Freddy Trujillo may be best known as the bass player with The Delines and previously with Richmond Fontaine. That aside, his three-decade career includes playing bass in the studio and on tour with some heavy hitters in the rock and grunge scene. He has also recorded four solo albums, the latest being I NEVER THREW A SHADOW. Written and recorded during the pandemic, the album’s subject matter is real-life experiences as a Chicano growing up in California. The title track from this album recalls an incident when Freddy, the subject of an attempted robbery, was subsequently treated as the transgressor based on the colour of his skin. Sonically, the album fuses Freddy’s love of Chicano and country-flavoured rock and roll. Freddy spoke about the album, his previous bands and employers, and his work with Richmond Fontaine and The Delines when we recently hooked up via Zoom
We know you from your work with Richmond Fontaine and The Delines, but you also have a solo career.
As a bass player, you always put your eggs in someone else’s basket. I have a good career playing bass with other people, but it’s always up to them when they want to play, so I have also stacked up some solo records. I haven’t always gone out and toured them because I had a family to support, and I also worked for CD Baby, a cool company that allowed me to play bass with bands on tour. In my early career, I played bass with Pat Smear, who is now in Foo Fighters; he was also in Nirvana. I played with Alejandro Escovedo a few times, played in a band called I Love You, and was in a short-lived band called Federale with Mark Ford from The Black Crows and Luther Russell, who produced all my earlier records. In more recent years, I’ve realised that I really need to start taking my own music out there. One that I released, SKETCH OF A MAN, was just before the pandemic, so I lost a lot of steam with that, and the one I had paid a publicist for the album before that, but he was new at that, and nothing really happened with that one. I had another one before, which was called HAWKS AND HIGHWAYS.
Are those albums available to us in Ireland in CD format?
I’ve brought those albums over to Ireland and England on The Delines tours and get to sell them on the merch table. I have a good ally in Garry Kehoe in Rollercoaster Records in Kilkenny, who has carried my records in that record store.
How did the connection with Willy Vlautin come about?
That was through Luther Russell, who produced LOST SON for Richmond Fontaine in 1999. Richmond Fontaine drummer Sean Oldham, pedal steel player Paul Brainard, and I backed up a Texan called Ian Moore, so I got to know those two guys. When Dave Harding, who played bass with Richmond Fontaine, moved to Denmark, I came on Willy’s radar for The Delines, and I’m glad he asked.
Why did you relocate to Portland from California?
It’s funny; my sister accidentally became a pop star. She was singing for this guy called Elliot Wolff and also used to ghost tracks before autotunes for people who weren’t great singers. She would sing along with them, and Elliot would ghost her vocals and fix the pitch. She sang a song with him that became a hit, and I wrote some songs with her, and I probably made the most money I’ve ever made in the music business. But that all eventually went sour. I didn’t care where I went, but I needed to get out of California. I had some friends in Portland and moved here. I didn’t think I would stay, and now it’s thirty-something years later.
Portland appears to have a healthy music scene. Jeffrey Martin, Anna Tivel, Jenny Don’t and The Spurs are artists living there who we have recently featured in Lonesome Highway interviews or on our radio show.
Yes, I know them; I love Anna Tivel. Her music and lyrics are amazing, and Jenny is a good pal. Kelly Halliburton Jenny’s bass players used to play in Dead Moon, played in punk bands and had good connections in Europe. Portland has a good scene, and there are a lot of clubs. From my perspective, I feel that when I first met Willy (Vlautin), it seemed like there was more of a singular type of community, but we were all much younger then. The Delines don’t actually play in Portland, and I don’t know who I fit with or what age group. I am starting to meet some younger Latinos who seem to like my music, so I am trying to build a music community with some younger folks.
How would you describe your solo music?
I would describe it as rock and roll under a big umbrella. I often term it Mexicana, sort of Los Lobos style. A lot of the younger Mexican artists are very straight ahead and doing Cumbia, a style of music from Peru, or Chicha, which is psychedelic guitar-based, and just doing that. I’ll have a little bit of both, and I can’t stay in one bucket; that’s probably where I shoot myself in the foot sometimes. When Spotify do my algorithms, they have me closest to Americana.
