LOCAL Houston | The City Guide JUNE 2016 | Page 35

FOOD | ARTS | COMMUNITY | STYLE+LEISURE

You might think of it as borrowed feelings, but it’s really that you’re
listening and watching what’s going on around you, right?
I have about three songs on this record that have to do with observing – even the last five years of social media, consumerism or whatever… I feel like we are witness to so many things, and we put a
filter to ignore it or at the very least acknowledge with “likes” and
stuff, so there’s another song that’s specifically about that, about
watching everything just go by and always feeling like you need to
take action but not really following through.
How long have you been writing songs?
Maybe about 25 years. Since I was like maybe 12 or so.
Well, in the last five or ten years, because of social media, we see
parts of people’s lives or we see lives that we maybe never would
have been privy to – sounds like your songwriting has maybe
grown with that.
It definitely has. People are very opinionated on social media, and
I’m not really a confrontational guy, and the band shares the same
– we are very humble and non-confrontational, so I guess this is our
avenue to let some of that out. Some of these can be very intimate,
and some of these songs can get really loud and it’s absolutely on
purpose to express our emotions through them.
And what’s your history with the guys – is it the same people that
formed together in 2009 and had you played with any of them
before?
It is not the original group – our bassist Carlos has been with us 18
months. He is our newest member. He and the drummer have
played together for maybe 8 years. So it was a natural collaboration. And then my guitarist has been with me the longest, which is
4 years, maybe a little longer.
Was there ever a point where you thought about singing in English
to reach that audience or were you always going to sing in
Spanish?
You know, we did like two songs on our first record in English.
Actually, they were not in English. I wrote them in the studio on the
day – I made a decision to try to appeal to a wider audience by
translating two of the songs in English. And it definitely allowed for
people to not completely skip us, but what I found was that what I
really wanna do is be honest with my songwriting, and I just cannot
… when I start writing, I start thinking in Spanish. And my vocabulary just seems to flow a lot better in Spanish, so it’s just so much
more natural for me to express myself. And also I feel that it is a
challenge. My genre in general is a challenge to try and do something within this city and this environment; I feel like there is a lot of
opportunity to be lost in the crowd.
www.lasien.com

june 16 |

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