I learned about Twanguero via an email addressed to a former version of me.
From 2006–2008, I was the Online Editor for Blender, a “snarky” music magazine that read, and felt, a little like the Internet in magazine form. Well, you can guess what happened: In 2006, YouTube blinked to life, and by 2008, Blender went dark. I mean dark. Much like what just happened to MTV News, the site vanished and the archives are gone. Now when you go to blender.com you get what you deserve: blenders.
(FYI, some of my favorite videos—Sia, Geoff Emerick, Gallows, Katy Perry, Gwar, Sheryl Crow, Antoinette K-Doe, etc.—are on my YouTube channel, and there are text interviews with David Lee Roth, actor Michael Emerson, Gene Simmons, Ari Hest, etc. on my site. Just because.)
Anyhow, part of the Blender gig was getting on PR mailing lists so I knew what was going on, or at least what was getting pushed. After Blender died, I never unsubscribed from those lists, and I still get them every day—they announce baby bands set to perform on Jimmy Kimmel; the 30th anniversary reissue of Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die; “Bowl for Ronnie,” a celebrity bowling party benefiting the Ronnie James Dio Stand Up and Shout Cancer Fund; and a thousand other products and appearance dates that turn the crank of the music industry. They remind me that the “long tail” theory keeps tailing towards infinity, and if you disagree, meet me at Creed’s “Summer of ’99” tour featuring 3 Doors Down, Daughtry, Switchfoot, Tonic, Big Wreck, and Finger Eleven. I can probably get us press passes.
When the subject lines of these emails are particularly nuts, I open them. I’m just too curious to hit delete, and too nostalgic to unsubscribe. The NKOTB/Paula Abdul/DJ Jazzy Jeff tour? Am I happier to know about that, or sadder? Going through my inbox takes a while, and can be weirdly emotional.
Then last week I got one:
EXPLORATORY GUITARIST TWANGUERO ANNOUNCES SEPT 27 RELEASE OF “PANAMERICA” LP
They had me at “exploratory guitarist,” but the name Twanguero was so hilarious, I had to forward to a friend as a joke. “Zorro, Desperado…Twanguero. Sure, why not?” I pictured a mask, cape, horse, and Telecaster. Duets with Orville Peck, both on horses, with both horses also in masks.
So I clicked. And then I shut up.
No masks. No horses. No gimmicks. Just four salt-and-peppered dudes arranged in a dimly-lit circle, conversing musically and conjuring—really conjuring, in the magical sense of that word—a universe where everything I love works with everything else. There was country, and 60s surf, and spaghetti Western, and rumba… and Hawaiian… blue jazz… cumbia… flamenco…
Really, it was like opening my front door and having a lifetime of musical influences flip on the lights and yell “Surprise!” at the same time.
Think Marc Ribot, but more inside. Link Wray, but more outside. Brian Setzer if he was from Spain and not Long Island. Julian Lage plus overdrive. Danny Gatton, or Les Paul, but not at all. Deadbolt, or X, or the Ventures, but also not at all. But also yes, all of it.
And teeth. Even when the vibe is chill, it is not chill. To me, it has what Garcia Lorca called duende — one of those know-it-when-you-hear it kind of words that was well expressed by Christopher Maurer in his intro to Lorca’s In Search of Duende:
At least four elements can be isolated in [Lorca’s] vision of duende: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical. The duende is a demonic earth spirit who helps the artist see the limitations of intelligence, reminds him that “ants could eat him or that a great arsenic lobster could fall suddenly on his head”; who brings him face-to-face with death; and who helps him create and communicate memorable, spine-chilling art.
I get shades of that in Twanguero—the melancholy, the beauty, and the “pain that has no explanation.”
Lorca:
The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, ‘The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.
But in this AutoTuned world where everything’s filtered and fake, how does he do on a small stage six inches from fans sticking their phones in his face?
Well. Damn.
Hey, Twanguero: Wherever you are, I owe you an apology. You have a perfect band name, and I’m glad it led me to your music. I’m sorry I don’t work at a major music magazine, or we definitely would have done something together. But then again, Blender is dead and gone, and we are not. So maybe this works out for both of us.
Mike Errico is a recording artist, author, and songwriting professor at Yale, the New School, and NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. His first book, Music, Lyrics, and Life: A Field Guide for the Advancing Songwriter, is available everywhere.