This is the banda one that was released as a single, but the first one was more of a norteño thing, and we decided to include it as a bonus track so that people could listen to it. “We recorded two versions of ‘Barquillero’. And I’m not talking just about romantic relationships, because this is something that could happen to you with your friends or your family too.” It’s a very subtle song, comforting in a way, but the lyrics are really heavy. It’s about those relationships that slowly fade away, those couples that grow apart and don’t even notice that the gap between them is growing wider and wider. “One of the very few boleros we have ever recorded.
The lyrics are about loving yourself, which is a huge thing to me.” We need to fill that up and not fall into an artistic depression. And it was a good thing to fill the music void that the pandemic has left. It was a little scary at first, with all the güiras, the congas and the crazy bits that made us sound like a salsa band. We could add certain rhythms and elements that were new to us, because we have never been this tropical. “This is one of the musical dreams we got to cross off the list, thanks to all the time that the pandemic gave us. It all sounded kind of crazy at first, but it’s one that we all liked in the end because it’s doing something different instead of rehashing the same old things done the same old way.” We broke down the story into eight cards, with the ‘valiente’ being the last one and the narrator. The plan was to write a corrido from the point of view of each of the cards. I never found a lot of open doors when I was looking for a break, and that’s why I had to form a band and sing my own songs.”
On this record I wanted to give a chance to a lot of songwriters that are coming up with good stuff and fresh ideas. It’s this pure love that nothing can touch. It’s about that perfect love that you feel in the early stages of a relationship. It’s the kind of song that resonates a lot when you are feeling great and even more if you are going through a rough spot. “This is a norteño ballad I wrote with Javier Rochín, and it’s one of my favourites on the album. Musically, this is another half-norteño, half-banda hybrid.” ‘Tomar’ represents partying it up, ‘fumar’ is a pot reference and ‘comernos’ a nod to sex without commitment. With all the debate about pot legalisation going on now, my friend Dani Carmona and me had the idea of mixing it up with a more sexual story and experiences with three or four people, which is a very taboo subject but very real too. “This is a throwback to the more casual Calibre and what we were doing in 2010, when we had no shame taking on any topic. It follows a long line of sincere and straightforward love songs which we will never leave behind, because it’s what brings us to the people and it balances out all the crazy things we come up with sometimes.” It’s a ranchera ballad in the typical Calibre 50 style. “This is on the opposite end of the spectrum.
So it’s a banda cut with charanga and a little bit of cumbia, which sounds half crazy but it’s really Mexican.”
We mix banda and the norteño sound that we’ve always been associated with, but this time we went all the way to the Michoacán rhythms of charanga and huapango, a little bit like the ones that Marco Antonio Solís used in ‘Morenita’. Musically speaking, it’s a very Mexican song. It’s about old-time romance and how, in a way, we are still doing it the same way because it’s a winning formula-the love letters, the poetry, the flowers-even though it’s all more virtual now. It’s a love song, but the context is different from everything we’ve done before. “The title is a reference to the old school. The pause that the pandemic forced upon us has been a good thing to a point, because we were just going through life way too fast.” Read on as Muñoz details the stories behind Vamos Bien, one song at a time. “This time we had time on our side and we could work on things that we hadn’t even thought about when we were living on the road. “The pandemic completely changed our creative process,” says the singer-songwriter and accordionist. Amid the corridos, a format they have mastered over the past decade, there is also space for cumbias, ballads and a bolero, as well as one cover song that will surprise many a fan. Yet the quartet’s new songs explore more terrain than ever before. Vamos Bien returns to the contagious norteño-banda-sinaloense hybrid that has been one of the group’s signatures since 2018’s Mitad y Mitad. “We always try to innovate, to tell different stories in our lyrics and find new ways to talk about love,” Calibre 50’s Edén Muñoz tells Apple Music.
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