Carrie Rodriguez’s ‘Laboratorio’ blends Latin roots, poetry and genre-bending sounds with Calexico at Austin’s Paramount

Carrie Rodriguez has recorded and shared the stage with the likes of John Prine, John Mayer, Bruce Hornsby, Los Lobos, Patty Griffin, Lucinda Williams and more.

She’s a native Texan and Texas is infused in her music, but she regularly curates unique performances in collaboration with other musicians ready to embrace experimentation.

One ongoing project is called Laboratorio, and the latest from this lands at Austin’s Paramount Theater this weekend.

Her collaborators are the members of Calexico, a band that shares a love of the borderlands and blending genres. To talk about her project, Rodriguez joined the Texas Standard.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity:

Texas Standard: Tell us a little bit more about Laboratorio. What is your goal with these one-of-a-kind shows?

Carrie Rodriguez: Yeah, they’re collaborations, and each one is unique. We started right here in Austin at the Cactus Cafe back in 2017, and it was just a project – I called my friend Michael Ramos, who’s a great producer, musician, and said, Michael, I want to do this project where we kind of explore what Latin music is.

When you say you wanted to explore Latino music, what does that mean to you?  

I am bi-cultural. I grew up not speaking Spanish until I met my ex-husband, who was from Spain, and then I learned Spanish, but from someone from Spain. So, entonces mi español es super – it doesn’t sound like Texas Spanish, that’s for sure.

So, it’s like we all have these stories, you know? And for me, I think learning more about especially Latino musicians here in Texas helps me connect more with my roots and my family.

Getting guests like Eva Ybarra, who’s an incredible conjunto accordionist from San Antonio, or Tejano legend Ruben Ramos. We get to collaborate with these incredible artists and learn from them.

Tell us a little bit about this collaboration with Calexico. What are you doing here?  

So I’ve gotten to work with their keyboardist, accordionist and producer, Sergio Mendoza, for many years. He helped me arrange all of the songs for the musical that I wrote, which was called Americano. He’s worked with me on a recent theater project called Postcards from the Border.

So we’ve had a musical relationship for a long time, but I’ve never even met in person Joey, the lead singer and songwriter, or John Convertino yet. So I’m really excited. I’ve been working on their tunes for the last couple of months.

We also have paired them with this wonderful poet. His name is Roberto Tejada. He’s a professor at U of H. And a friend of mine sent me a poem by him from his new collection called “Carbonate of Copper.” And as soon as I read that, I was thinking of this song in our set with Calexico called “Minas de Cobre,” the Copper Mines. And I just saw these two things together and went, oh my God, we have to have him be a part of it as well.

So when people see this performance on stage, a little bit of music, a little bit a poetry, that kind of thing, mixing it up?

Yeah, I mean, it’s pretty curated, but yes, we’ll have a couple of segments of poetry readings with music underscoring those. We also have video projections that my husband, Luke Jacobs, does. He’s actually gone out to Enchanted Rock to shoot these sort of videos, but they’re almost like photographs, of cracks in the rocks, plants … You’ll have this kind of imagery going with the music.

Wow, that sounds really immersive. So there are a couple of singles from a new album that you are, when does the album come out?

Yeah, album comes out mid July. The two singles are out now, and they’re from this theater project that just premiered here at University of Texas, Texas Performing Arts in January. It’s called Postcards from the Border. And that’s a project that I worked with Calexico’s Sergio Mendoza on.

You dropped something on me that I didn’t realize: You’re a songwriter in residence at UT. What does that involve?

Well, one of the biggest things was getting to work on this theater work. That was part of my residency. And we developed it with TPA in residence. We had multiple workshops. They helped us find this wonderful dramaturge – I think I said that right.

Dramaturge.

It sounds better in Spanish: Dramaturga.

Mm, yes, it does sound better in Spanish. 

But yeah, and so this is a project with author Oscar Cásares, who grew up on the border in Brownsville. He’s written many books. One of my favorites is his collection of short stories called “Brownsville.”

So it’s a collaboration with Oscar and with a wonderful photographer from El Paso, Joel Salcido, and then I did the music. And the album is kind of like a soundtrack from our show.

When you’re doing a show like the ones you’re doing with Calexico, do you try to capture it? Do you film it? Do you think about releasing it, perhaps? How do you go about that?  

We do film all of the shows. And even the rehearsals, we’ll film parts of that. You know, documentation and kind of archiving these experiences is a really important part of what we do.

Which speaks to the spontaneity of it. I mean, I realize you say a lot of this is choreographed and obviously this is a spectacle – visual spectacle, emotionally as well – but there’s something about that spontaneity and capturing that that you obviously are placing an emphasis on with this laboratory.

That is the magic of these shows. And it’s been that way since the beginning, when we started in the little 100-seat room at the Cactus, and it’s still that way, whether we’re performing on a huge stage like the Paramount or in a living room rehearsing, we’re playing music together really for the first time.

I mean, it’s kind of scary, but at the same time, this is the great thing about music. It’s like, you get to go on this playground and you can push somebody off of the top of the slide. They actually don’t get hurt in reality.

Ha ha ha ha! 

So it’s like, we get to go play. And the reason why this works, though, is because our musicians are so incredible. So we’ve got a core house band, all based in Austin, and these players, if you combined their years of experience, we’d be a thousand years old.

But we’ve got Roscoe Beck on the bass – now, he was Leonard Cohen’s bassist and musical director for 30 years. Alex Marrero on the drums, who’s also the front man of Brownout, and DJ here, host of Horizontes, our Latin music show. David Pulkingham, who I met playing with Alejandro Escovedo, he performs with Patty Griffin and records with her.

We have so many wonderful musicians, and that’s why we can get up on stage and play and have fun, and it still holds together.

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