At the risk of sounding a little pretentious, we’re pretty sure this is one of the coolest, most important pieces we’ve ever worked on. While it’s far from the first time the great storyteller and songwriter Juan Chi of Zeta joined us for a chat, it’s fair to say we both knew this one was going to be somewhat different.
To say much has happened over the past few years for the band would be an understatement. People all over the world had been waiting for their popularity to blow up, before and after the pandemic – they’d already attained biblical levels of underground hype, and it seemed like they were finally reaching the next stage of their evolution. But what would any great journey be without difficulty?
The last time we caught Zeta live was in Boise for the 2022 Treefort Music Fest, and as always, the band seemed to be accompanied by this holy light as they captivated the crowd. If you’ve seen them, you know what we’re talking about. There’s great performance, and then there’s sonic ritual – Zeta performs rituals, and not in some sort of white-washed appropriative way. It’s authentic, primal, ancestral energy that needs to be experienced to be understood. Anyway, technically we saw them twice while attending the festival – one evening at The Shredder, and again the following afternoon at a place called the Hideout when we were very, very hungover.
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Allegedly, towards the end in the second set, something happened with Juan Chi’s pedalboard where he stopped getting any signal at all from his guitar. This was during one of their primal percussion interludes where he’d typically dub some psychedelic guitar leads before joining the rest of the band on percussion. We would have noticed eventually, but Juan Chi just set his guitar down, detached the mic, and jumped into the front row where he finished the set. Switching from chill, hypnotic vibes to hardcore histrionics without missing a beat was truly something to behold. There were definitely some tears, and we couldn’t help but think it… Christ, I want to do that. Not sing in a hardcore band, just feel that level of connection with the audience during a performance.
Regardless, the set came to a close, we wiped our eyes and wandered over to catch up with band. Juan Chi explained what happened with the guitar immediately, seemingly unaware of or at least unaffected by the magic moment he’d just created. We were sure to let him know that particular moment was a thing of punk rock beauty, and when we think back on that moment now, it’s almost prescient. Perhaps that was the moment things clicked into gear for Zeta’s next phase.
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But in classic mythological fashion, the resounding click that would signal the next stage of their evolution couldn’t come to pass before they had a sizable taste of disaster: a few days after this, Zeta was robbed in Portland while taking a lunch break. As you can imagine, it was devastating – merch, designs, recordings, instruments and more, all vanished in a moment. It shouldn’t happen to anyone, but for it to happen to such a hard working groups of musicians made it all the more tragic.
Of course, the band’s indomitable spirit forged ahead, but it wasn’t long before the band was yet again met with trouble on the road after getting pulled over at the wrong place at the wrong time. Once again, the band rallied in a way only they could, and not just for tour – while continuing to play all across the country, they were also exploring new internal territory together through court mandated classes, anonymous support meetings, and charity sponsorships. As Juan Chi is about to tell you, much of this inspired the narrative behind Was it Medicine To You?, their recently announced album due in January. Just today, the band dropped the single “Steps,” which features Anthony Green of Circa Survive and The Sound of Animals Fighting.
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But underneath there was something else brewing, and people close to the band could feel it. At first, we thought we were making something out of nothing. It happens. We’d noticed one of the members had tagged a photo with Codefendants, a project teased by Ceschi Ramos and Sam King from Get Dead that allegedly included Fat Mike of NOFX. When we asked about it, we got nothing. That’s when we knew something was up… we just didn’t know what.
A few months later, a video leaked of a secret show in Los Angeles featuring members of Zeta, Get Dead, NOFX, and D.O.C. and that proverbial click that resonated with us at the Hideout show finally made sense. The following April, we found ourselves watching almost all of the above on one stage together in Salt Lake City, some of which you can see here. But at this point you’ve heard all we can say. The whole thing has been an honor to watch over the years, and we know so many of you that have played with Zeta or met them in any capacity feel the same way.
So now for the good stuff: below, you can listen to our conversation with Juan Chi and his incredible firsthand account of everything we mentioned and a whole lot more. It’s a long one, but worth every second. We’ll also have most of it posted below as a transcription for the readers out there.
Whichever you prefer, we hope you enjoy.
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FB: Alright, let me just turn that up a little… okay sorry about that, dude, first of all how are you?
JC: I’m good man, I am in Florida, chilling. I moved here last in April from North Carolina. My experience in Charlotte was really cool, it’s not like a big state, depending on the scene and where you’re at you’ll have a different experience. It’s more conservative in smaller cities but Charlotte was pretty lit, I miss it. I’m in South Florida, in neighborhood called Hollywood.
