Whatchumagenre

When I started this interview, I wasn’t expecting much. I figured I’d shoot the breeze with Lesser Gonzalez, post the interview, and carry on with life, never to read it again. Could I have been anymore wrong? Alvarez proved to be an interviewer’s dream—a true delight. When I first asked him to be interviewed, I was shocked (shocked!) at how quickly, and kindly, he responded. But that’s simply a petty reason to like him. He answered every question I posed with an honest, almost naked, panache. He delivers inspiration by the carriage load, and to top it off, is just a true likeable character. I once believed that David Bazan was the most honest, and authentic musician I’ve ever come across… David Bazan (and everyone else) meet Lesser Gonzalez.

We’ll start it off simply. How have you been recently?
Well, the past few months have been very trying, I’ve had a tremendous loss this year and I’m sort of just now starting to get a grasp on things, it’s come at a time when lots of good things are starting to happen which has made it very difficult to really appreciate those things. There’s been pressures from lots of different sources coming down all at once, all great productive things that need to be done, but all of them have just sort of sprouted at the same time. Slowly things are settling.

You were born in Havana, Cuba until moving recently to Baltimore. What have you found to be the biggest difference between the two areas?
Well I moved to Miami with my family in 1990 where I was raised from the age of 8 to 18 when I moved up to Baltimore for school. I’ve actually been living in Baltimore for about 6 or 7 years now. Baltimore can sometimes seem like a third world country, but I’d have trouble comparing them to each other. I was too young to really see any of the socio-political issues but I guess the difference is in Cuba you lived simply out of necessity and here in Baltimore I live simply by choice.

You’re credited with starting the short-lived band Cache Cache, which unfortunately disbanded weeks before playing SXSW in 2007, leaving you to virtually create a band weeks before the show with friend and bandmate Jared Paolini. How hard was that to do? I can’t image the pressure.
Well In that week me and Jared came up with an entirely new set based on snippets of songs I had started to compose and ideas we had had for a while, and Cache Cache always moved pretty slowly before then, I think when it became just the two of us we just sort of flew through the whole thing, we were hungry to compose new stuff, it took a couple of all nighters but it got done.

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