The New Sound of Mexico, Sung in a Nashville Accent
The singer Gerardo Garza, known as Chetes, leads a 
LAST October a quiet and unassuming 26-year-old musician from Mexico arrived at Nashville International Airport to meet an American record producer he had known only through a few e-mail messages and a phone conversation. Neither had any idea what the other looked like.
Janet Jarman for The New York Times Gerardo Garza, known as Chetes, at the EMI Mexico offices in Mexico City.
The musician was Gerardo Garza, the floppy-haired, dirty-blonde It Boy of the alternative rock scene in Monterrey, Mexico, who goes by his lifelong nickname, Chetes. (It’s Spanish shorthand for “cheeks”; Mr. Garza’s are noticeably pale and round.) The producer was Ken Coomer, a Nashville studio whiz who played drums for the new-school Americanists Wilco and Uncle Tupelo, two bands Mr. Garza had only recently heard.
The plan for the next month was simple, if not somewhat comical: the two would hole up in a studio with local musicians and technicians — none of whom spoke a word of Spanish — and create the new sound of Mexican pop music.
Both men come from the fringes of their respective music scenes. Mr. Garza has little to do with the sugary commercial formulas that dominate Mexican pop radio, and Mr. Coomer’s taste for rootsy indie rock and alt-country have kept him a world away from the pop country polish of Nashville hit machines.
“When I first heard him I was like, does he know how good he is?” Mr. Coomer said in a beaming and breathless Southern drawl. “I thought his music was timeless. Producers typically look for the flavor of the month, but he had something that was classic without being superficially retro. He clearly knew the history of good music.”
Friends at the Nashville alt-country label Lost Highway and Mr. Garza’s label, EMI Mexico, had sent along Mr. Garza’s demos. After hearing them, Mr. Coomer was hooked and sent back a package of albums featuring his own work.
“Once I listened to Wilco,” Mr. Garza said in Spanish. “I heard the style I was looking for: acoustic, live and natural. It was simple but not boring. Plus, as soon as I talked to Ken, I knew he was a good person. He had Elvis’s accent, and for me that was a very good sign.”
Mr. Garza stayed in Nashville for a month, recording and writing songs with Mr. Coomer and his engineer, Charlie Brocco, himself a veteran studio aid to Anglo pop-rock legends like Fleetwood Mac and George Harrison.
“It’s very unusual for a Latin act to come to Nashville to record,” said Kim Buie, the Lost Highway executive who first thought Mr. Coomer and Mr. Garza would make a nice fit. “We’ve got a strong alternative rock scene here,” she said, pointing to bands like Be Your Own Pet, the Pink Spiders and Bang Bang Bang. “But Nashville is not the first place people think of for international music. Neil Young has come here to record. So has Elvis Costello. Jack White moved here a year ago. But for a Latin artist to come? That’s a whole new thing.”
During the sessions Mr. Garza — who switched between guitar, bass, piano, organ and optigan (a rare ’70s “optical organ” that was a prototype for the modern sampler) — would often have to translate his lyrics for Mr. Coomer and the other musicians to help explain tone and meaning. Yet the partnership worked so well that by month’s end Mr. Coomer had helped write his first Spanish-language song, “Que Me Maten.” He now proudly streams it on his MySpace page.
“There was no culture clash at all,” Mr. Coomer said. “We went out drinking, hit all the good local bars. He just has this aura about him. You want to put him in your pocket.”
The album-length result of their experiment is Mr. Garza’s sparkling solo debut, “Blanco Fácil.” Mr. Coomer’s organic, analog touch is everywhere (the album was recorded live to tape, on vintage microphones and amplifiers, before it was loaded onto Pro Tools). Despite its Nashville setting, the album sounds as if it had been recorded in California. The songs are classic 1960s and ’70s sunshine folk-pop — the Brian Wilson and James Taylor kind — full of sweet and warm melodies, dreamy harmonies and perfectly placed jingle-jangle bridges that mend the hearts the verses have just finished breaking.
Since its Mexican release earlier this year, the album has sold nearly 50,000 copies, the benchmark for being certified gold in Mexico. That’s not a small accomplishment in a national pop market with little patience for anything other than teen sensations like RBD and Belinda. The first single on “Blanco Fácil,” “Completamente,” has an intense melancholic charm, which led to a 2006 Latin Grammy nomination for best rock song, some heavy iTunes Latino promotion, and a much-played video that features a bundled-up Mr. Garza singing his way down the wintry streets of Beijing.
When it is released in the United States on Dec. 26, the album will no doubt face similar challenges in an equally rigid stateside Latin music market that has not typically been kind to artists who are not wholly pop, rock, tropical or traditional. (As pretty as it is, Mr. Garza’s song “El Sonido de Tu Voz,” a sepia-toned mariachi serenade, will probably not earn him a spot on the Regional Mexican charts).
The New Sound of Mexico, Sung in a Nashville Accent
Mr. Garza in Nashville. Mr. Garza didn’t have to look very far for inspiration. In industrial Monterrey, three hours south of the Texas-Mexico border, he grew up on a strict Beatles and Beach Boys diet.
“First I was taken over by Bitlemania,” he said, using the common Mexican slang term Los Bitles for the Beatles. “Then I was lost in Beachboysmania.”
