Texas cult favorites Hacienda and currently a member of folk rock group City and Colour, Adrian Quesada, previously of renowned Latin group Grupo Fantasma and now a key member of Grupo’s funky offshoot Brownout and about a million other projects, and My Morning Jacket drummer Patrick Hallahan. If you’re familiar with these musicians or their bands than you’re aware how different of a musical background each comes from, and also the fact that their main bands sound nothing alike. This is what makes Spanish Gold such a special project – three musicians each bringing their individual style to the table to create an exciting new sound.
Listen to Spanish Gold’s debut album South of Nowhere (due May 27th) and you’ll hear music that is somehow new and a throwback at the same time. Lighthearted songs like “Day Drinkin,” “Out On The Street,” and “Lonely Ride” harken back to a time when rock was carefree and catchy and MTV was cool, while the band shares their collective love of funk and Latin sounds on songs like “One Track Mind,” “Don’t Leave Me Dry,” and “Shangri La.” If nothing else, South of Nowhere may be the ultimate summer soundtrack and warrants repeat listens while you sip beers in the sunshine. Lucky for us, the guys in Spanish Gold are hitting the road this summer for an extensive tour, giving everyone a chance to experience the quality tunes being made by these unexpected compadres. Recently, drummer Patrick Hallahan took the time to shed some light on Spanish Gold as the band prepared for their summer tour.
How did you all meet initially?
I’ll try to keep a long story short. I met Dante – it was me plus Hacienda who made up Dan Auerbach’s backup band for his solo run – and Dante and I traveled the world together for a year and just struck up a solid friendship. Just playing music together, we really clicked on a lot of levels, so we’ve always kept up. Every time Hacienda came through Louisville they always stayed at my house. Dante and Adrian went to the same high school together in Laredo, Texas, and there aren’t too many musicians who make it out of Laredo, so those two always kept tabs on each other. Adrian moved to Austin and started a studio and several awesome bands, so they were in contact with each other. As Hacienda was coming to an end Dante had all these songs bottled up and reached out to Adrian to help him demo them because a lot of the songs were touching on the subject matter of border relations, immigration, life in South Texas, and he thought Adrian would really connect with that. As he was doing [the demos] he was calling me and telling me about it just as friends, because I was concerned about the well being of Hacienda and for my friend. One day he called me and said, ‘Adrian and I are going to come to Nashville and track some of these demos. Would you come and put your two cents on it?’ That’s kind of how the band started. I didn’t meet Adrian until I picked him up from the airport in Nashville, so I was flying blind on him but it was an instant connection.
All three of you come from very different bands – how did you figure you could play music together?
It happened to quickly and so organically. I was probably emphasizing on taking things out of the obvious realm and adding overdubs that would maybe take the music out of a straight up garage rock song and add some cosmic elements to it. We all have funk elements to our playing, so that was a very common thread. Dante had the idea of treating these songs like a hip-hop album in a lot of ways. We all bonded heavily on that because we’re all huge fans of hip-hop and 80s R&B, and we just started building from there. To be quite frank, it was not something that was really talked about that much; it was really just a great chemistry that you can’t fake. We weren’t planning on making an entire album, and we certainly weren’t planning on forming a band and going on tour.
I know you said Dante brought a lot of the songs to the table, but I read an interview with you where you said it was highly collaborative. Did you and Adrian bring any songs in?
The first song on the album, “One Track Mind,” was a song that Dante had shelved for a long time and didn’t think it would see the light of day. Adrian and I were in Austin and Adrian had a couple ideas for licks so we recorded an instrumental demo. Dante heard it and was like, ‘oh my God I have a song in this key that goes right along with it.’ That’s how that song came to be. We didn’t really write the lyrics together but we awakened a song that Dante had put away, and we put our rhythm section to his melody. There’s a song on the album called “Don’t Leave Me Dry” that was pretty much a floor write. Dante had a few chords, but we knocked it around on the floor live and wrote a song from scratch, and we did that with a few others as well. Some of the earlier songs, like “Out On The Streets” and “Movin’ On,” Dante came with structure of those, and it all started with Dante wanting to bring these songs to life that he had stockpiled with Hacienda.
You covered a song from the Ghetto Brothers for record store day, which is a fairly unknown group that got an incredible reissue last year. How did you come upon them and what resonated in that song?
Oh man. Actually, Dante picked that song out. We were just looking for a B-side, and we all love that album. We all have a different story with it but all found it around the same time. Dante mentioned playing that song and we were all just like, ‘absolutely!’ If you listen to the original track it speaks for itself why we picked it; it’s just gorgeous. It’s just Beatles music going through Puerto Rican circuitry, you know, fucking amazing. It’s like a bunch of Puerto Rican kids trying to be the Beatles, but you get Puerto Rican rhythm structures like conga patterns and stuff like that with the Lennon & McCartney singing-songwriting kind of stuff. It’s undeniable, so we had to cover it. I hope we did justice to it because it’s such a special song.
The band is playing a show in Louisville next week and at Forecastle Festival later this summer. Is there significance for you getting to play with your new project on home turf?
I’m always super excited to play for my hometown. It’s also a little nerve-wracking and there’s a lot of pressure because with the hometown show everybody can call your bluff. There’s an element of transparency you can get away with out on the road – you can become a different character and nobody really knows it – at home they know from knee high on. I’m excited to show this new project off because we’ve been working on it so hard and we’re so happy with how it turned out.
For you personally, what’s it like getting to scale things down and play smaller venues again?
I think it’s wonderful, honestly. I feel extremely fortunate that My Morning Jacket has had the trajectory that it’s had. I love playing big spaces, I love losing myself in a huge room, but there is definitely something to be said for the intimacy of being close to the crowd and almost being surrounded by them. I miss that a lot. The interesting transition [that happens when you] go from playing smaller clubs to larger theaters is the intimacy and losing people right up in your face. I’m really looking forward to getting back to that, and to the adventure of a van tour. We’re going on a road trip basically, and being on a bus tour is certainly nice, but you do miss the element of adventure in it. Going to bed in one city and waking up in the next has its perks, don’t get me wrong, and I will possibly be looking fondly on those memories about half way through the tour [laughs], but I do love driving cross country, the camaraderie that ensues, the challenges of navigating. It’s gonna be a blast.
For more info on Spanish Gold, check out their website.
