Y La Bamba’s Luz Elena Mendoza Moves Forward

All sound is building. That doesn’t mean music can’t be original, it just means influence is a given. It’s how you interpret that influence that makes something original. Take Y La Bamba, for instance. The sound–self-proclaimed gypsy-pop, press-reputed art folk–embodies a certain sacredness. The meld of dreamy percussion, staccato swells of accordion, guitar licks evoking traditional Mexican songs, all move as one, almost with a ritualistic sense. The most enchanting part is the voice of Luz Elena Mendoza; her loose webs of harmony and vocal flutterings tapping notes all over the register. She seems in a trance, like she’s merely a medium, channeling these noises. In some ways, it’s true: She’s a medium for her influences. Mendoza grew up spending summers in Northern California orchards with her family and a larger Mexican community. There were a lot of parties with many musicians, during which Mendoza would see her father perform freely.

“He would be the only one in the family to have that musical drive,” Mendoza said. “I saw him kind of be out of his body, and for me to be little and grow up and see that, I guess I was just trying to tap into that, naturally that kind of stuff just finds you.”

Those early summers were the basis of Mendoza’s musical foundation, of seeing “the passion, the rawness, the expression,” she said.

As an adult, Mendoza relocated to Portland, Ore., her current home base, along with her cat, Bamba, who unintentionally became the reason for her band’s name.

“I made up a moniker, Y La Bamba, me not being present, and the cat,” Mendoza said.

The band has now grown into a six-piece group, with Mendoza still writing the skeletons of each song, filled into full-body sounds by her band mates. The group is currently on a West Coast tour, recently having made their first stop in Seattle, where Mendoza takes a minute to answer all these questions and reflect on her Northwest home.

“Since I’ve been living in Portland, I’ve just been becoming my own, and definitely have my roots within my core,” Mendoza said. “Everything I do with music, I see the image of my father and my mother and my ancestors. But because I live up in Portland it’s been hard in the last few years of my adult life to be connected to my ethnicity, the traditions my family had.”

Despite the distance from her early roots, Mendoza’s been lucky to fall into the arms of the growing musical body of Portland, that beautiful Northwest hub of artists in a forest. Soon after she began playing music around the area, Mendoza was lucky enough to have her first album, Lupon, produced by The Decemberists’ guitarist Chris Funk, and released by the quickly budding Portland-based label, Tender Loving Empire.

That northwestern tip of Oregon is quickly becoming a strong presence on the country’s map of music, thanks to some talented heavyweights like Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock, The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy, M. Ward and others.

“Portland’s really cool like that, there are so many musicians, a lot of people that have made a name for themselves outside of Portland,” Mendoza said.

However, it’s not just the bigger successes who give Portland its sonic reputation, it’s the community itself. Artists actually supporting other artists.

“Because Portland is such a music Mecca, it’s not hard to go out and play a song at a local pub and have people support you, and all of the sudden people supporting your vision, it just naturally happens,” Mendoza said.

Not to be misled, Portland may be becoming the land of milk and honey, but not in a lucrative sense, more in the way of ample human resources, most importantly, support.

“It’s not like we’re all making a whole shit-ton of money,” Mendoza said. “It’s not like something you seek out, it’s like dinner’s ready, just sit down and eat.”

After the success of Y La Bamba’s first record, Lupon, many things began to come to light about Mendoza’s past, one being an excruciating period of her life when she contracted amoebic dysentery and giardia while traveling at a young age. The illnesses took a gigantic toll on her overall health and resulted in substantial weight loss and depression. The repercussions of that experience are very much present in Lupon. However, despite their being at the lyrical forefront, they’re still tender wounds for Mendoza.

“I know you could sit there and talk about it like, ‘We need those things, they’re allies in later life,’ but for me they really stick in my spine,” Mendoza said.

When she first arrived in Portland, Mendoza was still very much suffering from her sicknesses, which bled into a lot of her interviews and musical demeanor.

“All of those things are part of my quilt,” Mendoza said. “Anything that creates a chip on my shoulder is going to be more prolific for me to explore.”

