Recorded at Panoramic House (the legendary artist retreat in Marine Country recently home to The War on Drugs, Cate Le Bon), outlaw country group Mapache have pushed their sound to new heights on their new album Swinging Stars (released 18th August 2023 on Innovative Leisure – https://lnk.to/mapache_sstars), drawn in by the beauty of their surroundings, imposed confinement and a hands-on-hip rockin’ new band.
It also features some of their friends and heroes, including Allah-Lahs’ Spencer Dunham and country star, David Rawlings. Today, they have released their first album single, ‘People Please’, accompanied by a music video Directed by Luke Gibb.
In the past, Mapache recording sessions have been pretty laid-back affairs, with friends coming and going, the sessions starting and stopping at the band’s discretion—as relaxed a process as the immaculately sunny vibes that their four albums would suggest. But on their dynamic and ambitious fifth album of cosmic-folk, Swinging Stars, Sam Blasucci and Clay Finch decided to take a trip and hunker down somewhere particularly special.
“It’s a pretty impactful place,” Finch says of the Panoramic House, the artist retreat where Swinging Stars was recorded and where the band stayed during the recording process. “It’s kind of dramatic. It’s a castle-y building on a hill, way up overlooking the Bay…That environment yields itself to a higher level of focus because everybody’s together for a week…We were all captive. No one could escape.”
Swinging Stars, an album of calm, second-nature swagger, is the natural result of a band that’s existed in one form or another for its founders’ entire adult lives. Finch and Blasucci first met as students at La Cañada High School, just north of Los Angeles, where they both had a guitar class: “There wasn’t much supervision or anything,” remembers Blasucci. “It was really nice. And we got to just play guitars together.”
The two stayed friends through their college years—Finch went to Chico State, and Blasucci spent two years as a missionary in Mexico—and eventually, they ended up back in L.A., spending their days playing guitar together once again, just like old times. Working with producer/engineer Dan Horne (Cass McCombs, Allah-Lahs), they recorded four albums —2017’s Mapache, 2020’s From Liberty Street, 2021’s 3, and 2022’s Roscoe’s Dream. Often trading solos, and occasionally switching from English to Spanish, Finch and Blasucci are perfectly in sync together.
Mapache is so easygoing that their vibe belies their prolificness at times. Swinging Stars is their fourth album in as many years, and they show no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
Blasucci chalks it up partly to the fact that, when you have two principal songwriters in a band, “the songs come in quickly and they stack up quickly.” It helps, too, that they’re just in the right place to be making music. “We’re just trying to make hay while the sun shines,” as Finch puts it. “None of us have any babies or anything and we’re all pretty committed to playing as much music as we can. And really focused on making something beautiful.”
Pre-Order/Save Swinging Stars: https://lnk.to/mapache_sstars
More here: https://www.mapachesounds.com/