I'm David Wax. I'm Sue Sleevac. And we're at the David Wax Museum.
We've been playing together for almost four years now. We met in Boston in 2007, and that's where the band got started.
Most of the songs in the repertoire are original songs, and then I've taken a bunch of songs from different Mexican styles that I've adapted.
Whether either I've translated the songs into English or I've written new words in English, or I've taken traditional song structures from Mexico and adapted them to a more Americana tradition.
We've been calling it Mexo Americana, but I think it's got some indie, it's got some rock, it's got some country, so American roots music.
I grew up playing old-time fiddle music and studied classical music growing up and did a lot of singing.
I grew up in Central Missouri and so grew up listening to a lot of country and alt-country and different types of bluegrass and kind of American traditional music.
But when I was in college I started spending summers down in Mexico and got really interested in Mexican song.
And so I've been studying that for the last couple years and I've been incorporating into this project.
One of the cool instruments that I play is the donkey jaw bone. It's a traditional Mexican percussion instrument called a quijada, which is the word for jaw in Spanish.
So it's really the lower jaw, the teeth are still here so that they make the rattle when you hit the side of it, and then I just have this stick that I use for the other sounds that it makes.
And I haven't officially gotten lessons so I've just been teaching myself over the past couple years but we're hoping to get down to Mexico and I can kind of dig in and find a quijada teacher down there.
It's a guitar from southern Veracruz, Mexico called the Harana Rocha and people often mistake it for ukulele.
This kind of guitar came over hundreds of years ago from Spain into Mexico and it's kind of a variation of those earliest guitars that arrived.
It's a style that people aren't very familiar with in America but it's the same style that La Bamba comes from. So that's sometimes how people have been exposed to this music from southern Veracruz.
It's interesting for us to see what direction it will go in in terms of what role the Mexican influence will play in it but we're not sure where that's going.
I think we're really open to what feels most exciting and inspiring to us. We have a lot of different backgrounds that we're bringing to it and we're playing with musicians that bring a real rich background as well.
I think that it's just a matter of going deeper into what we're doing and really honing that.