I understand that the pandemic gave you the time and space to write and record your recently released album, I NEVER THREW A SHADOW AT IT.
It’s always been difficult for me to keep a band, and I have two great guitar players, Ag Donnaloa and Kenny Coleman. Sometimes, guitar players can be like roosters and don’t get along too well. These two guys get along great, and the three of us are music addicts. During the pandemic, I didn’t want to bring people to my house and practice in the basement, so we went to a store and masked up and played. I wanted to keep them engaged, so I started writing some songs and talked to Cory Gray about recording some. We just started piecing it together from there.
The album title and track recall that disturbing incident where you encountered police racism first-hand.
Yes. The title song, particularly with the Black Lives Matter thing going on, reminded me of how traumatising that incident was for me as a young man, and I felt like purging it that way was a more beautiful way than maybe smashing windows downtown.
Do you feel that racism in the police force has in any way reduced since that incident?
It’s hard to tell as I get older; I was probably more of a target when I was younger, as you always are. I had to train my kid to be like Jedi in Star Wars, avoid the police, and not provoke them. That incident I had was just a month before the Rodney King trial when there was a lot of tension there. I was recently listening to a John Doe interview, and his stories were just as bad being a punk rocker back then as being a person of colour.
Your previous album, AMEXICO, also had political overtones but less pronounced than the new album.
A lot of my songs are not entirely political, but music has always been therapy for me, especially when talking about incidents in song. I got a scholarship and went to college, and I took a lot of Chicano lessons and studies, which empowered me, giving me knowledge that I hadn’t known. I didn’t even know what the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was in 1849, where somehow America acquired Texas, California, Nevada, Mexico, and Utah, that whole territory we call Aztlan, which is the opening track on AMEXICO. In the Chicano movement, that is known as the forgotten land. In America, you see a lot of extremes; the African American movement was really outspoken and simultaneously, we had the Brown Berets and AIM, the American Indian movement. Mexicans tend to be overlooked, keep their heads down and keep working. I’m also a big fan of black civil rights music, Stevie Wonder, Sly and The Family Stone and having soundbites and dialogue in songs; we tried to do that with AMEXICO with spoken dialogue in some of the songs.
Getting back to the new album. The opening track, Corpus Christi, was initially written by Willy Vlautin for The Delines.
Willy always has way more songs than he needs, and it didn’t seem like that one was going to make it onto a Delines album. The reason I liked the phrasing of it was that it reminded me of Doug Sahm. Willy’s demo was a lot slower, and I decided to process it more like a Krautrock mix; that beat is straight up from that band Neu; there’s a big German influence in Texas, and Mexicans play accordion because of that. We recorded it, and I loved it, so it made the cut on the album.
I particularly like the track Remember Me. I get a sense of Carlos Santana in it.
I was trying to capture a Mavericks groove with that one. I love Raul Malo, and I wanted to have some countryish guitar on it, too.
Have you plans to tour the album?
Yes. I’m actually leaving today to do a California run. I’m opening for The Delines on the U.K. tour and will get to play some of the album then.
How do you compare playing in The Delines to your previous stint in Richmond Fontaine?
There’s a big difference. For one, I feel I’ve been a part of The Delines from the beginning. With Richmond Fontaine, I was a fan for so long before getting to play with them. It was fun because Dave (Harding) played bass a lot differently from me; he’s way more on top of the beat, and I’m more of a traditional bass player playing in the pocket. With one, I’m a ‘fanboy’; with the other, I’m part of the family. The two tours I did with Richmond Fontaine were really memorable. When we were playing in London at The Electric Ballroom to a thousand people, there was a moment there when I just got choked up. We were playing the song The Janitor and to see an audience hang on every lyric as they do in your country and the U.K. – that won’t happen in America, people talk over the music. It’s a really sad song that Willy was singing, and watching everyone just hanging on to every lyric felt like justice for a really good friend of mine. I just got caught up in Willy’s performance and choked up and had to look at my amp for a few seconds.
Is there a new Delines album on the horizon?
Yes. We have a whole record pretty much done, but because Willy is juggling two careers and promoting his new book, The Horse, he’s always writing new songs, so we might also do an extended version of the record, maybe a deluxe version. The regular version should come out in early 2025.
Interview by Declan Culliton