Longtime trio wins crowd with harmonious personalities
by Joe Tarr
Ani Cordero was already a veteran drummer of a number of indie rock bands when she tried to write her first song.
She wrote it in Spanish, the language Cordero grew up speaking. She didn’t really like the results. “I thought, ‘That doesn’t sound very rock. I want to sound like all these bands I like,’” she says of her first songwriting effort. “I stopped trying [to write in Spanish] for a while. So I wrote a bunch of indie rock songs.”
She was recording her first solo album—the never-released Deserter—at the house of a bandmate, whose little daughter, Mia, was often running about.
“Mia would be at the house and want attention. I started writing this song for entertainment, and my affection for her came out in Spanish,” she says. “I thought, ‘That sounds all right. Why don’t I let myself write in Spanish?’ Once I started, I couldn’t stop.”
Since then, Ani Cordero has gone on to form her own band, called Cordero. It’s an indie rock band that draws heavily on Latin music without sounding like a generic genre-blending group. That originality is possible because the band’s frontwoman understands the music.
Cordero grew up in Atlanta, the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants. Until she got a transistor radio in fifth grade, she listened mainly to the music of her parents.
“I didn’t really get into rock ’n’ roll music until I was in fifth or sixth grade. Before that, I didn’t listen to any rock music at all,” she says in a phone interview from her Brooklyn apartment. In her teens she got heavily into punk and new wave music—New Order, Fugazi, Violent Femmes, Jane’s Addiction, et. al.
“Part of what seems strange about me, according to other people, is that I have huge gaps in my rock ’n’ roll history. I didn’t know I liked the Beatles until I was 21,” she says.
There were few other Latinos around when she was growing up. But Cordero found acceptance in the local punk scene, and her parents encouraged the outlet.
She fell in love with the drums, which she started playing at 15, after she managed to save enough from babysitting to buy a set. “They picked me,” she says unable to explain her instrument choice. At 17, she started playing in a number of indie rock bands, touring the country while attending college. She drummed in Number One Family and Man Or Astro Man’s female clone band, Gamma Clones.
She lived for a spell in Tucson, Ariz., where she became friends with Howe Gelb and Joey Burns of Calexico. It was here where she taught herself to play guitar and began writing.
But the percussion is always in her head when she writes. “As soon as I write a song, I already have the drum beat in mind,” she says of her approach. “I can write some really simple guitar lines that only make sense if you’re hearing a drum. I can’t go out and play my songs solo. It wouldn’t make any sense.... They’re all meant to be played with drums and bass and all of those elements. Otherwise you’d be playing this guitar line completely out of context.”
Cordero’s music is fiercely percussive. It’s one of the few bands able to get the generally static Pilot Light crowd to move to the beat.
It has a great rhythm section with Chris Verene (formerly of Rock*A*Teens) on drums and Jonathan Petrow (Bee & Flower) on bass. Ani Cordero occasionally plays timbales, in addition to guitar and singing. F.A. Blasco (Blasco Ballroom) plays keyboards, and Lynn Wright (Bee & Flower) plays guitar.
Half of the songs are in English, half in Spanish. She writes in both languages and never translates from one to the other. “Because of the sound of the language and the rhythm of the words, I notice that they sound different. When I write a Spanish song, it doesn’t sound like a Spanish translation of my English songs,” she notes.
The band is soon to release its second studio album, Somos Cordero, on Daemon Records, the label owned by Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls, who Cordero is now touring with.
Outside New York City (where there’s a bilingual indie rock scene) or California, Cordero mostly plays in indie rock clubs.
“Usually everybody apologizes for whatever scene we’re in and say, ‘People don’t dance here.’ But then the show starts and everybody ends up dancing,” she says. “Somewhere around the grunge era after moshing and shoe gazing, people forgot that it’s really fun to get into the music. There’s this really cool thing of crossing your arms in front of your chest. If you’re brave enough to get into the music, it’s really enjoyable.”
In New York City and California, plenty of Latinos come out to see Cordero play. Outside those areas the audiences tend to be predominately white indie-rock kids. Both audiences are great, she says.
Asked if she wishes there were more crossover of music fans, she says: “I wish there was more crossover of human beings and friendships and neighborhoods. I look forward to a time when it’s all mixed up. I just think that it’s bound to keep going in that direction, and I think that’s a real positive thing.”
March 4, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 10
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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