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Omar Rodriguez-Lopez - A separate reality

Caleb Goman talks music, magic and alternate realities with Omar Rodriguez-Lopez.

Don't let 20 minute songs scare you — Omar Rodriguez-Lopez is as down to earth as they come. No stranger to Australia, the man has gone from punk rock pioneer in At The Drive-In to prolific experimental rock virtuoso with The Mars Volta and his solo project The Omar Rodriguez Lopez Group. He's also an accomplished director, artist and producer. Not bad for a self-proclaimed "rowdy Spic from the equator".

Caleb Goman (CG): You've toured Australia a bunch of times with At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta, but this is the first time you'll be here doing solo shows with the Omar Rodrguez-Lopez Group. Can you give us a hint of what to expect?

Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (ORL): Oh you know, just more music. Just more music. I never know what to say when people ask what to expect. If you've seen us over the years, you know we never have any big, spectacular shows; it's just people on stage playing songs and music you know.

CG: I'd say some of the Mars Volta shows I've seen were pretty big and spectacular.

ORL: Oh you know, it's not like we have pyrotechnics or costume changes. It's nothing special, just old fashioned guys on stage playing music which is fun for us, and we hope that it's fun for other people as well.

CG: How many members in the group this time?

ORL: We try to and make it different and change it up each tour. It's a three-piece at the moment, that's just where I am right now. I've played with everything from a five-piece, sometimes eight- or nine-piece band and now I'm just playing as a three-piece.

CG: Is there much improvising?

ORL: No, it's all composition. We never really improvise. There's jamming on sections but that's all planned, you know like "once we get to this bridge section we have 32 bars where we can be expressive but we've got to come back in on the pre-chorus". It's all very planned out but if it's done right it feels natural and it should feel to the crowd that it's happening in the moment, otherwise it's too uptight, you know.

CG: For all of your releases over the years you've overseen pretty much all the aspects of an album including production, artwork and video clips. Is that something you strive for?

ORL: I just love doing it. It's that simple. It's really fun and I love doing it so what else can you do? I have friends that have kids and some of them have full time nannies and they go and do their thing and the babysitters take care of the kids and they come home at night and kiss their kids and put them to bed and that's enough for them. Other friends take their kids everywhere. They spend all their time with their kids, they take them to the studio and the park and they want to be around them all the time. It's like that with me. I can't help it. It's just so much fun and I absolutely love what I get to do. Simply put I'm a very, very lucky individual and I don't want to ever take that for granted. I get to do the same thing I did in my dad's garage as a kid and I get to do that now as an adult and that's pretty cool.

CG: One person you do trust with your kids is artist Sonny Kay, who's been doing a lot of artwork with you over the years. Can you tell me a bit about your collaborations with him?

ORL: Yeah we've had a very interesting relationship over the years, we used to run a record label together and have done all sorts of stuff. We have a lot of similarities but we're also completely different people, which is always a good thing if you are creating art.

CG: In what ways?

ORL: Completely different cultures. He comes from an English background and he's a very proper gentleman, very well spoken and knows proper grammar and I'm just a rowdy Spic from the equator and I'm not very proper at all. Latin culture is very loose, very improvised, very much the opposite of the English culture with the "don't put your elbows on the table" things. I'm constantly butchering the English language and having bad etiquette and it drives him crazy and it drives me crazy that he could be so uptight.

CG: Sounds like a good balance.

ORL: I think that's part of the chemistry. We work really well together. It's good to have tolerance and remind yourself that it's a great big world out there and there are completely different kinds of cultures and culture clashes.

CG: You've mentioned before that you were a fan Carlos Castaneda and his books on shamanism and what he calls "non-ordinary states of reality". Have they influenced your creative work at all?

ORL: Yeah, well it's my reality. That's what I was raised with. That's the type of household I was brought up in. He calls them "non-ordinary states of reality" but for me it's my reality, it's the way I view the world. Some people are raised believing that you die and the worms eat you and that's your reality. I'm Latino, I was brought up with Latin culture and I was brought up with magic and spirituality and meditation and vegetarianism and rituals my whole life so that's just where my heart is.

CG: You incorporate that a lot into your art. There are lots of magical sigils in your artwork and references to occult and esoteric knowledge.

ORL: For me its things I grew up with and it's not because I read about them in some book. It's because I lived them and I've seen them work. It's what I was brought up with and it's just family tradition for me. The same way as eating fried plantains and beans is family tradition. Rituals were always a big part of my upbringing: sun rituals, moon rituals, rituals for healings or for opening your mind.

CG: And you're able to tap into that for creativity?