FB: Is that near where you used to hang out when you were in Florida before?
JC: Yeah,I’ve always been in Florida and lived kind of around this area, when I first moved to the US I came to live in Holland Beach, 10 minutes away from where I am now… it kind of looks practically like Georgia or Alabama, it gets very hot. But it’s way more green, so it looks like it could be closer to the islands like Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic… it’s also very similar to back home.
FB: That’s what I wanted to ask, how does that compare to coming from Venezuela? Is that like a nice familiar thing for you?
JC: Oh yeah, very. If anything our hometown was a little bit more dry I say. It is very humid still, but we get a lot of heat and sun there, and there’s a lot of salt, way more than here. So our hometown, before they established it, the first people that moved there just found little balls of salt. So it’s very dry, but it’s humid weather.
FB: That sounds otherworldly. You did a great job with the Mochima record conveying a lot of those sensory things across in the production, I know that’s kind of left field but I remember you describing the whole effect and the vibe.
JC: The big difference in between here and there is that here is very planar. Once you get to Florida you don’t see the terrain, it’s flat for many many many miles and hours. It’s just flat. Ours gets different, it has flat parts but it has this big rocky region that starts changing everything and so the national park, Mochima, it’s kind of like half of that mountain, half very flat, and then a lot of water in this group of islands, so it’s diverse. Definitely that other worldly vibe you know, it’s different. The craziest, or at least to me the craziest wildlife we get is the… not the orcas. The Whale Shark, the big orange looking one, the big one that is not really um aggressive. That’s the wildest that it gets, and there’s a lot of dolphins, sea turtles, weird birds… it’s interesting because parts are more rain forest-y, very tropical and humid but the islands themselves have different elements in the soil, there’s one that has a lot of clay rocks and water gets in to make a little bit different color. The water is very beautiful, it’s not the blue ocean, it’s more like very clear and very green, so you know it’s like that Caribbean Sea. Especially in South Florida, then again in North Florida, it starts getting more like deep blue more like it’s it’s a little bit more dark. And it gets colder by this time of year. But the South will just remain Forever Summer, you know?
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FB: So is it easier for you to manage your projects from where you are now?
JC: In a way yeah, I’m closer to the guys in the band so that’s always a win. I was coming here at least once a month, sometimes I take a little bit more, but you know, we’re always touring so I don’t think I stopped seeing them for more than a month probably two, and that’s being like super exaggerated. But here I am close to them, so we can write in person, we get to hang out we get to talk in front of each other you know, so that’s that’s really nice. But North Carolina being on the same Coast and same time zone wasn’t that hard. But life was more accessible, more affordable in Charlotte. It’s getting gentrified very fast and so prices are going up, but even though they’re going up constantly, it’s still cheaper than Florida.
I don’t know, I try not to think about it too much, right? I’m just like, we go and keep doing it. Miami I feel like is just such a main city for for many things, not necessarily just music. It’s a city with a lot of movement in it, a lot of people, so traffic all the time… it’s like a younger sibling of L.A. At the beginning, I guess Florida was thought to be like the retirement place and so people will come here to retire, mostly people that were wealthy, but later it became this entire huge city with a lot of people coming through. It’s a Melting Pot of cultures from all over the world, it’s wild and fast. I don’t see it as a retirement place like ‘…I’ll go to Miami downtown to retire…’ It’s not long like that any longer. It was meant to be like that but it’s just modern, you know? and very bougie. Lots of celebrities and weird shit.
FB: I’m actually really happy that you mention all of that, because I’m curious: you guys have had a pretty good hold on that area, the Miami area at least for a long time. It’s been a good home base since you came from Venezuela, so I’m interested in how you made this amazing connection with these West Coast / Los Angles legends, being the people in Codefendants and NOFX. So many people have rooted for you guys for so long as one of the hardest working bands out there, most cohesive units out there – can you give me a brief synopsis of how that happened for you guys?
JC: Well, first off thank you for all the flowers. You said a word that I think is powerful to describe us, in that we’re definitely a unit. We are passionate musicians, and we’re not just passionate about the music that we make but we’re just passionate about all music. We didn’t really, at least not all of us, go to any music school but we all share that we’re nerds when it comes to music, so any music, any challenge, any different genre style, we want to know it. We want to learn how to play it, we get lost in the sauce talking about other styles of music which are not normal. Through the years of collecting new music to listen to, we stumble upon Ceschi when we were still in Venezuela.
