Performing under the moniker Harmless, Mexican-born, Los Angeles based singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Nacho Cano feels he’s a bit of a stubborn optimist.
Despite having to overcome many obstacles in his life – including undergoing a long recovery six years ago from the near-death experience being run over by a drunk driver, moving to America as an immigrant and trying to find connection and a sense of belonging both individually and as a musician – the songwriter remains full of hope.
It’s why his new album, out March 29 on the Nettwerk label, is called Springs Eternal, drawing from the shortened line “Hope springs eternal” from Alexander Pope’s 1732 poem An Essay on Man. He recorded the album at Sunset Sound Studios with the help of producer Yves Rothman (Blondshell, Amaarae).
“When I was in the hospital and in the ICU, I was dead set on leaving, and the only way that I could leave is if I got better and I almost angrily got better,” says Cano. “I think I’ve always been an optimist in the most realistic, contradictory kind of way where I’m almost angry like that I hope life gets better.”
“But that’s also the truth of coming to the US as an immigrant where you’re always trying to put yourself into the United States and feel like you have a place where you belong. And I think the same is true of how I feel about it in the music world at large, where I’m just like I’m my own biggest critic, and I bet my close friends are exhausted sometimes by how defeatist I can get. But really at my core, I know that if I was truly that defeatist, I would just not do it, right? But the reality is I really do want this dream and I really do want these things.”
When he mentioned that to one of his bandmates, they said, “Well, it’s because hope springs eternal.”
“I just felt like the kind of joke is that I took hope out so that when anybody writes about, it’s Harmless – Springs Eternal, which is just a way of saying that I spring eternal with optimism, despite my own grievances with myself, I still remain optimistic,” he says. “So, I hope for the best, even though I am not so much expecting the worst, but I believe in the worst. It’s Mexican, that contradictory behavior is super Mexican.”
Amidst a steady undercurrent of rock and bedroom-pop the songwriter chronicles his roller coaster journey to this point and reconnecting with himself. It pulls from his experience growing up in Mexico, moving to San Diego with his family when he was 17, adjusting to life as a citizen, his struggles to be heard as an artist, getting hit by the drunk driver while riding his bike on his way to work and enduring his long recovery. It also looks at his achieving gold-certification as an artist, playing sold-out shows, and getting married.
Scummy Water Tower caught up with the singer-songwriter to talk about his emotional journey making the album, why he avoids clocks and what it was like writing a song about his wife.
How are you doing today?
I’m doing okay. I’m still getting used to the time change, so taking my dogs out and waking up in the morning feels like a little laggy, but I think the world knows that I’m a super early riser, it is just the week of a time change I think my brain just doesn’t understand what it’s doing. Because yeah, I don’t like clocks, I know that’s maybe a really weird thing to say, but I remember, especially when I was a kid and even into adult life, when I would go to therapy, I would always ask before going into therapy that all the clocks not face me so that I don’t know what time it is, and I feel like I’m like that with everything else in life where I’m just like, “I don’t want to know what time it is. I just want to know that I’m vibing.” I always felt like that was the quickest way for me to get through working retail or anything like that.
Do you think there’s a reason that you don’t like seeing the clocks?
I think the surface answer would be that the older version of me in therapy would be like, “I don’t want to know how much money I’m spending an hour here,” because I feel like whenever I view time is money, I don’t want to know that I’m spending it, if that makes any sense. Or at work, I don’t want to know that I’m making dollars to the hour. But I think really it’s just, since I was a kid, I’ve always been super, super-duper scared of death. And I think if I know that time is going by, I’ll become hyper-aware of it. If a movie is bad or if a movie is something I’m not really enjoying, I can do this party trick where I can guess almost to the minute how much of a movie has gone by. I can be like, “All right, we’re an hour and 21,” and then I’ll pause the movie and it will be at an hour and 21, and my friends will be like, “Whoa.” But really, I think it’s because my brain is internally being like, “You just wasted an hour and 21 minutes that you’re never going to get back because you’re watching this terrible movie,” or something like that.
What music have you been into lately?
Really corny, but whenever it’s the Oscars every year I feel like I care a little less, and I hope me saying that doesn’t bite me when I inevitably get nominated someday, but I listen to the Best Original Score soundtracks while I’m out and about, which it doesn’t make for the best walking music. But yesterday I spent the whole day listening to the Oppenheimer soundtrack because I know that it won the Oscar. And before that, I say this as I look at my “on repeat” for Spotify, I’m not a musical guy at all, but I don’t know why I felt compelled to listen to the Sweeney Todd soundtrack for a month straight from the Johnny Depp movie. I think it’s because I was like, “Man, Johnny Depp, he can sing, but he can sing.” Sometimes I feel that way about myself, so maybe if I listen to him sing, I’ll feel better about tracking vocals like I’m doing right now.
But the music that I genuinely enjoy recently has been, I’m still spinning the last Laurel Halo record Atlas from last year and the new Schoolboy Q album Blue Lips is really good. I try to listen to things outside of my wheelhouse when I’m recording music because I’m terrified that ideas will slip in. I did that once in high school when I had a band with a friend, and I definitely without meaning to ripped off one of our favorite bands when we were doing our little band meeting. And I just remember the disappointment on his face and not very long after that he quit the band. So, since then, I’m always just scared that I’ll copy somebody. So, I just try my hardest to listen to just very weird stuff in comparison to my own music, like the Sweeney Todd soundtrack.