ORL: Yes of course. Everything is a way of transmitting energy and expressing yourself. Everything you do is an expression of yourself, whether it's the way you move your body or the way you form sentences. So all of your music, lyrics, if you film something; everything is symbolic and has a double meaning; even the most superficial things. That's the beauty of it. I have a close friend who's the exact opposite, he's very straight and down the line. He says, "Why does everything have to be something?" That's his joke with me. It's just two different ways of viewing the world.

CG: I was thinking about you being a left-handed guitarist and as a left-handed musician too it got me wondering if it sets you up to a different approach because you are playing from a different hemisphere in your brain than most people. Any thoughts on that theory?

ORL: S---. I hadn't even thought of that! That's a good question. You know since I was a kid someone grabs my guitar and goes "oh it's backwards" and that's the normal comment I get but that's their reality. In my reality it's like "oh my god all these other guitars are backwards and mine is the only one that's correct!" It's just a matter of perspective. It seems so normal to me that all guitars should be left-handed!

Catch the Omar Rodriguez-Lopez Group on their Australian tour with Le Butcherettes this December.

Caleb Goman
30 Nov 2011

Omar Rodriguez- Lopez is one of my favourite musicians. You might know him from At The Drive-In, The Mars Volta, De Facto or his 20+ solo records or you may know him for his films (his most recent The Sentimental Engine Slayer – trailer at end of post). He is incredibly prolific and offers beautiful insight into creativity and life through his eyes. Whenever we catch up we always have the most thoughtful, inspiring chats. I’m super excited about the Australian tour that kicks off on December 9th…I’m even more excited he’s bringing the Mexico/Los Angeles band Le Butcherettes he signed to his label. He will also be joining them on bass! These shows are not to be missed. Seriously.

What’s life been like for you lately?

OR-L: It’s been mellow. I’ve been taking time off and just being around my family.

That’s lovely, family is so important.

OR-L: Definitely! Without a doubt.

You live in Mexico now these days?

OR-L: Yeah. I’m in the process of moving. I’m actually going to move back to Texas to be with my family.

What inspired your move to Mexico?

OR-L: Just being around my culture. I’m Puerto Rican so I like being around Latin culture. I was raised in Mexico as well. We went from Puerto Rico to Mexico and then to America. I just wanted a higher quality of life than what America has to offer.

Do you play music and create every day?

OR-L: Yeah pretty much. In some form or another, yes, I express it every day.

Do you have a daily routine at all?

OR-L: Yeah to a certain degree. I wake up, I eat, basic things like that. It’s not like when we spoke last time and I pretty much had the routine of at 11am to midnight I’d be in the studio. It’s just laid back now. My priorities are waking up and eating right and figuring out the day from there.

You’ve said in the past that your records are just opinions, notebooks and journal entries; you discovering life and beautiful things and learning lessons – is there any important lessons that you’ve been learning lately?
OR-L: Oh sure. There’s a lot. If I had to simplify it and boil it down to its most common denominator it’s that there is nothing more important than love. There is nothing more important than love whatever that is to you—family love, people… everything else has to come second to that. I’m a romantic and with most romantics it’s easy to fall under the illusion that love is enough and that love will fix everything—it’s not enough! Love is an art form, love is a craft, love is like anything else. If you want to be a good piano player you have to practice playing piano. If you don’t play piano for 20 years you’re not going to be a very good piano player. Love is the same way. You can’t just think because you love your mother or you love your father or you love your woman that that’s enough, you have to refine it and you have to work on it every day. What the means is that because it’s a craft and an art form it has to come before anything, it has to be at the top of the list. All things being equal, if love is an art form and if guitar is an art form, painting is an art form, it comes down to you have to decide which art form is more important to you because that is the one you are going to excel at. If you spend most of your time painting you’re going to excel at painting. If you spend most of your time playing piano, you’re going to excel at playing piano. I want to excel at loving and I realise that everything else is secondary. It is the root of everything. If you’re great at loving you’ll be great at playing piano or painting. Everything else becomes so small in comparison. It goes back to why spending more time with the family and doing things outside or whatnot it important.

You’re an avid journal keeper, is that something you’ve always done?

OR-L: Yeah since I was very little. Like any kid, you have your notebook where you draw your dragons and space monsters and whatever else comes to your mind. It’s a way of creating your own personal world. I love keeping a journal.

What’s one of your first musical memories?

