A. D. Amorosi, May 2014

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

        It’s difficult to imagine as such now, but in 1997—the time of release for the seminal Sounds From the Thievery Hi-Fi on the Eighteenth Street Lounge (ESL) label—the softly souped-up aesthetic of electronic samba, box-beat-driven bossa nova, coolly wonky world music and the entirety of lounge-tronica was still but a glint in the eye of night club marketers and crepuscular Buddha Bar mixologists (DJs and CD compilers rather than bartenders).

        Two of the principle architects of this then-burgeoning bar-hop scene—producers, instrumentalists and “outernationalists” Rob Garza and Eric Hilton—held court in Washington D.C.’s Eighteenth Street Lounge (the label and the swanky saloon of the same name) where they created Thievery Corporation, a mixed-up, synthetic/organic United Nations of Braziliana, Jamaican dub, African high life and rippling tones from Asia and the Middle East.

        Their T-Corp’s fusion was good and great, filled with the sort of soft touch crooners, male and female, singing romantic abstractions that would make Sade look like Henry Rollins in comparison. With those relaxed fit voices looped and poured through each song like Drambuie in a tall, cold glass, their subtle arrangement of musical allegories made for a swell, slightly sweet and decidedly sensual trip on richly comported recordings such as 2000’s Departures remix album, that same year’s mood-ringing The Mirror Conspiracy, and their masterpiece of 2002, The Richest Man in Babylon.

        The world of electronica followed suit and every other restaurant and bar either played their music as the culinary soundtrack or bought like-sounding CDs from any number of trip-hoppy, bossa-poppy synth practitioners. “You know, it’s not entirely our fault that the world got overrun with us,” says Rob Garza when I joke with him about pushing an agenda (then) that filled our lives with so-called loungers and their so-called lounge sounds, let alone the glut of striped-shirt, three-button-suit-wearing blokes and the lounge ladies who loved them. “I swear it wasn’t just us. We just made music.”

        Still, no longer content to just wear sharp, slimming suits and play iced sandy sambas and chilled-out lounge soliloquies, Garza and Hilton changed the game slightly with 2005’s The Cosmic Game: shorter songs, brand name guests (Flaming Lips, David Byrne, Perry Farrell) and a lyrical”palette that began to mean something, a slowly smoldering, incendiary “Revolution Solution” in their own words (would you expect anything else, though, from two Washingtonians who grew up as wise-ass punk rock guys with ties to the Discord label?). Radio Retaliation from 2008 and Culture of Fear in 2011 found themselves soaked in highly politicized lyrics, harder guitars, and blunter beats to go with its worldy fusion. “We’re just trying to wake ourselves up, let alone our listeners,” Rob Garza told me at the time of Radio Retaliation’s release.

        It’s strange then, but not mercilessly unexpected, that Thievery Corporation would now stray from the scene of their most recent politicized works and return to the sandy shores of Ipanema, the cocktail parties of Sao Paolo and even lean toward the mostly-acoustic instrumentation of Saudade (their latest release of 2013) and a big band tour of the States brings them to the Tower Theater on May 10.

        When the 21st Century was bereft of bossa nova, Thievery Corporation filled our lives with it, until they stopped and brought big guitars hard edges into our lives—until they stopped that as well, and brought us back to the sunnier and samba-riffic again with Saudade. Speaking from Washington just last week, Garza laughed at the simplicity of that trajectory. “I don’t think that there was any real conscious reasoning as to why we returned to that sound,” he says. “When we started, Eric and I were brought together by foreign sounds…of Brazil and Jamaica and India. Even old soundtracks were new to us then, and we wanted to make that part of our own music at Thievery Corporation’s start.” Neither Garza or Hilton ever thought that having a band would be a job, let alone one going on 20 years. “We thought of being in a band and spinning music as a hobby,” says Garza. As they moved forward, each Thief got more into playing their instruments and composing, and with that grew more proficient while sticking to their guns as edgy punk rock kids. “Those edges—Washington hardcore and hip hop—definitely became part of what we did on our most recent albums,” he says of bringing the noise to The Cosmic Game, Radio Retaliation and Culture of Fear. “After being around for twenty years, though, we wanted to make an album of the music we’re still most passionate about after all our travels—and that’s the music of Brazil, of jazz. We wanted to leave the electronic side behind, and really play the music that’s been in our hearts the longest.”

        With those same shifts in now-non-programmable sounds, Thievery Corporation’s lyrical palettes went from being loving cups of neutral romantic abstraction to talking about the cultures of fear and highly politicized minds. They spoke their minds, hearts, leanings and consciences.

        I asked, “And now that the world is all better, you guys have abandoned the social conscious and the seriously polemic for something softer on Saudade?” He answered, “We just followed the path of where the music took us.”

        Garza says that with a laugh, and continues on to say that Saudade’s words delve more into personal politics than social sciences, and paint pictures of longing and bittersweet nostalgia. “I think we’ve been very politically passionate on our last few albums, even more so if you go back to several of our songs on The Richest Man in Babylon. I feel as if we’ve done a lot in regard to the political. Our fans were certainly thrown for a loop at first. On this record though, we’re using the lyrics as a palette cleanser—the music and production, too—before we start the next chapter of Thievery Corporation.”

        With Saudade, Garza and Hilton are taking a break from electronica and funk-punk and politics, and relaxing for a minute. If you were going to take a break from electronic music at any time (“…and we will probably go back to electronic music and heavy experimentation on the next album”), now might be the moment. The 21st Century rave scene is filled with brusque, jagged noises and happy-hyper-busy and dizzying beats—so unlike Thievery Corporation’s supple rhythms and roundly sensual arrangements in its past and in its present. “I think that’s one of the things that we wanted to work against with Saudade was an electronic music scene that’s hard and fast. Then again, it’s really funny to look at the current weekly EDM charts and the iTunes charts and see Saudade up there next to Skrillex. We’ve been a part of electronic music in the past, and certainly will be again, but Saudade is a different animal altogether.”

        Garza says that in its own subtle samba-licious way, Saudade is going against the grain of what’s au courant, a skill set that just happens to be a calling card of theirs when you consider the duo’s longtime shifts in their trajectories. “We’ve been around nearly 20 years, and thankfully still have an ability to bring people back to music, whatever it is we’re pushing.”

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If A.D. Amorosi can’t be found writing features for ICON, the Philadelphia Inquirer or doing Icepacks, Icecubes and other stories for Philadelphia’s City Paper, he’s probably hitting restaurants like Stephen Starr’s or running his greyhound