Me and Dani have this friend that came to the US to study English for a couple years or something and uh he came back with all of this amazing music, underground music that wasn’t really main stream stuff that you could possibly find on TV or the radio, just specific music. By the time that we were putting out our our first official long production album we were trying to figure out how to do videos for it and he showed us a very indie hip hop band called Dark Time Sunshine.
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We saw a video for “Sleestack Payback and All Aboard.” I think it’s two songs in one video, it’s like five minutes and it just it felt so good and we could identify so much in what we saw in it. We were like oh shit, I think we can we can definitely take this as an inspiration we had a Canon camera, the most basic camera from that time and and we started experimenting making videos and whatnot and watching this video a lot. We start loving the band, and so he’s like, ‘oh if you like it so much, here, take this, I burnt us a CD.’ He gave us the CD and the tracklist and we saw the first song, and it’s featuring Ceschi. We’re like, oh, holy shit! And that song, the first song of the album it’s incredible it hits so, so hard, and we’re listening to this while hot boxing in the car with our friend. We’re like, holy shit, what is this?
It sounded so surreal and crazy. It’s like nothing we’ve heard before, the album’s called Vessel from like… 2010, I think. So we start checking more facts on the album and Ceschi was the actual executive producer of the album. Everywhere we looked we his name was there like he introduced the guys in the band, he was co-owner of the label that put out the record which is Fake Four Inc., he was on the first and the last song of the album, and we’re just like… man this guy has to be incredible, you know? Who are these people, right?
We were still in Venezuela by the time they released the album after that one which is Anx, it still has Ceschie on it and it’s even more amazing but we didn’t knew much about him. We didn’t know anything about his like personal life, we thought he was just like…you know, probably American, and we moved here, started playing, making a name in the music community, especially here in Florida since we were living here, but random fact: the first tour had we went all the way to the West Coast and back we already had good friends around the L.A. area since 2015. We’re very nomadic by nature, we can’t really be still in one place. When Venezuela started to get very weird we started moving, and we tried to stay in different places or go to different places to really experience with the mindset of ‘oh we’ll maybe move here eventually.’ Venezuela was getting more and more turmoil politically and it was getting harder to just be a musician, like it was considered a luxury, and the first time we went to Argentina to play, we went for like a month and had in our minds, like ‘oh, let’s really experience this because we might need to move out of the country.’ So we went there, and we were like oh, that’s the place and then we just kept on going all the time, like at least once a year and staying for two months three months. But we couldn’t really like figured out having jobs, we were kids you know. Then we went to we went to Columbia for the first time and we were like oh, shit… maybe this is the place. That same thing happened later with Mexico. I even tried to stay in Panama once um but it was like, ‘I need to go back home because I don’t have shit!’ So anyway, we came to the US in 2015, and that first tour we really liked it… we thought, ‘Oh right, maybe this is the place!’
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We were trying to get cool shows to play in Florida because this is where we were settling in, and we got we got this show opening for Trash Talk. They didn’t had any bands in their tour, and I remember asking the promoter to play and he was like, ‘well you know, I really enjoy you guys, I don’t know if they’re gonna want a band because they are the only band on the tour, them and rap artists, but they actually were cool enough to say ‘yeah, let’s have them, they’re from Venezuela, sounds cool.’ So we get to open and the artist that played right after us was a rapper called Bleubird from here in Florida and it was amazing. It was rap, but very punk punk and and very different, it sounded kind of like what we heard in Dark Time Sunshine. We met him and he was like, ‘oh, I’m from the same neighborhood that you guys are from!’ And we’re, like holy shit, we have a first friend! It was nice, we didn’t knew anyone else and we would just visit him when he was working at a really cool place called Laser Wolf. They have beers from all over, you know, local beers, beers from weird places, and we’re just amused, going there trying different shit to hear the stories of this amazing guy. He’s older than us and he’s talking about this community of indie rap in the US and we talked about DTS at some point, and he’s like ‘oh yeah, I’m at the same label, my best friend is the owner of the label, and his name is Ceschi.’ We’re like, ‘what the fuck did you just say?’
‘Yeah, he’s my best friend!’
