TW: Would I be right
in saying Raul, Raul Malo, that you are the moving spirit behind this great
band?
RM: Well, I don't
know about the moving spirit, but perhaps the one... well, yeah, yeah I
guess I would be the lead singer, leader, sort of, of the band..
TW: The style you've
adopted - because this is a great time for categories - How do you categorise
the Mavericks?
RM: (laughs) Well, we
try not to, I mean we've obviously fought a lot... we've had to fight a
lot of that sort of categorisation - just musically we have been able to
withstand it a bit. Obviously with the success of Trampoline, especially
in Europe and the UK, it helped really confuse matters even more.
TW: They're confused
in the United Kingdom... What do we call the Mavericks, do we call them
a Mexican hat band, or.....
RM: (laughs ) You
can......!
TW: ...Tijuana-influenced, or
RM: It's definitely
Tijuana-influenced you know. I think it's popular music, it's just American
pop music but it's definitely influenced from... You know, we derive from
Latin influences of course - you know, my heritage, my background: my parents
are Cuban so I think that's going to come out in the music no matter what
you do, as well as being influenced by all the American artists, and also
by British rock `n' roll, we grew up, I guess like most people, listening
to the Beatles, and Cream and all the great British rock bands that came
our way.
TW: Is Nashville the
place to be? If you're going to make it, do you have to be here?
RM: I don't know
that you have to be here. Our situation was different. We moved up from
Florida because we wanted to. We knew we had to leave Miami, just because
of the kind of music we were doing...
TW: So it wasn't
the police...?
RM: (laughs) It
wasn't a witness relocation programme or anything like that.....fugitives
of the law...! We knew we wanted to leave Miami and I think musically Nashville
seemed closer to what we were doing than even New York or LA at the time.
I mean at the time, we're talking about 10 years ago, almost, you know,
Steve Earle was on the scene, Lyle Lovett, Kelly Willis, Nanci Griffith,
so it was...even though they were all part of the country music scene they
were artists that weren't doing country music, you know, they were more
I guess what you would call Americana, or, you know, very different types
of American music.
TW: You know, your
latest... "Things I Cannot Change"... Will you be changing, will you be
moving on to a different style?
RM: Well we don't
know; this is a song that a friend of ours wrote that we happened to like
a lot, and it kind of reminded me of some of our older stuff, where it
was just more guitar-oriented, `jangly guitar' type of stuff, and very
Beatle-ish, so it's kind of a throwback just for our sake, just to go back
in time a little bit.