Stories have the power to connect, to touch lives, sometimes even to change them. The best songwriters weave their words and music together, creating images that envelop and transfix, draw in the listener and make them a part of the tale. That’s what Cuñao does on their second full-length release, Sangre Y Arena (released October 6th, 2015). The people who inhabit their songs build their spaces inside the listeners’ heart.
“In terms of lyrics I’ve always been influenced by the nueva canciónmovement of the 1970s,” explains songwriter, singer, and band founder Julio Montero. “It was very political, very lyrical. It was protest music but it was also poetry. It moved me, and that’s what I want to do to people who hear us.”
Born in Ecuador but raised in New York City, Montero heard plenty of bolero – the ubiquitous romantic music of Latin America - as well as cumbia, rock, and African music that adds up to the transcontinental swirl of sounds that underpins Cuñao.
“We’re quite deliberately an acoustic band with warm textures in the music,” Montero says. “I want to keep it that way. In our early days the sound was more electronic, but this truly evokes all the emotional aspects in the material, even when the songs are more upbeat.”
Cuñao originally came together in 2010, gradually developing and morphing over the next four years into the current five-piece lineup. But the band’s history also informs its present.
“The first four songs on the album are all old tunes from those early days,” says Montero. “They’re pieces we’ve kept playing live and greatly rearranged, like “Mas Alla” and “La Oveja Negra.” And they work better in this setting, it brings out the intimacy inside them.”
The move to this acoustic sound has been organic, a path traced by the band’s releases. After Trabajo Y Ron in 2011, where Latin folk merged with beats and electronica, the 2013 EP Los Testigos offered a deliberate glance over the shoulder to vintage Latin folk. It was followed by another EP, Llano Lllanero, Lloron, which explored cumbia. That release won Cuñao The Examiner Magazine’s 2013 L.A. Music Critics Award for Best International Release, while one of the cuts, “Mi Periquito,” was featured on From Dusk ‘Till Dawn: The Series on the El Rey network.
But Sangre Y Arena finds Cuñao quite literally looking at another landscape. The title, which translates as ‘Blood and Sand,’ was inspired by the desert that surrounds the band’s Los Angeles home.
“The area is a big part of our inspiration on this record,” Montero says. “The desert and the city helped bring this band together and we want to credit it. It’s even there on the cover, which Josel Cruz, our bass player, designed.”
The desert resonates across Sangre Y Arena. It’s not only there in the heat or the lonesome sound, but in the songs themselves. “Niños Del Desierto,” for instance, transports the listener right out into the unforgiving wilderness where death can be a heartbeat away.
“A few years ago I saw a program about kids crossing from Mexico into the U.S.,” Montero recalls. “They’d be caught, then housed in facilities near the border. The images shocked me. The temperatures there are brutal, everything is horrific. I started to think about the kids who attempted that journey but didn’t make it. The song is about one of them. I wanted it to be musically very sparse and light, an innocent contrast to the seriousness of the lyrics.”
The song is in the direct line of nueva canción, political yet personal. It’s a story, beautifully drawn, with a stark reminder that not all tales end in happily-ever-after. “Saana,” too, tells a story of America, but this time from the perspective of an African immigrant.
“That’s the most orchestrated song on the album,” Montero notes. “We added percussion and saxophone. It all began when Wilfried Souly, a dancer-musician and West African drummer from Burkina Faso who lives in L.A. asked me to write something for a show he was doing called Saana. It means ‘Foreigner,’ and the lyrics are made up of African proverbs about foreigners that I translated into Spanish. What it highlights is that we all have many of the same experiences, no matter where we start, and I think showing that is important.”
Connections and empathy. The things that make us human. Montero leads with his heart as a writer. He tells his stories, he draws us in. And through his music he draws people together and holds up a mirror for us to see ourselves. There’s a great deal of beauty to be found in the sand and the blood.
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