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‘Bro, we’re like, hardcore fans of this shit,’ and he’s like, ‘Are you kidding me? No way, that’s so crazy, the next time he’s in town I’m going to let you know and I’ll introduce you guys.’ After that, he called us saying he was in Miami. At the time, I don’t even think I had a car of my own. I asked the family that I was living with to lend me the car, and drove all the way to Miami just to meet this guy. So we met him, and at first we’re talking Spanish. Then he started talking Spanish to us. We’re like… ‘what the fuck, you talk Spanish?!’ He’s like ‘yeah, I’m Puerto Rican!’
I guess he family came from Italy and settled there, and so he’s Francesco, which is, Ceschi. We started talking about bands, and this guy knows music for real. He’s not just a rapper but he shreds, right? As we became friends we exchanged numbers and starting to build this cool friendship we actually sent him a t-shirt before meeting him and he had that T-shirt with him always. He invited us to play on the release of some shows for the tour of the release of an album, and a newer band called Hurricane Party with a guy called Andy the Doorbum. We did five or six shows around Florida and we became closer friends if anything right and at this point we asked Ceschi to sing one of the songs, Andy also sings one of the songs we had… so our friendship was more than talking and hanging out, we were doing music together. Eventually you know uh he got signed by Fat Mike to make this album called This Guitar Was Stolen… and after he got signed he’s shared some new stuff with us just like any other, but he didn’t really: he’s like, ‘I’m working on something and when I have something to show you, I want to know your opinion and I might ask you for your help,’ and we were like, ‘of course, we’re we’re family up to this point. First he wanted to ask Chino to play some shit. Then he asked Danny. And then I guess they were trying to make it work but they were like ‘let’s let’s just call the other guys.’
At first, I think Mike Fat Mike wanted or had in mind a different lineup, I guess with friends of his, but Ceschi had dreamed about doing it with his friends, and we had talked forever. He’s just an amazing poet, and live, he’s insane. When you see Ceschi live, that’s when you’re like, ‘oh shit, that’s why everybody knows him.’ I cried the first time I saw him play.
FB: I guess I did too.
JC: So he showed us the Codefendants thing and it was not a regular sound, but it had a lot of life, of course there’s a lot of Ceschi in everything but more electronic even, like drum machines and like… real guitars… I don’t know if the word is like an L.A.-ish sound?
FB: Like more synthesizers?
JC: Yeah, like… mod. Just like a different type of post-pop-punk that is not your regular two guitars, bass, and drums. That was challenging, emulating those sounds, translating that to our normal rock. We started incorporating synths, Tony is actually very big on synthesizers and modulating sound and so it was a cool challenge. I got to play bass, and I’ve always wanted to play bass in a punk rock band because I would listen to that, I wasn’t just into hardcore or into prog, I was into fucking everything, so this was cool. It’s low-key a rap band but an emo band that has chord progressions from pop and punk rock…
So we learned the songs and we rehearsed we were together in Florida for like a week, then we were like we need to show this to Mike. So we finished the tour and started driving all the way to the West for a showcase that they had, like a secret show. I guess the booking agents that were interested had to be there because there’s a lot of tiny moving parts, so anyway we went there. We showed it to Mike, and at first it was difficult because I guess he wasn’t expecting it to sound like a rock project. We rehearsed a little bit there, and heard his thoughts on it. His knowledge of harmony, chord progressions, and musical arrangements is just insane. It’s beyond what we knew at the time. I remember him on the first rehearsal, he’s there, a bunch of his friends there, all of them were old dudes and they were also old and they’re there in the rehearsal, like everybody’s just gonna see how this sounds, like this huge expectation, and the guy that’s been recording, I guess they told him ‘oh yeah, the guys are gonna play with Zeta,’ and I guess he went into YouTube and typed it but thought that we were a rapper and had set up everything like that. We get there and we’re a full band, so it’s just this crazy confusion. This is the first rehearsal with Fat Mike and there’s a guy fucking filming everything, this Brazilian dude that wanted to do a documentary about Mike, all of these other dudes… it was kind of intimidating
So, we start playing, and he’s like, ‘no, no, stop, stop, stop!’ and I’m like, ‘oh shit.’ He said something that to this day I can still think about and still see his face and his expression. At the moment, it was a little bit more serious, but now it just cracks me up. He looked at me and Chino because we’re together, you know, rhythm section, and says ‘with Zeta you guys rock, right? you’re a rock band, right? you fucking rock, right?’ And we’re like… I guess, yeah? And he’s like, ‘well, with Codefendants, we don’t rock. We play beautiful chords.’ He makes these hands of like… a chord in the air, okay? He’s like, ‘let’s try again.’
