Shakey Graves Talks Drum Machines, Girls and Getting Back to His Roots

Stephanie Hernandez

Austin, Texas native Alejandro Rose-Garcia is the sole member of the one-man band Shakey Graves. His journey began in Los Angeles, where he moved to pursue his career in music. Following some growing pains, Alejandro eventually made the trip back home to finish what he started and released his debut album “Roll the Bones” in 2011. Consisting simply of Alejandro singing over his guitar and drum machine, his follow up record “And the War Came,” saw the addition of a few musicians and a well-deserved spike in the singer/songwriter’s popularity. Now a staple in his hometown of Austin, Shakey Graves is proving himself so much more than the sum of his parts. Alejandro took the time out of his tour schedule to talk to Entertainment Voice about everything from sneaking into music festivals to visiting the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and how he became Shakey Graves.

For a while, you were living in Los Angeles before eventually moving back to Texas to further pursue your career, what sparked the decision to move back home and what makes Austin such a great place to make music?

Oh! Well, L.A.  was being a bitch to me! A total bitch, ugh (laughs)! Fucking L.A., dude, I love and really really despise that place. It’s absolutely equal love and hatred. I mean it is fucking awesome, I lived there for five years off and on, and I’ve always had this analogy that L.A.  is this beautiful woman that I’m totally obsessed with that always invites me to a party with her, but then doesn’t actually hang out with me. She’s like, “Hey what’s up? This is my friend Craig and my other friend Craig and my other friend Bill and my other friend Craig. See ya!” You know?! And then the next day she’s like, “Hey, we didn’t even get a chance to hang out at the party!”

She ditched you!

Yeah! Then you know, you go out and have a great lunch, and then she says “come to another party with me tonight!” and you’re like, sure, I love you so much. Then she goes and does the same thing. I mean, you still get to go to cool parties and if you really look at it, you’re meeting tons of cool people and having a great time anyway; so yeah that was the longest analogy ever (laughs). The point is, the city taught me so much, it doesn’t pull any punches, it makes everything really hard. It took all my money and drove me insane and made me write tons of music, because I felt so stranded and frustrated. You go to work and make sixty bucks and come outside and you have an $85 parking ticket. And now my whole day is neutral now, I didn’t make any money, I actually owe money. You know I’ve gotten three parking tickets in one day in Los Angeles, it was literally some ninja shit. It taught me how to accept failure and party on, I got to hone my musicianship, and as soon as I felt like I could hold my own in the Los Angeles music scene I was like, I’m going to go home and plant the seed where I really want it. I learned how to do what I needed to do, I didn’t want to be big in Los Angeles, I wanted to have roots in my home.

It eventually came down to where I was living in L.A., essentially out of my car. I had all of my shit in my car, all of my possessions, which wasn’t very much. I was taking a nap in my car in a parking lot, and I was like fuck this! You know fuck this! I’m going to eat my pride and I’m going to go mooch off the other woman in my life, my mom, I’m going home! I’m going back to my mom’s house, I’m going to be poor, that’s it.

How did you start getting back into the Austin scene?

I set up shop in a bar; I thought where do I want to start this? And I chose this place called Hole in the Wall. I didn’t know what was still relevant in Austin, and hole in the wall is kind of a constant. I walked in and started playing happy hour from 5-7 p.m. to you know all of five people, then people started to show up and I booked a show, booked another show, filled that room up and then the back room too, I built it from the ground up and kept at it.

“Shakey Graves” is such a soulful name, how did that come about?

Yeah… It was in 2007, I was living in L.A.  and my best friend Wesley, who is now my touring manager and compadre, asked me to come with him to this festival called old settlers. I was super duper homesick, but I knew if I went back home I would have to you know, see everybody, literally everybody. I’d have to see my parents, because I hadn’t been home in a while, which is fine but I wanted to just go camping and come back to Los Angeles and that’s it. So we devised this plan to not tell anyone I was coming to town, which went great, actually. He came and picked me up at the airport with another friend of mine and drove us to this music festival, and he was working on the garbage crew. So I didn’t have a ticket, but if you get in, they won’t boot you out, so we pulled over just before the gate and I got into the trunk of the car.

He smuggled you in?

(Laughs) yeah, I only brought one change of clothes and my guitar and we had a magical weekend. One night we were hanging out by the fire drinking beer and guy showed up, who as far as I could tell was on acid. He was tripping hard. We were like “Oh hey how are you doing?” he’s like, “Good! I’m on a quest!” he had a really hot beer in his hand which he kept referring to as his whiskey, and offering us some.