But now, Mendoza is ready to lay those things aside and grow from them. The newest Y La Bamba installation, Court and Spark, set to come out early next year, is produced this time by the recent Portland transplant, Steve Berlin, band member of Los Lobos.

This album devotes a larger chunk to her roots, with more tracks sung in Spanish.

“There’s way more songs in Spanish. It’s not like I was trying to go for that, it just kind of naturally happened,” Mendoza said.

Despite its subconscious appearance, keeping that presence in the Y La Bamba sound is something that’ll be protected.

“Writing in Spanish is something I don’t ever want to forget; I feel like I’m speaking from my ancestors,” Mendoza said.

Beyond her past, Mendoza is ready for forward action, to keep ties to her influences and what’s essentially made her present, and move on.

“For those who are totally hungry for growth, everyone has their own interpretation, but my intention when I wrote those songs was to simplify my mind, and if that’s healing to others, I just want the audience to know that’s there,” Mendoza said.

Y La Bamba will play Luigi’s Fungarden in Sacramento on Friday, Nov. 18, 2011. Also performing will be Death Songs and Armando Rivera. Show starts at 8:30. Look for Y La Bamba’s forthcoming new album early next year.

Marnie Stern’s Unintentional but Compulsive Musical Attack

Last fall when Tina Fey won the Mark Twain Prize for Humor, she remarked she was honored to be one of the few females to win this noted honor but looked forward to a time when we stopped counting women’s successes. Can’t a girl just be good at something without it being such a novelty? In Marnie Stern’s song, “Female Guitar Players Are the New Black,” she mocks that idea through her own musical lens.

Sure, Stern has worked hard. Back when she was 23 (she’s now nearly 35), she became quickly enamored with gritty, Northwestern rock a la lady punkers Sleater-Kinney, and soon after became immediately inspired/obsessed by finding her own niche in music. Her determination turned into long hours of learning the ins and outs of hammering out guitar licks–straightforward, jaggedly lined noises. Stern’s approach morphed into finger-tapping, method-fierce sounds and nimble fingers.

While that’s all pretty far back in time, she has recently come full circle. In early January she released Demo, the compilation of songs that originally landed her on Kill Rock Stars, a large majority of which comprise Stern’s first release, In Advance of the Broken Arm. The cassette/digital only release is a good refresher on Stern’s earlier work, rooted mostly in fixated-nit-picked strings, “trying to lock weird guitar parts together to see if they fit,” Stern said.

When asked by her label who would be her dream drummer, Stern automatically noted Hella’s drummer Zach Hill, who agreed to play and produce the project, and went on to tour with Stern as well.

Hill seemed like the perfect match for Stern’s aural energy. The Sacramento-based drummer has adorned many projects with his marvelous percussive powers. His drumming is both rambunctious and polished–explosions of sound, two-steps ahead of the listener. Hill is known for his unorthodox approach to time signatures and his quick ankle-work with double hits of the bass drum. His adventurous style was the perfect nail bed for Stern to lay her own spiky sound upon.

Following her original first release in 2007, Stern was immediately put on a media pedestal as a technically driven female artist. Venus Zine named her one of the “Greatest Female Guitarists of All Time” in their Spring 2008 issue, followed by various nominations at the 2008 Plug Music Awards, including “Female Artist of the Year.” People instantly took to Stern’s quirky approach as both overwhelming and awesome, but being known as so technical has become more of a stigma for Stern.

“I find it annoying. It puts a lot of pressure on me to be good at it and puts pressure on me as if I’m walking around with a guitar slung on my shoulder telling everyone on the street that I’m a good player,” Stern said.

Sure it can get on her nerves, but it’s not all bad. Sleater-Kinney was the predecessor for Stern’s career, and the train can easily continue, bringing new creative ladies to the limelight. Women like Kaki King and St. Vincent push the average bounds of their instrument, looping rhythmically and complexly composed pieces to make full, symphonic-feeling music, changing the normal frame of a female solo artist’s classically simple song. Sound evolves, and if that’s a product of a little extra pressure on Stern, then it’s not all bad, so “at the same time, if it inspires any girls to play music, that’s good,” Stern said.