So we tried several times until we understood that he just he just wanted a lighter dynamic, which all changed after. In the studio with all of these processed sounds and modulations, you need to control them, it’s very important that you figure it out through the velocity, the effect, the release, the volume, but when we’re playing live we are all a team, so we need to feel each other to see where we’re at. It turned out great though, and then we played the show, everybody loved it, uh… weirdly, at the end of the show, Sam, who is the wildest card in the world, finished the last song and just looked at us, and said, ‘now, the almighty Zeta is gonna play a song for you!’
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We’re like, ‘bro we don’t have any songs, I don’t play bass in Zeta, we don’t know what we’re doing, we’re even a different team… we managed to play a song that Danny sings that’s really short, so I grabbed the guitar, Tony took the bass, and we didn’t even fucking tune. Everybody loved it, they’re like hyper, screaming having fun, and in the crowd Donovan Melero was there because he works at a talent group and there was an agent interested in working with Codefendants at the time, so he was there. When we finished the song we got to talk and hang out and he was like ‘…honestly, I’ve never thought about a band that could like hype up these old school punk rockers that also happen to play post-hardcore. It’s really odd, really different’ We didn’t even consider ourselves post-hardcore, but we understood what he meant. We knew about him because of Fall of Troy, because up to this point we had good relationship with Thomas Erak, who is also a great friend of Ceschi, we met through Ceschi.
FB: Interesting, that’s kind of what I wanted to go into next was this arc where after Codefendants, you’re working with a lot of post-hardcore bands, but there’s also this eclipse thing happening with Zeta where we get to hear you probably speaking more or singing more in English than you ever have, right?
JC: Well, from Codefendants and Ceschi to Fat Mike and Sam, we got to learn a lot of signing and song writing aspects that we didn’t know before because we went in deep into progressive music and that was kind of our main thing at the time, mixing post-rock and like, hardcore, sludge-y shit but changing it to the point that it felt no structure, no formulas, just like a lot of feeling and a lot of changes to a lot of different parts. So it was interesting hanging out with the Codefendants crew because we learn more about chord progressions, harmonies, and pop structures in a different way.
FB: It’s amazing that you bring that up in that exact way because that made me think of when I saw Tony after your set in Salt Lake he was like ‘Sam is a wild card, but he is also like working with an incredible jazz musician. Not that he’s bringing like 13th chords to the table but he’s in creative like Predator mode all the time, always on top of things.
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JC: The way Codefendants work is Sam and Ceschi are the main writers and Fat Mike isn’t just a producer because he also writes and he make everything work in terms of like musical arrangements. I will say again the chord progression thing is something that he’s… I don’t know if this is like, the school ofThe Beatles or what, but every time they sing a verse or a chorus, the chord progression changes slightly. If it’s Ceschi, if it’s Sam, if it’s like a feature, every time someone else is singing the chords are not exactly the same. It sounds the same because it’s making rhythms with a drum machine which makes it very linear but the chords are changing are changing in little ways.
FB: You know, I’ve heard him talk about that or seen him talk about that in interviews, but to hear you say that means a lot because I feel like you are seasoned as an arranger yourself. I know you might not see it that way but you’ve had to function as a multi-instrumentalist many times so you at least know from experience how that works…
JC: Yeah, yeah. It’s crazy because it’s not like changing the mode completely, it’s probably in the
same scale but the chords are different, the order of the chords are also different. Like “Suicide by Police,” okay? This is is the same group of notes but they used differently for each part and and that’s what makes it very challenging… I remember this time we stayed at his place doing more of the songs while answering phones and working for the store, and I remember he woke up like at three in the morning, or maybe he was already awake, I don’t know. But we couldn’t sleep and we’re just like goofing around in this like ping pong table in the basement. That’s where we were all meant to rehearse and record. We had it all there set up, and he just comes down at like three in the morning with an acoustic guitar like “I already figured out.” So super random like hours, from the rehearsal during day but also when he’s like, hung on that note that we couldn’t figure out for whatever new thing. He’s really cool, he’s very intelligent when it comes to that, so we got to learn a lot from them and we’ve put it into our music too.
