More than any of their prior releases Calexico’s Carried to Dust captures the brilliance of the band’s live performances. At times energetic, at others majestic and always measured, the new record may be the finest thing Calexico have put to tape and is certainly amongst 2008’s best releases.

Talking from Wavelab studios, the recording studio responsible for Carried to Dust, Calexico’s Joey Burns discusses the new album, social conscious and the live/studio dynamic with WB's Justin Pearsall.

WB: What are the band currently up to?

JB: We’re doing a couple of rehearsals with a French group who are in town doing a residency here for a week. We are then off to a recording with a Spanish musician, Jairo Zavala, who’s on our Carried to Dust record. He sent us the tracks over the internet and we’ve done a couple of recordings for some compilations together.

We are doing some radio sessions. We just recorded seven songs from the new record, including a cover, for NPR. We are also waiting for the soundtrack to start happening on a movie called Love Ranch. And we’re doing the promotional stuff for the new album as well.

How long did Carried to Dust take to record?
 
It was out early September, but we started recording it around early April. That’s when we had to turn in recordings before mixing. We did some overdubbing while we were mixing as well.

These overdubs play a more central role than in previous albums.

That was the thing I was intuitively going for. We always get this comment ‘Wow, your live shows are fantastic, but the album doesn’t capture that’. This time we wanted to capture both the energy and the ambience of the band.

A song like ‘Man Made Lake’ really reflects that point. It’s a more psychedelic sound than the band is renowned for...

I agree, yes.

But then again the album doesn’t embellish this too much. I imagine the final instrumental section could stretch out live.

I don’t mind a good solo, now and then and I guess that does happen a bit more live. There are some fine players in this band and if you mention the word solo then they’re all over it. I like that. I like the instrument becoming as important as the voice.

That’s why we’ve got a song like ‘El Gatillo’ (trigger revisited), because it features all these different instruments on there, including the whistle. I like the fact that the instrument has a focal point and a strong voice in a group like ours.

Obviously the band is well regarded; you’re very sought after collaborators.

What I can add to that is what Sam Beam, from Iron and Wine, said after we started touring together for In the Reins (the split EP between Beam and Calexico). He was like ‘wow, all the guys in your band are really good players’. And it’s impressive. It’s not like we have this show that’s all very laid out and planned, it’s more of an intuitive feel. You can just tell from the intricacies of the parts and the arrangements and the spontaneity. Live, you never know where the solo section’s going to go. They’re not just technical and dexterous players, they are soulful as well. They know how to play and when to play, and even better yet, when not to play.

When we last chatted you said that you wanted the sound of the new album to sound less static. Do you think you achieved this?
 
Yeah, we achieved it. We streamlined our approach and tried to capture the mood, the ambience. We wanted to expand the imagination of some of the mixes and the songs too. These songs lend themselves to more vivid colours and shapes.

Are there plans to come back to Australia?

Always. We’d like to do a record in Australia. John [Convertino] and I are massive fans of the Dirty Three and we opened up, as a two piece for the Dirty Three in America. They are one of my all-time favourite bands.

The fact that they are still getting involved with as diverse projects as Cat Power or Tren brothers or Grinderman or the Bad Seeds, it’s great. They’re just hitting their stride. They also did the music for Jesse James and The Proposition, didn’t they?

Yeah, between the members of the Dirty Three and Nick Cave they’ve got their fingers in a lot of pies.

Nick Cave wrote The Proposition, right? Yeah, fuck him. Who does he think he is man? C’mon. What’s he trying to be a superhero? He can do anything in my books. Anyone who inspires good music, great words and stunning clothes is A-okay in my book.

‘Writer’s Minor Holiday’, track five from Carried to Dust, sounds structurally like some of the material from Garden Ruin, but it seems like it is handled differently.

The variety adds to the record, it’s something the band embraces and aspires too. When we play live, we are constantly mixing up the old songs and the new songs or reinterpreting songs. I think it was in Adelaide were we finally found a good version to play of ‘Bisbee Blue’. I realised we don’t need this big arrangement. We can play it loose and minimal to balance out these songs that had heavy parts.

What we do in the studio it’s a whole separate world, once you take it out of the laboratory (or the Wavelab, so to speak). It may not naturally translate as well as it did on record. You’ve gotta tweak it and sculpt it.

You were criticised a little for Garden Ruin. Some people saw it as a mainstream Calexico album.

Mainstream, give me a break. Mainstream is Beyonce.

A band like Calexico even on a record like Garden Ruin is not even going to be close to mainstream. That’s just a way of saying that the people who liked our previous albums, didn’t like the changes on that one, or maybe they felt like we didn’t pull it off. They have their opinions and there are a lot of people who got into the band with that record and they just love it. There are songs on there that I generally love too.

I told my brother, who had done some co-writing with me on some lyrics and stuff, I mentioned this to him and he said it’s like disowning one of your own kids. You can’t do that. It’s not like you were blacked out and high or anything the whole time, it’s just not that way.

In some ways, for me, that record was about and for America. In my own angst ridden way and frustration with America’s consciousness and lack of perspective, I just wanted to strip away our variety and make the album plain-and-simple. We’ve done some records where it has called for us to be Southwestern. With the trumpets and the pedal steel and all that stuff, we’ve done that, now let’s do something different.

It’s not like you can please everyone. The same thing happened with Hot Rail. Some people were like it’s not as good as the last one, but I’ve read other people who say it’s our best.  At the end of the day, as you put out records it becomes less and less about an individual record and more about a band’s sound and identity. Our identity is very strong and deep. It’s not one-dimensional, it’s got sides to it.

Do you read much of the media on the band?

Some of it. I can usually tell by the first sentence whether it’s worth reading, if it contains something about deserts and lost highways then I don’t bother.

Another comment you made in our last interview together was about society moving back to more communal living. Is this something that is important to the band?

It’s important to support local businesses because it’s obvious that corporations are running things into the ground and only for the short term. It’s only if people get involved with their communities and locally grown products that change can happen. Hopefully there’s a change coming from the green revolution.

It’s something that goes back to the late 60s and 70s and the ball was dropped back then, for whatever reason. It’s become more important because of icebergs melting, and strange environment patterns and wars for oil, wars for water. We have to think more long term. We can’t depend on corporations to do it for us, we need to do it. So it is important I think.

Sometimes the themes are important in our songs. But we aren’t making protest songs. It’s a part of our consciousness and ethic, the community aspect, our different instrumentations and backgrounds coming together.