Mavericks still marching to their own funky beat
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Raul Malo, the lead singer and songwriter for the genre-crossing roots band the Mavericks, sat on the balcony of the third-floor office of his group’s new record label, Mono Mundo, surveying the kingdom below: a parking lot and an alleyway extending into an open field.
“Yeah,” he said in a tone dripping with sarcasm, “it’s great to be a mogul. I’m like Jay Z!”
Swimming in bling, he and his bandmates are not.
But the long-running group members who for nearly three decades have seamlessly blended rock, country, Latin jazz, early 1960s pop, soul and gospel are, nonetheless, grinning about the big step they’ve taken toward independence.
“When we started back with this, our objective always was that we weren’t going to let anybody mess with the product, so to speak,” said Malo, 51.
The Mavericks, one of the leading lights of Americana music since the early 1990s, have been signed since 2012 to Valory Music, an offshoot of Big Machine Records, the label that introduced Taylor Swift to the world.
“We weren’t going to compromise the music for any reason,” Malo said. “Not that Big Machine was asking us to do that. It’s not about any one label. But even with management, or situations you might get in with your booking agent — we’ve taken control of it all.
“Here we are,” he said, “a bunch of middle-aged guys playing music nobody can describe, and we’re still doing it and having more fun than ever.”
That attitude consistently shines in the band’s albums, especially the most recent works from the rejuvenated and reconstituted band.
The Mavericks’ first studio collection for the new label, “Brand New Day,” was released late last month — the group’s third since reuniting after going into a decade-long hibernation while Malo recorded several solo albums and participated in two of three albums with the Los Super Seven Latin rock supergroup.
From the get-go on “Brand New Day,” members of the Mavericks continue to march to their own irresistible drumbeat.
The opening track, “Rolling Along,” rides rhythmically along. Guitars, bass, keyboards and drums are augmented by accordion and banjo as Malo applies his soaring tenor to a number extolling the virtues of lighting up.
“Yeah, we’ve got banjo and accordion and the song’s about smoking weed — everything you’re not supposed to do — so, of course, we thought, ‘Let’s start the record with it!’” Malo said of the decision reached with his bandmates: guitarist Eddie Perez, keyboardist Jerry Dale McFadden and drummer Paul Deakin.
There’s also the grandly upbeat pop-rock title track as well as a sultry Latindrenched tune, “Easy As It Seems,” which brings the band — one that most often champions good-time grooves and themes of love lost and found — back into the realm of social commentary. Malo wrote it, with Perez and Alan Miller, after sensing tensions in his own family and hearing similar stories from friends during the past year’s divisive presidential campaign.
As usual, he looks to music to bridge such divides:
Malo and his cohorts go forward boldly without fretting much about whether such commentary will rub anyone the wrong way.
“In these times, the political climate is such that you never know how people will take a song or a lyric,” he said. “But like a friend of mine says, ‘Once you write it, sing it and play it, it isn’t yours anymore.’ So we have to live by that.”