Garden Ruin strides right into Calexico’s new world with its opening track. “Cruel” opens with an acoustic exercise under Burns’ assured bari-tenor voice, now revealing an elasticity and range unimaginable from the duo’s 1997 debut Spoke. Convertino comes in with a radio pop beat, a barely perceptible veneer of dust and a chip or two keeping it real. (Says Foster, “You’re not going to get dumbass drums outta that guy, ever.”) With a piano over the bridge and an emerging, upbeat horn part, the song threatens to turn sunny behind Burns’ dark lyric hints of the “lay and law of the land” misused, but he pulls it all back with a line he borrowed from his brother John: “Birds refuse to fly/No longer trust the sky.”
“Originally it was one of those songs that kind of popped out in Bisbee,” Burns says. “We said ‘Hey, let’s write a song that’s…more in the way of a song that we’ve covered by Love, ‘Alone Again Or’. The lyrics that I was kind of just mumbling at the time were about love and careless heart, ‘Cruel’. And I couldn’t do it.
“So I e-mailed my brother and I said, ‘I need some help here. I want to take this away from this theme of love and heart.’ And just writing this e-mail helped open me up to thinking about where I would want to take it, to more like being a good steward to the land, environmental topics, or what does one do with this resource that we have.”
The odds-on favorite song follows. “Yours And Mine” is a universally resonant assay of that looming “fish or cut bait” moment in a relationship. Whose time is being wasted? Yours and mine. The hookiest track, though, is the next one, “Bisbee Blue”. It’s a song of hope for a touchstone amid troubled times in a worried landscape, and the spirit of the music makes you believe there might be one.
Convertino provided the backstory for “Letter To Bowie Knife”, an angry tale of innocence lost. Says Burns, “It’s just kind of a rock song we made up down there in Bisbee and didn’t know what the hell it was supposed to be. But after we started playing that song, John kind of mentioned this letter he wrote when he was a kid growing up, because he had a Bowie knife, and he wrote a letter to the company. They wrote back a letter that was kind of all cloaked in fundamental Christian belief.
“It seemed to kind of strangely coincide with this idea of living by the sword and dying by the sword — these causes that are being fought for, crusades, all those kinds of ideas started coming to mind and how that could influence a child, about his own knife.
“It’s also kind of a play on words with David Bowie, because the song sounds like a leftover track from Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou” (a 2004 film that used Bowie tunes on its soundtrack).
“Roka”, featuring the vocals of Amparanoia’s Amparo Sanchez, revisits desperation, disillusionment and death on the migrant trail. “Having traveled and playing songs from Feast Of Wire and talking to journalists in Berlin or Lisbon, London or Amsterdam, this idea of immigration doesn’t so much pertain to our own back yard, but it’s global,” Burns says. “So as much as I wanted to make it about this place, I wanted to also kind of open it up, and address the whole global issue of immigration.”
At age 10, John Convertino performed for an audience of 8,000 at a North American Christian Convention in California. “I barely knew how to set my drums up,” he remembers. “At one point, because the rack tom was sitting on the left side and I didn’t have the spurs set up right, the thing rolled over. It was pretty bad.”
The audience, of course, loved it. Convertino was then touring with a family band that also included his mother, two sisters and brother. While they made the rounds of Christian conventions and church groups nationwide, his father held down the home front, teaching piano and accordion. For a time, he also led an accordion orchestra. “They would do classical pieces like Bach,” Convertino says. “Fifty accordions playing a Bach fugue. It was awesome!”
When his mother left the road to become a voice teacher, the siblings traveled as a rock ‘n’ roll cover outfit, eventually settling in for a year as the house band at Chilkoot Charlie’s in Anchorage, Alaska. Their next move was to Los Angeles to look for a record deal. Apart from the predictable problems of working with siblings, the lure of marquee lights finally broke up the band. A brother and sister went into the acting business; the other sister started a family.