Stern taps away at her fret board, notes piling on top of each other in a mess, like dropping a deck of cards. Her chaotic guitaring is laid on beats that are all at once anxiously abrasive and so quick they barely touch down as a tangible rhythm. Absorbing it is like drinking five cups of coffee and listening to your heartbeat.

“I really don’t know how or why, I get pretty compulsive about stuff. For instance on tour right now Vince [Rogers, drummer] and I are going to start a Tetris tournament, and I will sit and play Tetris as many hours as it takes to win. So I guess the same thing happened with guitar. I just decided and played it for 10 years every second,” Stern said, and quickly added, “and also it’s fun.”

However, as Stern has gone on to develop in her musical career, she’s lost her drive toward focusing so specifically on guitar parts.

“I used to be more technically driven…and I don’t really care as much anymore,” Stern said. “I would prefer people to focus on my songs themselves, as opposed to just the guitar parts.”

Last fall, Stern released her third full-length, a self-titled piece. While listeners might have expected to have pinned Stern’s style to a specific frantic-guitar pattern, they’ll be surprised by Stern’s resistance to style repetition.

“It always has to be different, and never can be formula, or else it sounds like formula to me,” Stern said. “I always have to just look down and not know. It always has to be a blank screen, unfortunately, which makes it much harder for every single song but more exciting when it catches.”

With her head down, following a new path, Stern has branched out of her own dexterously savvy road to a more lyrical terrain, but reluctantly, which in result gives a tough but honest product. It’s no coincidence such a vulnerable piece would be self-titled. Things haven’t changed too much–she’s still the speed queen–but Stern’s effort to sing out and be heard is far more apparent on this album. For an artist with such a forward musical presence, Stern’s always been notoriously shy when it comes to the lyrical side of performance.

“It’s uncomfortable for me; it’s the hardest part, vocals and finding melodies, so I focus on it,” Stern said. “The last record was real personal for me, and I put myself really into it, and I’m proud I felt brave enough to do that.”

When asked to specify what beyond the writing itself made Stern so vulnerable in this particular album, she simply replied, “The way I’m singing, I mean, the whole thing, it’s like Barbara Streisand.”

Thomas Pridgen Makes Honest Sounds for Anyone and Everyone With The Memorials

The most stereotypical complaint of any musicians attempting to form a band is that there just aren’t enough drummers in the world. Percussion is the heartbeat, that aggressive slap of stick to skin or steel, an intensity that can’t be mimicked by any other instrument. So why the lack of drummers when they add so much? There’s something so universally understood, yet confusing, about drums; but not for people like Thomas Pridgen, who started playing early on, not even as a conscious decision.

“My grandmother was a piano player in the church,” explained Pridgen. “Where I grew up, all the drummers used to switch off. It was kind of like playing basketball in the hood; everybody did it, so I had no choice but to.”

Pridgen quickly separated himself as a prodigious talent. Not only did he win The Guitar Center drum-off at age 9, and a year later become the youngest recipient of a Zildjian endorsement, but he also was given a full scholarship to the esteemed Berklee School of Music, at age 15.

“Yeah, I was a little badass,” said Pridgen with a laugh.

Now only 26, he’s played with musicians like Dennis Chambers and Walfredo Reyes, Jr., and enjoyed a stint with the highly regarded, extraordinarily progressive force known as The Mars Volta.

At one point while working as a musical director for a childhood friend, Pridgen received a somewhat out-of-the-blue invitation from prog-rock luminary Omar Rodriguez Lopez to hang out on Halloween. In the middle of a few drinks, Lopez casually mentioned he wanted Pridgen to join their set for the night, which happened to be opening for Red Hot Chili Peppers to an audience of roughly 20,000 people.

That was essentially the beginning of Pridgen’s time with The Mars Volta, during which he found a home for his somewhat aurally chaotic style that he thought was outside of most listeners’ realms of tolerance. In fact, they not only understood it, but liked it.

“Sometimes as musicians you kind of feel like stuff you’re doing is over people’s heads, and sometimes when the normal person can like what you’re doing, and actually gravitate toward it, it’s kind of big,” Pridgen said. “I learned I can play all my crazy shit and be as crazy as I want, and it wasn’t far from normal. It wasn’t too abstract that people didn’t get it.”

