Today we’d like to introduce you to Peralta y Los Paisanos.
Hi Peralta , so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Me and Ivan (our bassist) have been jamming for fun since High School. I slowly got to meet his friend Christian (our drummer) and we all would go to concerts have late-night video game sessions every now and then. I’ve been known to throw house shows, so I decided to form my own band and open for one night with. Side note, the name “Peralta y Los Paisanos” was perfect! It was funny, catchy, stupid, pay an homage to Latin artists such as “Selena y Los Dinos”, “Fito Olivares y Su Grupo”, “Chico Che y La Crisis” etc… We’re all from Oaxaca, Mexico except for our drummer Christian Peralta. I love that it has a Chicano sound to it too! English speakers pronounce us as “puh-ral-tuh” while Spanish speakers say “beh-ral-ta”. We played covers from The Smiths, Mac DeMarco, & Hombres G. As inexperienced as we were, the crowd loved us on our first show! We kept jamming every now and then wanting to become better musicians, and overall just fun. My friend Eroz (lead singer/accordionist) soon joined as well as our golden goose Freddy (lead/rhythm guitar). Through the help of friends, family and fans, we quickly climbed from openers to headliners in the local scene.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?Like many things when you start, it was very tough trying to brand yourself and getting recognition from others. Opening for shows with a crowd of 15 people, hauling all our gear, commit to practice was becoming exhausting. My goal was to be different from other band’s acts. See what they do and how we can improve it. Using fireworks, playing with two drummers, having an accordion player, playing songs you’d hear at quinceñeras. Since then, it’s been pretty smooth because we’ve gained the recognition from our community. We had exciting things lined up for us; live radio show, headlining gigs, playing for a local festival. Then the pandemic hit a week right before we had all of that ready and set to go. We took a ~17 months hiatus break and came back around September 2021. Luckily for us or unfortunate to them, I should say, many local bands from our area broke up or ended up being canceled. Thanks to our committed fans, we were called up to play live shows again for businesses and art shows!
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Most of our songs are composed by Ivan and Peralta. They’ll jam it out and create a skeleton base for a song. When we have practice as a band, they’ll play what they jammed out, and me and Freddy will jump in, and we’ll have a new song by the end of the day. Sometimes Freddy will have a catchy three-chord progression song, and we’ll all just jump in and create snippets for a new song. We’re proud when we play an original, and our fans will absolutely just vibe with it. We like to think we’re different because no other band in our area at the time was infusing Latin music and incorporating them into their songs. We even have a Brazilian-infused song, “Ocean Hills” as well as a Middle Eastern-inspired song “Arabian Nights”.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
As a band, we hope in the next couple of years have fun jamming and creating songs. Building a larger fan base, playing in festivals, getting recognized in the scene. As we rise up, we meet bands who have worked or played with bands we’d love to get know more. When bands from LA or OC talk about how they’ve worked alongside with members of Chicano Batman or Tropa Magica, it really gets us excited that we too could soon be doing that as well. Networking around or opening for a band we admire is where we’d hope to be soon.
Contact Info:
- Email: peraltaylospaisanos@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peraltaylospaisanos/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PYLosP/
- Youtube: https://youtu.be/o3jXfvR4T-U
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/pylp666
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3ORfm7vCFAotSmURh2c8Ci
Image Credits:
-Raul Aguilar