Who would you say are some of your biggest musical influences?
I know that this is maybe a weird one, but I think one of my biggest influences is Tim Hecker. I know that I make guitar music and there’s lyrics, and when we talk about Tim Hecker, there’s really none of that. I think ambient music influences me the most because whenever I’m writing or looking to write, I end up listening to ambient music to get myself in a headspace where I understand what I’m talking about or what I’m trying to talk about. And I wish I could think more ambient textures in, or I could get away with releasing a 10-minute instrumental song where there’s no beat or anything like that. But I try to emulate the feelings that Tim Hecker music gives to me with my music, which I think is a strange way of looking at it, but that’s the music that really moves me and I think I spent the most time listening to, and it’s the music that helps me feel like my feelings are able to be communicated. So, I strive to make music that makes me feel like that.
So yeah, I would say Tim Hcker. I love Harold Budd. I love Brian Eno. I’ve also been listening to a lot of Chihei Hatakeyama. I think last year my favorite record was the last Ryuichi Sakamoto record, 12. I mean, that guy has my dream career, like him and Trent Reznor. You can make rock music or electronic music, but you also make these beautiful ambient film scores, or you could translate feelings into much more abstract ideas, and I am really inspired by that. So yeah, probably like Ryuichi Sakamoto, Tim Hecker, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, those guys. And I say that as I make little jingle-jingly indie music.
How do you think your time in Los Angeles and Mexico has impacted your view of music and your approach to making music?
I think, on one hand, as far as writing music goes, it’s maybe impacted it a little bit, but not a lot. I think that the music that I listened to when I was a kid in Mexico versus the music that I listen to now is not super different, we just chose which bands were bigger in Mexico. Sometimes I feel like those bands are better, but they’re big here anyway. Growing up, the biggest bands in Mexico, I remember, were The Cranberries and Radiohead, and those are massive bands even here in the US. Or a band that is massive in Mexico that I think is big here as well is Interpol.
So, there’s a lot of… How would you say? I would call it the Venn diagram of musical culture of two countries. There’s a lot of overlap, and I think that comes from sometimes this desire to not want to be in Mexico when you’re a Mexican, especially a Mexican band. It’s why there’s a big conversation with some of my friends in Mexico City who play in bands where it’s like, “Can you really call yourself a Mexican band if you sing in English?”
So, that kind of then leads into the second part of your question, which is how does it affect me making my music? Well, I feel like it creates a very difficult identity space to have existed in both because I feel that when I’m here, the music industry or the music culture wants me to make a specific type of music in order to belong into a very specific type of box, which I think is the Latin box, because I think there’s really only one very specific idea of what Latin music is in the U.S., whereas I feel that in Mexico, even though it’s a little contradictory, we have these bands that sing in English or in Spanish, but they’re like dream pop bands, and they’re like jangly rock bands, or they’re like shoegaze bands. Those are the kind of bands that are pretty popular in my circle of friends in Mexico, and none of those genres really speak to, or their genesis doesn’t come from Latin culture, and yet I consider them to be Latin genres, if that makes any sense. Because I’m just like, “Oh, well, we do them so much in Mexico that it does feel like it’s Latin music because my friends are making it,” right?
So, I have that similar perspective when I’m making my own indie rock and my own dream pop here in the US where I’m like, yeah, to me it’s still feels like Latin music, because I’m Latin and no matter whatever I write about is going to come from my perspective and my background and my viewpoint, which is a multicultural viewpoint. It just doesn’t happen to have that, as some labels who I’ve talked to have called it that “urban Latin” sound. So, now I just feel like whenever I write, that’s always in my head, or whenever I compare myself to my friends, it’s always in my head. So instead of really influencing what kind of music I write, it’s really just influenced the way that I view myself in this environment. It’s just another juncture for me to use comparison.
Your new album chronicles a number of the ups and downs and trials and tribulations you’ve had through your life, including your near-death experience being run over by a drunk driver and your experience as an immigrant. How did that train of thought come about? What were the biggest things you learned about yourself?
I feel like near-death experiences, I feel like we all know somebody who has one, either ranging from something that’s very severe to something that’s not as intense. They’re all intense no matter what, but they range from violent to maybe not or something like that. But I always think of how, particularly in the United States, things are always seen as kind of black and white where it’s almost like life is always lived in this three-act structure and whenever we experience things here in the U.S., things are always on their way to going from one thing to another, right?
And I think what pains me about that is that when you have something as intense as a near death experience, there’s kind of only two pathways in which when you’re talking to people either close to you or not about what happened to you, there’s really only two paths to walk. And one of them is either you are still in it, you’re still suffering and you’re still grieving. And the other path is you’re over it, right? And I struggle with my experience because maybe it’s because I’m not from this country and I can kind of view those contradictory spaces as both being true, that I feel that you could do both, that I feel like you could not be over something and overcome it, right? You can grieve, but you can still learn to move on, or it’s acknowledging that things take a long time.