In December 2009, Pridgen decided to break from Volta and focus on his own creation, something to fill a certain void he felt existed in the current state of rock music. Something that’s purely about sound, regardless of style or ethnicity.

“It’s kind of like if you’re a gangster rapper and you’re from the suburbs then nobody respects you, so in this [rock music], nobody cares where you’re from; but for us, we’re from the hood, from the ghetto, especially when I’m living in Oakland, where it’s predominately black and they’re not playing rock. It’s predominately hip-hop and R&B,” Pridgen said. “I could walk anywhere in my type of black neighborhood and they would not recognize me, but then when I come to more eclectic neighborhoods, they’re like ‘you’re the guy from The Mars Volta!’”

It can be hard to maintain a balance of equally representing your individual style and self with music, especially if the two haven’t historically gone hand-in-hand, but it’s something that Pridgen strives for, and feels like people can get behind.

“For me it’s kind of like a fine line, of trying to have people that respect you and know you’re from a place that’s predominately urban or whatever, and to do a music that most people of your color aren’t doing,” Pridgen said. “That’s why I feel like that voice is missing; Fishbone and Bad Brains, they’re super older than us, there aren’t too many young bands that come from where we come from.”

Pridgen wanted to assemble a band that didn’t have to build an image around the sound, but more just played honestly what they felt regardless of suit or trends.

“We don’t go play rock music and dress up like we’re in the ‘80s. We go and look just like we look when I walk in the hood, so for people my color to see that, it’s inspiring,” Pridgen said. “It’s inspiring to me to see other people–even if they’re not black–just to see people doing their kind of music with 100 percent passion,” Pridgen said.

From all this came the birth of his newest project, The Memorials.

The drums are the meat of The Memorials, with Pridgen’s impressively clean and rapid percussive builds that make for a thick base for their songs, melted over by Nick Brewer’s hammered/licked and sustained electric-guitar noises, drizzled with a glaze of Viveca Hawkin’s smooth, mellow vocals. Stacked and peppered with cameo contributions from various talented instrumentalists (Uriah Duffy on bass, Michael Aaberg on keys), it makes for a unique plate that at one point Pridgen might have questioned if people could even stomach, but now realizes they may even crave. “I never thought it would fail, but I never thought it would be this big so fast,” Pridgen said.

In the history of Pridgen’s impressively long resume of collaborating with other talent, this is the first time he’s actually the appointed head of a group. While it might sound like more pressure, it’s around the same level of obligation, just more hands-on in the entire process of a band’s duties.

“The only difference is I’m there from ground one–all the mixing and mastering, all the headaches–I’m getting the brunt of it,” Pridgen said. “It’s just a lot more on my shoulders, but it’s actually more fun.”

Not even a year old, The Memorials will be releasing their first record on Nov. 23, 2010, according to Pridgen. Coincidentally, the date is also his birthday. However, they’re more excited to go test them out in front of crowds.

“We made all these songs so we could go play them live,” Pridgen said. The core focus of The Memorials is to be able to play as many live shows as possible, to offer their eclectic creation to whomever wants to listen, and to be reciprocated with the experience of fine-tuning that very sound. Even though the group is now a solid trio, they remain open to guests and new ideas.

“I’m totally open to experiment, because I don’t want to make the same kind of records over and over again,” Pridgen said.

No matter who comes or goes, there will of course, always be drums.

Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band has the heart of a teen, literally.

“We didn’t necessarily know what we were getting ourselves into,” explained Benjamin Verdoes, co-founder and lead singer of Seattle, Wash.-based Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band. He talked over the group’s timeline as he waited patiently for wife and band mate Traci Eggleston to pick him up so they could head to the studio; there, they’d work out percussion kinks for the newest record. This has been Verdoes’ daily schedule as of late: work, then studio.

At this point, all the ideas have been born. The songs have all been written in full and are in the Mt. St. Helens repertoire. Verdoes has been anxious to get them recorded. Now they’re laying out a lot of basics, getting the skeleton of the album built so it can be out by early 2010. They’re progressing, but what’s left is “a lot of little details to fill in,” Benjamin said.