OR-L: It would have to be my father and my uncles and my mother, just basically being at home. It’s just part of my culture and my upbringing. Puerto Rican culture revolves around music and food. Everybody plays something even if they are not musicians. Music is used as a language, it’s a second language. Before I ever learnt English I already knew the language of music because it was what was most spoken at my house besides Spanish, those are my musical memories. In other cultures, in America say for example, they have Christmas songs… when Christmas time comes around – I say that because it’s almost Christmas time now – there are a lot of communal Christmas songs that everyone knows and sings, they have that thing where people go door-to-door singing, well, Puerto Rican culture is like that all the time, it’s not just Christmas, it’s everything. There are songs that talk about the food you’re eating, there’s songs that talk about what it is like to be Puerto Rican. There’s songs that talk about what it’s like to be like from this village or that village—it’s just inherent in the culture. For me I’ve never thought of music as something separate from life or family life. I’ve never been cognisant of music like when people ask, did you ever think you’d end up being a musician? It would be like saying, did you ever think you were ever going to eat rice and beans with fried plantain? It doesn’t enter the consciousness when it is something that is around you all the time, it is just something that is there.

It’s like breathing.

OR-L: Exactly!

You also film lots of things. You’ve been filming since the beginning of At The Drive-In and documenting your journey as a musician; why do you feel you have such a need to document everything so avidly?

OR-L: Because I can, because it’s there. It’s another brush stroke and another colour on the palette of paint. I was born in era where the average person can walk into a store and buy a video camera. Thirty years ago that was only something that was there for rich people. We live in an era where you can get a couple of hundred bucks together and you can by a camera and document things. Going back to it again, it is how I was raised. When we moved to America and my father starting doing well with his business, one of the first things he did was by one of those VHS camcorders. He used to film all of our family outings (pretty normal stuff, families film their family outings) that was always stuck in my head. When he first brought a camera he showed me how to use it and I started filming right away. I’d make little short films. It felt very natural. My dad didn’t film family vacations in the normal way, he always turned it into a narrative somehow. There was always a narrator. He’s always would turn it into this big fun event that would involve everybody, so then everybody wanted to play with the video camera. Being the second oldest son I was allowed that luxury. It’s just there in your subconscious or the makeup of how you do things. When I grew to be an adult and At The Drive-In started making some money, one of the first things that I did was go and buy myself a video camera. I filmed stuff because I thought it would be a cool thing to show my mom back home and eventually my children.

Do you think the footage will ever come out to the public?

OR-L: I’m sure parts of it will, yeah definitely. I have about three films in my closet/vault, together with unreleased records. I imagine at some point as the years pass by I won’t care and I’ll just put it out. Over the years they’ve just been journal entries. I cut together a small film of my experience of At The Drive-In. I cut one together about my experience in De Facto. I started to cut one together about my project The Mars Volta, about what became very, very long. You also start to lose interest after a while and you start to film other things or become interested in other things. I imagine at some point parts of it will come out definitely.

I know that the new Mars Volta album has been finished for a while, the musical parts were finished for a very long time while awaiting the lyrics/vocals. In an interview recently when someone asked you about what the record sounded like you said ‘The first thing that pops into my mind is that it sounds like me and Cedric finding answers and insight into each other’s spirits.’ I thought that was really beautiful. I was wondering what insights you found?

OR-L: It runs pretty deep so it gets tricky. Off the top of my head some things would be like, I never realised how much my controlling-ness or my dominate personality affected him. I just always saw it as I was doing it for the greater good of us both. I never stopped to think about how it affected him and in inadvertent ways. I was able to see that during that process. It’s hard to get into because it is so layered and a lot of it is so personal which is why I usually just try to speak in general broad brush strokes. You learn a lot about yourself when you do a project and you learn a lot about whoever you let into that project. At the end of the day that’s the only real reason to do anything – to make records, movies or anything else – it’s to learn.

I know exactly what you mean. I learn so much from each conversation I have/interview I do. Our last chat taught me so much.

OR-L: Exactly. I remember it well.

You are bringing Le Butcherettes (pictured above) to Australia on your tour. I’m so excited to see them! I read an interview with Le Butcherettes’ frontwoman Teri Gender Bender and she said that you discovered them when you went to a show they were playing. She went on to say that the power went out and that they keep playing regardless. What was it that you saw in them?

OR-L: What I saw with them is something that is undefinable. When you talk about it you can only use general terms like, I saw that spark or that spirit. It’s so abstract in a way. You see that thing in people where you know that it is honest, you know that they are doing it because they have to do it, you know that it’s a primordial type of urge.

There’s people that like entertainment, there’s people who like playing music and then there are people that are searching for God. God not being… I’m not talking about Christianity or Judaism or anything like that, just in broad terms for whatever the fuck you want that to be. Those are the three different sections that I found when you talk about art: entertaining, people that are being expressive and that want to play music, that love to play music and there’s people that are trying to communicate with God—they fell into that category and that was what I was able to see very quickly. Like you were saying, the electricity went out but they still played! Somebody else would say, well what’s the point of playing with no electricity? Another person would say, because they absolutely have to, this is how I’m trying to communicate with God. God could be me, it could be myself, I could be trying to get to know myself—the point being, it is absolutely vital. That’s what I saw in Le Butcherettes.