interview by Oscar Cabrera
photos by Rob Schoenborn
Coachella Magazine catches up with Desert Rhythm Project for an interview with Mikey Reyes and Bryanna Evaro. DRP opens up about a number of topics ranging from the origins of the band, their album debut, struggles they faced as artists, work process, and more.
Oscar Cabrera: So what is DRP’s backstory — how did you guys meet?
Mikey Reyes: I’m actually from Indio, CA, originally and Bry’s from up here in the high desert, Joshua Tree area. We met playing shows. Our bands would play a bunch together. And then after a couple years of us playing, you know, a bunch of music, bunch of shows, we got together. We started dating, I mean, that was when we first started dating. But, then we started playing music together in 2012. We kinda been playing music together ever since.
Oscar: So you guys got together before you got the band together?
Bryanna Evaro: Yeah.
Mikey: Exactly.
Oscar: Who makes up the rest of the band?
Bryanna: Our drummer’s name is Tyler Saraca and then our keyboard player is David Yuter.
Oscar: Did you guys meet them also through kind of just playing at random shows or?
Bryanna: They were local. Well, David’s from San Diego And Tyler moved here from Boston a few years back and was playing music in groups up here and they were great players and friends of ours.
Oscar: When it clicks it clicks right?
Mikey: Oh yeah. They’re amazing people, brothers, and musicians.
Oscar: Let’s talk about this album [Mojave Roots]. It’s your debut, if I’m not mistaken, right?
Mikey: Yeah man, yeah.
Oscar: I did a little research and saw a youtube video that I believe said that there was an album coming fall 2015 or something like that; is this the one that you guys were referring to?
Bryanna: Mhmm Mhmm… (laughs) Yeah.
Mikey: This is that album
Oscar: Interesting. May I ask why it was pushed back?
Mikey: Life. You know what I mean? It’s kinda crazy. Life kinda starts happening. We felt like, you know, it needed to take its time to breathe…
Bryanna: We recorded most of it back in 2015. All of it. We just went through a lot of changes within the group and we’ve been playing out a lot and getting a lot of really great performance opportunities. And we actually started recording another album while that one was already just sitting and waiting. And we almost thought that we should just release the newer, you know, what we’ve been recording. But we felt really good about what we recorded [Mojave Roots] and loved all the songs that are on it and…maybe it was just, it was the way it was supposed to be.
Mikey: I think the musical journey is interesting in that way though too, you know? As an artist, I think there’s times you go through like this… space of where you think it’s not good enough. You know what I’m saying?
Oscar: Oh definitely.
Mikey: I think every artist can relate to that. Where it’s like, ‘ah man, I wanna put this out but it’s just not right or it’s just not there yet’ or whatever. That was a HUGE part of what stopped us from releasing it [Mojave Roots]. Just like the mixing process, just us wanting it to be so perfect. We started recording another project basically in the process of releasing this first one and it’s like there’s this new meditation that we’ve fallen into of just being, ‘you know, it is good enough — cause we’re good enough.’ We feel good enough about ourselves and we feel good about this material. I think it’s like a life journey! It’s a music journey but it’s also a life journey where you start telling yourself, ‘I am good enough — this is good enough.’
Bryanna: Before we do anything here. We knew then we had to release it (Mojave Roots).
Mikey: Before we do anything else.
Oscar: It felt right at that point.
Mikey: These songs are so necessary. They’re very healing not only for us but for our fans and their journey too. The anticipated, you know, album — these songs that people have been hearing for a couple years.
Oscar: I feel it is part of the life of the artist kind of like that self-doubt or being afraid of what the spectator is going to think of your work — your project. I mean just judging from the name itself, “Mojave Roots”, is it safe to assume that your sound is influenced by your hometown and where you’re from?
Mikey: Yeah.
Oscar: That’s really cool about it. It’s weird how life works in that sense, right? It was a totally new sound for me. You mentioned the ‘healing’ earlier and it’s like “WOW” I totally get where you’re coming from. So, I feel, even though it was pushed back, it was kinda supposed to happen in that way.
Mikey: Dude, totally. Totally. 100% man.
Oscar: I wanna talk about my favorite song on the album, “Feelin’ Love.” I mean, for one, I noticed that it was completely different, very different from the rest. When I first saw that it was ten minutes long, I was like ‘Whoah, this is a looong song’, right?
Mikey: (Laughs)
Oscar: But, like, quite honestly, as I listened to it, I sorta got lost in it. All of a sudden those ten minutes seemed like one or two minutes. And all of a sudden, the song just ended and I’m like, ‘wait, can there be more?’ (Mikey: awesome). Like, I want more of this song. And you know, it’s a ten minute song and for it to have that impact on me by the end of it, like — me wanting more, rather than less of it, it’s pretty amazing.
Mikey: It’s definitely a love song. The song was actually written in connection to me and music. But, originally, I was feeling very… uninspired and in a space of where I felt like, I wasn’t inspired to create. So then I just kinda wrote this really slow, pretty-type… ‘Cause I was saying, ‘how could this love ever pull me away from this but no other love could ever pull me away from this.’ My love for music is what I’m talking about.
It was really hard for me to write music at the time. When before, you know, it was so second nature; songs would just kinda come to me. And so again, that’s the struggle as an artist. It [Feelin’ Love] pulled me out of a space — out of a very stagnant place in which I wasn’t being creative.
Oscar: Is there a specific process to creating your music?
Bryanna: It’s all over the place. Most recently when we write we start with ideas, whether it’s a chorus, a verse, or even just chord progressions, we kinda build on that. It can be really intimate to where you know how you want every part to go, you know, from the drums to the guitar. Or we have an idea and we kinda just jam on that and see what happens.
Mikey: I don’t know if you’ve checked out some of those “Wordplay Wednesdays” at all. But, in some of those songs, we’re coming up with the beat or the song like that day. It’s like, ‘let’s see what we got, let’s just put it out there.’ That’s been the real test lately.
Oscar: How would you compare that to the traditional way of gradually creating a song and finding the process as oppose to forcing it?
Bryanna: It kinda goes back to what made us hold back on the album for so long. We have a whole catalog of songs that we have yet to release. So it’s actually that response to wanna not release. You know, it is good enough and it’s fun. It puts that spirit of spontaneity in it, like ‘hell yeah! We dig it. Let me sing on it.’ It’s like a good creative release.
Mikey: It’s funny how this goes back to the release of the album. After we showed our friend (Giselle Woo) the songs she said, “what are you guys doing with these songs!” She put it into perspective. I was like, ‘we have a whole freaking album sitting there, WE NEED TO PUT THIS THING OUT.
WEB: desertrhythmproject.com
UP NEXT: Friday, May 18, 2018 at joshuatreemusicfestival.com