And I felt that after I got run over by a drunk driver, that for a large period of my first year of recovery, I was so desperate to get it over with because I felt like there were only two modes in which I could exist, which was either I am the victim of this horrible thing and I stay a victim forever, or I learn to walk again and I pick up all these pieces and then I move on with my life, right? But it’s not that easy. And on top of that, it’s not the way that honors or respects what I’m going through or what anybody goes through when they go through things like this for that matter, which is being able to be both, making progress every day or every year and looking back and being like, “Yeah, I’m better than from where I left off, but I still carry some of this weight.”
So, I wanted to make a record that kind of was about that feeling, right? And I felt that that feeling is a little too intense and maybe too abstract for me to try to put into words or to try to put into sounds so I thought that the best way to do this would be for me to have a dialogue with the person who I was before the accident… Or not accident, I always call it an accident because it’s what I’ve been conditioned to say from some people, but it was a drunk driver, so I feel like I have to correct myself, it was a crime. But back to my point, I feel like when someone experiences a great trauma, there’s almost like a divergent point between who you were after that and who you were before that.
And in my experience, it was so intense that I felt like I took the place of somebody else’s life, whoever this version of me is completely foreign to the life that came before that, and not just in an intellectual space or a thinking space, but in a physical space. I don’t remember what my body felt like before being run over. I don’t know what it’s like to not be achy or to not have nerve pain or to not have numbness and not to have any of these, feels like this is a completely different life, but I have the memories of someone else. So, while I’m trying to process this grief and overcome it, I feel like the only way to adequately do that is by having a dialogue with my younger self and trying to find a way to talk to myself, if that makes any sense.
And the beauty of music is that it’s kind of like the most easily accessible time machine we have next to our sense of smell. And I thought about picking songs that were about the things that I’m going through right now that I could talk to my 19-year-old self or my 21-year-old or 25-year-old, all of these different versions of myself before being run over. So, I feel like that’s how the near death experience shaped the concept of this record, which I don’t know, now that I think about it because it’s funny, I think I’m going to be one of those artists who can only make concept albums because before making this record, my drummer, when I got signed, I was like, “I’m just going to put singles out. I don’t want to make a record.” And my drummer was, “The most definitive thing any artist could do is make an album.” So, I sat down and thought up this whole concept. Really shows I went to art school, doesn’t it?
Yeah. You also talk on the album about your relationships and fitting in with others. That includes your wife. What was it like writing songs about your wife and love?
I think love, this is so corny but it’s true, it’s just as true as the corniest thing ever, which is saying that the coolest thing you could be is yourself. I think it’s equally true of how corny it is that love is a deeply healing thing, and I think that I’m very lucky to have that in my life. So, I can’t help but write songs about my wife. I think it’s very easy when you’re in your twenties or as a teenager to talk about unrequited love, it almost comes naturally at this point. I think about whenever I sit down and I write a song, I don’t even need to think about unrequited love as a real thing. I think I know how to write about it, but I’ve never written a love song about somebody who I’m thinking of and acting on the idea of spending the rest of my life with.
So, with the concept of the record of trying to have this dialogue with past versions of myself, I was kind of like, I wonder how I could sonically communicate what kind of person I’m with to a ghost or what they mean to me or any number of these concepts. So, I kind of explored this new songwriting space where I got to talk about my wife, and I think it’s one of the first times where I chose to make music based on her.
The songs that are about her, particularly the album closer, “Ferrari,” which is kind of a joke because my wife’s name is Ari, So, I didn’t want to call a song “For Ari,” so I was like, “Oh, that kind of sounds like Ferrari so maybe I’ll have this inside joke with myself where I’ll know that it’s about her because I phonetically called it that,” similarly to how the last time I did a record and I’d had an album closer, which is I guess now my most popular song, I wanted to call it the name of the girl that I wrote it about, but I was too chicken to do it, so I just called it “Swing Lynn.” But like Lynn is her middle name. So, I was like, “Let’s continue this trend of when we write songs about great loves, just not having the courage of calling it after them.”
But with this track, “Ferrari,” I wrote a song that I thought she would like. So, I know that she likes cheesy kind of folky, country-esque bands from way back when. That’s my wife’s meat and potatoes when it comes to music. And I tried to write one of those songs because I love her so much, and I think that’s a huge gesture of love to almost write outside your own genre as a gift to somebody. And I know that if my younger self was listening, I would be like, “Why’d you write this? You probably wrote this for some girl,” or something. And then I’d be like, “Oh, of course. Future me is married, I bet.” Super corny stuff like that.
Plus, I don’t know, I feel like my wife is my biggest ally in everything, and I don’t think I could be a functional and responsible full-time musician if it weren’t for my wife. I think she brings a certain type of support and structure that I didn’t have before. And I think without her, I don’t think I could have made this record simply because I would be almost too cynical about it and not even bring myself to make it. So, I feel like that’s one way my wife has definitely influenced my song making.
Harmless will celebrate the album’s release with his debut headline show at Los Angeles’s El Cid on April 4.
You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.
