Calexico

Tucson

Calexico takes its name from the border town of Calexico, California, but the band comes from Tucson, Arizona, and since 1996 it has been built around two players: Joey Burns, who sings and plays guitar, cello, accordion and much else, and the drummer John Convertino. Burns had studied music at UC Irvine. Around 1990 he met Convertino, then drumming for Howe Gelb in Giant Sand, and later joined that band himself after playing upright bass on a European tour. The pair also played in Friends of Dean Martinez with Bill Elm, parting from him in 1996, and hired themselves out as a rhythm section to Victoria Williams, Richard Buckner and others.

Their home base was Wavelab, Craig Schumacher's studio inside a huge warehouse beside the railroad tracks in Tucson, which is why trains turn up on so many of the records made there. Schumacher called the two of them the core of the desert sound that Friends of Dean Martinez helped spread. The first record, Spoke, was made largely in the members' houses and issued in Germany by Hausmusik under the name Spoke, then reissued by Quarterstick in 1997 once they had become Calexico.

Desert records

The Black Light (1998), produced by the duo and recorded at Wavelab through 1997, was a concept album about the desert of Arizona and northern Mexico. Hot Rail followed in 2000, along with a run of tour-only records and EPs, and John Peel put Ballad of Cable Hogue in his Festive Fifty that year. Their music drew on mariachi, conjunto, cumbia and tejano as much as on indie rock, and writers reached for the phrase desert noir. Burns described the method in 2003 as throwing everything into a blender and pressing the button.

Feast of Wire

Feast of Wire came out on 18 February 2003, made at Wavelab with a wider band: Paul Niehaus on pedal steel, Jacob Valenzuela on trumpet, and two Germans, Martin Wenk and Volker Zander. It became their critical and commercial breakthrough, reaching 71 in Britain and 10 in Germany, and Pitchfork's Joe Tangari called it their first genuinely masterful full-length. Its first single, Quattro (World Drifts In), was also their first music video.

They had already played that song in November 2002 at the Barbican in London, with Mariachi Luz de Luna, in a concert released in 2004 as World Drifts In. In 2005 they made In the Reins, an EP with Iron & Wine that reached the Billboard 200.

Later years

Sergio Mendoza joined in 2007. Garden Ruin (2006), produced by JD Foster, and Carried to Dust (2008) followed, and the music traveled: Banderilla was used in Breaking Bad, and Slowness woke the crew of the space shuttle Endeavour on its final flight in 2011. Algiers (2012) was written and recorded in a converted church in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans. Edge of the Sun (2015) brought in guests including Neko Case, and after The Thread That Keeps Us (2018) came Years to Burn (2019), made with Iron & Wine for Sub Pop, then Seasonal Shift (2020) and El Mirador (2022). They have toured with Wilco, Pavement and Arcade Fire and played Glastonbury, Roskilde and Bonnaroo.

In 2021 Robert Plant and Alison Krauss opened Raise the Roof with Quattro, the song Krauss said convinced her they would make another album together. In 2023 the band marked twenty years of Feast of Wire with a deluxe edition and a tour that played the album in full across Europe, Britain and New Zealand. Burns has said Calexico was never a band for radio singles and hits.