Hey – this is Pat. This is the story behind Escalera, from our “Under Different Stars” EP. Enjoy!
- Escalera Stellarator 4:28
On “Under Different Stars” (2019) we recorded an English-language cover of Monocordio’s “Escalera.” Monocorodio is a band out of Mexico City, led by Fernando Rivera Calderón, and “Escalera” was one of the singles from their 2005 LP, “La Hora Del Tiempo.”
In the past couple years, I have become an obsessive fan of indie rock bands from Mexico. This started in November 2018, when my wife and I heard some really cool Spanish-language indie rock while at a local Mexican restaurant. After Shazam-ing some of these songs, I realized that there are some amazing bands out of Mexico and Latin America that we would never hear in the States, and I fell into a deep rabbit hole of listening to tons of rock bands particularly from Mexico. Along the way I found a few of my favorites, including Monocordio, Chetes, Zurdok, Cafe Tacvba, Porter, Hello Seahorse!, fLIP Tamez, Zoe, La Gusana Ciega, and many more, all from our neighbors to the south. I don’t even speak Spanish, but I really fell in love with some of these bands, and I thought it would be fun to do a cover of one of these songs on Under Different Stars. In the end, we narrowed the choices to “Escalera” by Monocordio, and a couple songs from Chetes (“Completamente” or “Efecto Domino”).
I got in touch with Monocordio (Fernando) and explained that we wanted to do his song in English, and asked if he (or anyone) had translated his original Spanish lyrics into English. No one had done this, so I asked his permission to do so, and he was very cool about saying “yes.” So we picked this one for our record. Maybe we’ll do Chetes cover in the future.
Although I really love the arrangement of the original studio recording of Escalera (link above), I realized the “live” arrangements that I watched on YouTube would be a better fit for Stellarator. They often played with a horn section that featured trumpet, and with me having a kid who is great on trumpet, it seemed like a great way to get my son involved and also pay homage to the live versions of this song.
(Quick aside for a “dad brag”: John played all the horns on this track, and Henry played drums. Ok back to the story…)
The other cool thing about Monocordio’s live performances is that they would often finish the song by jamming out to some iconic chord progression, such as “She’s so Heavy” from the Beatles, or something from King Crimson, etc. This gave us a fun idea to play with, to come up with our own jam on the outro (the ending of the song).
Translating the lyrics was hard, but luckily Theron knows some Spanish, so he did a lot of the heavy lifting. I think we ended up doing a pretty good job.
Escalera translates to “staircase” in English. Theron had suggested working in some kind of reference to Stairway to Heaven in our translation, which was a great idea. Which got me thinking… I had been trying to figure out what to do about the outro jam part, and realized that the Stairway to Heaven chords were very similar to the Escalera chords, and by making one change we were able to morph the outro of Escalera into Stairway to Heaven. So this is how we both came up with a cool outro and worked the Stairway to Heaven easter egg into the recording. It is kind of subtle, but if you know it is there you will definitely hear it! (The “morph” starts at the 3:33 mark in the song… it begins with Theron’s lead guitar playing Escalera melodies over the Stairway progression, and then the horns pick up the Stairway melody lines….) This was a fun way to put our own spin on the song, and also to pay homage to Fernando, and work in Theron’s Stairway to Heaven reference…
We finished the song in the middle of March 2019, and so I sent a link to Fernando to make sure he didn’t hate it or want to have us remove it from the record. This would have been a bummer, since we had gotten the record mastered assuming Escalera would be on it. Luckily he was super cool about it, loved it, and even helped promote it on his social media accounts. This was amazing, as Fernando is not only a successful musician, he’s also a radio and TV personality in Mexico, as well as a published author and poet. He has a large social media following, and was very generous to promote Stellarator to his fans. He even played our version of Escalera on a radio program where he was playing his favorite songs. To this day, we probably have more fans in Mexico than we do in the USA due to his promotion of this song.
It gets better: In late September 2019, I had to got to travel to Mexico City for work, so I reached out to Fernando to see if he would be up for grabbing a beer or something. He said he’d be happy to meet up, and even suggested taking me out to see Lucha Libre, which would have been amazing. Schedules ended up being tight, but we were able to spend a few hours together over a few glasses of wine, and had an amazing conversation. Ever since I’ve known him, he’s claimed not to speak English… Since I don’t speak Spanish I was worried it would be hard to communicate. Turns out his English is great! It was such a special thing to get to meet him, talk music, family, culture, politics, etc. Music is so cool for making connections like this, which I truly treasure. Thank you Fernando…. ¡Abrazo!
By the way, Fernando has a great Instagram feed – he’s a good follow! @fernandoriveracalderon
I wanted to bring Fernando an appropriate thank-you gift, so I asked Ken Stringfellow (of The Posies, who also played on a few songs on Under Different Stars) to sign a copy of The Posies iconic “Frosting on the Beater” for Fernando. Frosting on the Beater was a pretty seminal record, and influenced my own musical tastes, so I thought it would be a great gift for Fernando. Ken was super cool about this, as he was on the road when I asked him to do this, and made it work out I could send it to him and get it back before my trip. Thanks Ken!
This trip to Mexico City was short, but truly magic. I arrived late Saturday night and had to work Monday-Thursday and fly home Thursday night. So I only had Sunday open to do sight seeing. A colleague and his family took me to some museums in the morning and afternoon (thanks Rogelio!). In the evening, I got to see Chetes perform a set at the SeptemberFest festival… which was so amazing that he was playing 5 miles from my hotel when I was in town – what are the odds??? Seriously! And of course later that night I got to hang out with Fernando. It was a day I won’t soon forget.
I am now such a huge fan of rock bands from Mexico. I have spent so much time looking at Mexican bands on the Internet that I now get Spanish-language ads on Twitter…:) If you have Spotify and are interested in hearing some great music, I have a playlist that showcases some of my favorite songs from favorite bands:
Thanks for taking the time to read this!
– Pat