Also, we have been a band forever, so at the beginning we make the band thinking of a sound, like let’s make a band that sounds kind of like this or that, right? But by this time there’s not really limits because we’ve passed that border of the band sounding like something, it’s more that we’re together with this configuration and we’re just vibing together, whatever the challenge is musically. At this point the writing is more like that than anything else, it’s not just like creating a concept for an album, which we’ve always been very all about for all our albums, they’re kind of conceptual but we’re letting ourselves try to explore for creating a little world for just one song, and finishing the song. Not just being like the song will like jump into this other one, just one full song… with this next album that we’re going to put out little worlds in each song.
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FB: The title is Was it Medicine For You?, right? Is that a phrase or something that you came up with, like did someone say it on tour or is it something that resonates with you guys?
JC: Well, the the album is conceptual when it comes to lyrics. There is a main idea behind all the writing of the lyrics we wrote for the album. We started to think about the album right in the middle of probation. We went to jail last November not this one but the last November we were on tour in the middle of Texas, kind of North West Texas not really West Texas. It’s like kind of the middle of nowhere Texas. But we’ve learned so much from this area up to this point that it’s no longer ‘nowhere.’ It’s definitely not Metropolitan right, but… I’m gonna say it and probably many people are going to disagree, but there’s there’s a lot of culture there, from that area. There’s a way of being, a way of speaking, there’s codes that are unspoken, there are certain things that people do. People that know that will help you thrive or survive that area when it comes to how things move socially and economically. It’s a whole different set of rules.
We didn’t know any of this, we were doing life just like we’ve done anywhere else in the states, but we went to jail for something that probably in any other place they wouldn’t really mind. I would love to get detail with it but because we’re still in probation… we were pulled over because the center upper light of the van supposedly wasn’t working, we didn’t even have a center open. They asked us to step out of the vehicle and the rest is history yeah. We all have a hell of a thick accent and we clearly look different than the people that pulled us over, anyway we went to jail for 24 hours had to bail out. It created an impact on us that was so heavy that we really needed express exactly what we felt, what we discovered later when we started the probation process. That’s also one of the main reasons why the new songs are in English, because this was like a real American Experience, you know what I mean?
We learned so much from the system and how every state works… during the probation they had us go through different things, we had to do like a psychological assessment, we had to to take some classes on abuse, on controlled substances… periodically we have these like calls with the Parole Officer, we have to achieve an amount of community service hours and we were asked to go to meetings. We’re not really drinkers, so it felt very hypocritical going to AA, so we chose NA. We went to those meetings and we learned so, so, much. But we ended up learning from ourselves, from humans, and from the system itself, you know, how crazy everything is. The game is… well, I don’t want to say rigged but there’s definitely things that if you don’t know, you’re basically falling for it. The tables are always slanted when you are not the most common type of person in America, and it’s very hard to know why, why would you know those rules? Why would you ever need them?
Honestly, was it was so eye opening and we met so many interesting people that just, like… live in the
shadows, like they thrive in them, in those rooms. Some of these people are so, so intelligent emotionally and spiritually, and so that’s where the title and the songs come from. The song that we released is called “Privilege” because it’s the most straightforward title. We’re releasing the next one this December 6 with Anthony Green on vocals, and it’s called “Steps.” It’s inspired on the 12 steps of recovery, the literature from NA rooms. Especially the first step, which is admitting that you have a problem and coming to terms with reaching out for help, which is so fucking difficult. To me it’s probably the most difficult step because it’s crazy how we got there right, and we always felt like in a way we didn’t deserve to go there, but up to this point I find a lot of joy having gone through NA and through the classes. I’ve learned so much… uh it doesn’t mean that I think that people should go to probation or have to go through this shit, but embracing life and being able to see or hear different realities, being able to see deeper into people…
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FB: I think the people that I meet in the most everyday situations, if they’re capable of like empathy and having a open mind, they do often have the most interesting insight, and at random, you don’t necessarily go to your favorite deli to get an amazing story, but there’s a one in 10 chance he’s going to tell you something that’s going to change your life, you know? I will run into people like that more than with competitive musicians where I think people have like the same goals or at least they’re all going the same direction. When you when you step out of your wheelhouse it’s really interesting what’ll slap you with some perspective.
JC: I have a friend that went to school to study philosophy and major in socialism, and she taught me that at a certain point in history, in Latin America, there were bodegas, those little neighborhood stores, that is where the thinkers would meet and conspire. I find that so beautiful, so poetically beautiful because these are tiny places where you get, like you said, the daily… that’s where the people that are trying to make the revolution meet to share ideas.
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