Grammy winner and Black Pumas founder Adrian Quesada’s new album, Boleros Psicodelicos 2, is a love letter to the Latin ballads of the 1960s and 70s, featuring around a dozen music stars from Mexico, Chile, Cuba, Colombia, Puerto Rico, and more. They sing original ballads and cover oldies.
Quesada tells KCRW that he was born in Laredo, Texas, and lived there until age 18, when he moved to Austin. In the 80s and 90s, living along the U.S.-Mexico border offered the opportunity to grow up between two countries, two cultures, and two languages. He says he didn’t appreciate it much at the time, but now, he’s starting to realize its influence on everything he does.
Ranchera, bolero, mariachi, and cumbia music played all around him, but he wanted to listen to what other kids in America were listening to: hip-hop. He didn’t appreciate Latin music until he moved to Austin, then reconnected with friends from Laredo and started a cumbia band, he recalls.
He adds, “Growing up bicultural, binational, bilingual, it was effortless for me to speak English and Spanish throughout the day. It was like listening to Tribe Called Quest, but then listening to Selena at the quinceañera and dancing to that on the weekend. … As divisive a topic as it is sometimes now, I try to show people how much more in common everybody has. … A friend of mine … said, ‘It's like build more bridges and fewer walls.’ That's becoming a current in my music — to do something in English, do something in Spanish, do something Latin, do something not Latin, and show that it's all the same thing.”
Bolero music is at the heart of Quesada’s new album. Boleros are ballads originating from Spain and Cuba, he says, which then spread throughout Latin America. Traditionally, it encompasses acoustic guitar, light percussion, and vocals.
But boleros psicodelicos is a loose term, he says. “Basically in the late 60s, early 70s, young kids across Latin America were influenced, like everybody else, by the British invasion and the Beatles and psychedelic music. … And they're wanting to sound like the rock bands that are out there, so they're putting down the bongos, and they're picking up a drum kit. I was so attracted to that intersection. … I'm a big fan of psychedelic music in general. But a lot of psychedelic music is really just a vibe … it's a sound. … But when you take a vibe and that sound, and you take arguably the greatest songwriting ever and combine it, so now you have a vibe and a sound, and you have incredible songs.”
On Boleros Psicodelicos 2, the track “Bravo” features Grammy-winning Puerto Rican singer-songwriter iLe, who suggested a cover of the old Cuban song.
“This song, to me, was so striking because a lot of boleros have this naive love song, romantic, sometimes the damsel in distress … but this song has the most biting lyrics. This woman is talking to her man, saying, “You burning in hell is not enough. I want to see more than that.” It's really the most intense lyrics.”
He continues, “And I just love that iLe had the idea to do that because to think about when this song was written … for a woman to be singing that is super powerful. And then, of course, iLe is such a powerful interpreter that she just completely took it to the next level.”
“Primos” features Ecuadorian-Swiss brothers Alejandro and Estevan Gutiérrez, who make up Hermanos Gutierrez. This track was recorded spontaneously in a studio.
“We just said, ‘Let's just jam, and we wrote a couple of ideas, and this was one of them.’ And I love it for that, just because it's that exchange of ideas in person and everything, I think, just gives everything more life,” Quesada says.
“Cuatro Vidas” features Latin Grammy-winning artist Mireya Ramos, and it’s a cover of the original composition by Justo Carreras.
While multiple versions of this song exist, Quesada says he mostly referenced the version by Sola, a vocalist from Mexico. He learned about her from his friend in Mexico City, who’s a historian and record collector. When rummaging through the friend’s boxes of music, Quesada found a record of Sola doing “Cuatro Vidas,” bought it, and listened to it daily for three months.
For his own version, he immediately thought of Mireya Ramos as a collaborator because “to sing that song, you really have to have an insane range and dynamics.” He adds, “Because Mireya is a mariachi, she totally knew it. She was like, ‘Oh yeah, I'll do this one. I know that one, super easy.’ She did it in one afternoon and got it.”