They might sound like old pros at this, but this is an incredibly young group. In fact, that’s essentially what Mt. St. Helens is known for: their youth, belonging in particular to their 14-year-old drummer (and Benjamin’s adopted younger brother), Marshall Verdoes.

“He kind of blows people’s minds every time they see him,” Benjamin said. “He doesn’t even necessarily look 14, and when people find out how old he is they’re genuinely awestruck.”

Mt. St. Helens actually started as just an idea between the Verdoes brothers. When Marshall was young (or younger”¦), Benjamin would bring him along to all the shows he attended, and Marshall would incessantly try to convince Benjamin that they should start a band together. Benjamin slowly started teaching him some tricks on percussion, and was impressed by Marshall’s quick knack for drums.

Benjamin had been involved in other various bands, but after watching his younger brother progress so fast and accurately on drums, he decided to experiment. The two began a project, roughly four years back, as a pair sparking fire for the first time.
“In some kind of form, in some rough primordial state, it was just us playing riffs,” Benjamin said.

It wasn’t until fall 2007 when the lineup became a quintet, including Matthew Dammer, Jared Price and Eggleston.

From the start, there was a lot of quick buzz surrounding the group’s odd approach to hyping their new creation. They made a Myspace page, but didn’t actually post any samples of their music, opting instead for comical blips and parodies that did not relate to their music whatsoever.

“We kind of, through this series of accidents, came up with this thing where we didn’t post music,” Benjamin explained.
The brothers hadn’t landed on a solid demo yet and were in transition from a two-piece into a larger group. Even if they were posting purely to stall for time as the group took form, it worked. Mt. St. Helens gained a ton of interest; enough that at their first show, there were hundreds of awaiting bodies.

“It was an interesting reaction that we got, so we definitely played into it,” Benjamin said.

Things continued to go well, enough so that Mt. St. Helens went from something of a fling to a full-fledged affair. Comparisons in sound were made with bands such as Wolf Parade and Modest Mouse, thanks in part to the driven scratch of Mt. St. Helens’ urgent guitar chords, swelled by slaps of cymbal and other smack percussive movements, exemplified prominently on songs such as “Albatross, Albatross, Albatross.” Impressive, catchy licks with Benjamin’s lightly fuzzed-yet-piercing vocals are displayed nicely on “Anchors Dropped.”

Mt. St. Helens spent the last year touring across country and playing from their self-titled album (which came out in mid-March), which consists of a lot of Benjamin’s older material, mostly songs quilted together with years of pieced ideas. They’ve also been debuting selections from their upcoming release.

Whenever they can find spare moments, be it on a long stretch of freeway in the van, or at pit stops or cafés, Benjamin and Eggleston take turns helping Marshall with his schoolwork. This wasn’t a choice based purely on touring. A few years back, Marshall realized it was much easier for him to get schooling done on his own, away from the traditional school scenario. Benjamin was already helping Marshall with his schoolwork, but volunteered to take on the role of teacher as well. Even off the road, Benjamin and wife Eggleston take turns helping Marshall with school while the other works a part-time job.

Between the commitment to the band, the family tie and the schooling, the Verdoes brothers are virtually inseparable. Luckily, they have a tight bond.

“I spend almost every waking hour with him it seems like, for the last four years,” Benjamin laughed.

For most kids, the kinds of distractions presented by being a traveling musician and still getting school work done would be too much; but the environment has worked well for Marshall, Benjamin said.

As far as the live shows themselves, it’s still a real treat for audiences to see a youth so precise and talented on drums.
“We work really hard on it, but he definitely has a real gift for it. It’s really cool to watch,” Bejamin said in praise of his younger sibling.

Benjamin still finds himself having to pull his brother’s I.D. out for proof of that he’s underage.

“People—they’ll argue with me, they’ll be like, ‘He’s not 14,'” he said.

For the time being, they’ll be touring through the West Coast and finishing up in the studio, still somewhat curious of their own next step.

“It’ll be definitely interesting how this next record comes out in the spring,” Benjamin said. “How we transition into this real, band, I guess.”