And you’re like, no that’s a Bud Light.

It was a Miller High Life (laughs)! We talked to him for about 25 minutes, he told us we were good people and left by telling us to watch out for someone called “Spooky Wagon,” we all laughed and thought it would make a great country artist name. Right? Doesn’t that sound like a great nickname for a Nashville guitarist? Spooky Wagon?! Come on! So we all came up with names, I was Shakey Graves, we had Spooky Wagon and Major Jones and Wesley’s brother was napping while we were making hot dogs so we named him Spooky Wieners.

Shouldn’t have fallen asleep. Lame.

Yeah, he got fucked over because we all had cool names.  So for the rest of the weekend I went around and just played a few of my songs and people asked me who I was and I sort of just went for it. You know it’s kind of weird telling people your name is Shakey Graves, at least I thought so but people didn’t even flinch at it, “I’m Shakey Graves?” “Oh hey, nice to meet you Shakey!” It just worked.

“Oh hey nice to meet you Shakey!” sounds like you’re a damn drug addict (laughs), don’t mess with Shakey when he’s high!

Don’t worry about Shakey he’s fine, it’s just the cocaine that makes him shake! (laughs)

Your one-man band set up garnered you lots of attention, how did you come up with that suitcase drum machine?

Well we are now on the SG3 model, we started off with SG1 then the SG2, I know really interesting. No, I actually had seen a guy in a subway New York play a suitcase. He was a banjo player and he had a kick pedal and in the tunnels, it was making plenty of noise and I thought it was really cool. I had been trying to figure out how to get that sound. A few years earlier I had seen a one-man band show with three of these guys in a row, they were all one-man bands but totally different, and it made me realize how crucial percussion can be to get a song across and it gets people’s attention. So I was like, how the fuck am I going to do this?! Then I saw the suitcase, and wondered what if I could get two sounds out of this? And I drew it up in a notebook; I have the original design laying around somewhere. I gave my friend Will Wolf the design, who was the drummer in my first band and he turned it out! Changed a couple of things, I imagined it a different way, but he slapped the concept together and that first drum still works, it’s crazy.

What is the biggest obstacle between transferring your sound from your live performances to your recordings? Do you perform songs live before recording them or do you prefer to present them after they’ve been workshopped in the studio?

It depends. It almost never works out that a song is played live and then recorded. It’s nice when it does, I feel like that’s a good approach to it, but it usually works out that I build a song and then learn how to play it live. The songs usually come out a lot more aggressive live, a little more raw, and I like to keep it like that. I really enjoy recording, just recording and not trying to think of how to reduce it.

You’ve been off and on tour for months now, since the release of “And The War Came,” have you had any funny or exciting happenings on the road yet?

Hmmm, fun road stories, I’ve got a ton let’s see. We got to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland recently, which was insane. They let us into the back vault, we got to see and touch all these pieces. In one drawer was Elvis Presley’s handgun next to Prince’s lace doilies.

Perfect combination.

Oh Yeah! We got to touch weird Kurt Cobain stuff, the jacket Otis Redding died in. It was so exciting, oooh rock stuff, legendary things! It was super inspirational and silly at the same time. Chris, the drummer was like “fuck this, I’m not going in there, I’m tired I’m going to stay in the bus.”

Oh, don’t be a loser!

“Fuck that dude; I don’t need to people’s clothes.” We didn’t know what we were getting into and when we came back out we were like, “You fucked up so much dude. You fucked up so much!” It was so inspirational and made us want to rock that much more!

We heard the Mayor of Austin officially declared February 9 “Shakey Graves Day” and fans went crazy for the album “Nobody’s Fool” which was only available for a short period of time, Do you have any plans to release it on a wider scale?

Well at this point it’s really like six albums total, I put out a whole EP every year. There’s “The State of Texas vs. Alejandro Rose-Garcia,” there’s “Nobody’s Fool” and “Story of My Life.” So, so far there are four albums, about five and a half hours of music. Right now, I like hiding those albums. I kind of promote people stealing them. If you really want that music just go find it! I appreciate you paying me for it if you want, but I put them out for free anyway. But, at some point it would be cool to have a box set, or put out a greatest hit from that.

When you do, you should release them in a mini suitcase drum machine. Just sayin’ you open it up and have the vinyl copies of everything inside.

Oh my God, that’s a great idea.

When this happens, I’m totally going to tell everyone I planted that seed in your head.

I’ll deny it! I’ll be like I have no idea who you are, police, call the police!! (laughs)

Shakey Graves will play the Belasco Theater on May 20. Tickets available here.