He credits his taste to his guitarist father, a founding member of Los Rockets, the sharp-dressed Mexican rock pioneers of the ’50s and ’60s. Like most Mexican rock bands of the day, Los Rockets recorded mostly Spanish-language covers of American hits, and their debut album included makeovers of “Blue Moon” and “Calendar Girl.” Their first big gig was playing before the Monterrey premiere of the film “Melodía Sinestra,” better known north of the border as Elvis Presley’s “King Creole.”
“It was the era in Mexico when rock was still a very new thing,” Mr. Garza said. “Bands were very influenced by American music, and they would take any popular song in English and then translate it into Spanish. My dad was at the center of all that. He played all those songs around the house on his guitar, and they’ve been part of my personal history ever since.”
Yet for all his father’s influence, Mr. Garza’s first foray into music, at age 7, was through classical guitar. It wasn’t until MTV hit Monterrey that he decided he should plug in. “I quickly discovered that my guitar didn’t sound anything like all of the Twisted Sister videos I was seeing,” he said. “I started learning about distortion, and that was it, I wanted to play rock.”
Mr. Garza’s first band, Zurdok, landed a recording contract when he was only 16. They went on to release three albums, two of which, the highly influential “Hombre Sintetizador” and “Maquillaje,” became landmark recordings in contemporary Mexican rock, in large part because of their use of programmed delays and feedback and their whimsical mix of ’60s psychedelia with Flaming Lips-style space-rock experimentation.
Along with the cosmopolitan style-mashers Plastilina Mosh (who went on to work with producers like Money Mark and sign with the American electronic label Astralwerks) and the norteño-sampling hip-hoppers Control Machete (whose “Sí Señor” became the soundtrack to a beloved Spike Jonze commercial for Levi’s), Zurdok became one of the main border-hopping voices in a blossoming Monterrey alternative scene that many likened to Seattle.
“There’s always been a lot of American influence in Monterrey,” Mr. Garza said. “Everybody speaks English. We could always go to Texas to buy new albums and see shows. We could always turn on the TV and know what was in fashion in the U.S. and England. It’s a pretty Americanized place.”
So Americanized that Mr. Garza soon left Zurdok to form Vaquero, a Beatles- and Phil Spector-tinged indie-rock project where he wrote and sang everything in grammatically perfect and accent-free English (the group’s self-titled album was released last year on its own label). On songs like “Space Is Fake” and “Sunshine,” Mr. Garza sounds as if he had been raised in Manchester or Michigan, not Monterrey.
“Because I mostly heard music in English growing up, I had a pretty good idea of what a good song in English sounded like,” said Mr. Garza, who admits to understanding English far better than he speaks it. “But soon I started missing Spanish. And I had spent so many years playing with psychedelic music and alternative music, all that distortion, that I wanted to get away from that. I wanted songs with really pleasant arrangements, with structures of classic pop songs.”
Yet he said the true model for “Blanco Fácil” had not been his usual well of Beatles and Beach Boys songs but the strings-and-spaceships adult radio pop of the Electric Light Orchestra. And not from their ’70s heyday either, but from their final outing, 2001’s “Zoom,” an album that even devout E.L.O. fans have probably not uploaded to their hard drives.
“That album changed my life,” he said. “It was the inspiration for my work as a solo artist. I loved how simple the arrangements were, yet how great the melodies were, the chords, the lyrics. That’s what I wanted to pull off, something with a lighter arrangement, but that still had powerful melodies. Then I became obsessed with Jeff Lynne. I bought all of the E.L.O. albums, the Traveling Wilburys, even the most recent Tom Petty album, which Jeff Lynne produced. That’s the sound I wanted.”
It obviously worked. Mr. Coomer’s first reaction to the demos was an instant case of mistaken E.L.O. identity. “I thought, ‘He’s a Mexican Jeff Lynne,’ ” Mr. Coomer said. “I just flipped.”
As thrilled as he was by Mr. Coomer’s reaction, Mr. Garza had no intention, or hope, of “Blanco Fácil” ending up on Nashville radio (no matter how many friends Mr. Coomer insists he has played it for). His focus was Mexico, where pop means singers who rarely write their own music and would rather sing over prerecorded tracks on gossipy talk shows than front a live band, and where alternative music tends to occupy its own self-policing world, one that can toe an unforgiving line when it comes to rock authenticity.
Which is why there were a few raised eyebrows in September when Chetes was featured among the 24 acts at the Manifest alternative rock festival, held under the massive steel dome of a suburban bullring on the outskirts of Mexico City. Three Nokia- and Nintendo-sponsored stages may have boasted leading we’re-not-pop acts like VHS or Beta, of Louisville, Ky.; Pretty Girls Make Graves, of Seattle; and the emo strivers Allison, of Mexico City. But the surprise hero of the day turned out to be Mr. Garza, the timid guy in a blazer and a T-shirt, the least alternative of all.
For most of his set he played piano, strummed acoustic guitar and in his reedy but assured voice led audience singalongs as often as he could. The music might have been inspired by bygone American pop and forged in American studios, but it still made plenty of sense back on Mexican soil.
“The trend in Mexican music right now is to be strange,” he said. “Everyone wants to be weird and really alternative and all that. I just decided to make something more normal, more traditional, more honest. It was time for me to come up with something that I knew was truly my own.”
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