Like many ideas, it started over a round of drinks. Musicians Shorty Delgado, James Jones and Joshua Josué were discussing where they stood in the world of music.
Their sounds weren’t traditionally country or Americana, and having Spanish thrown into the mix didn’t make them Tejano either. Thus, Electric Chololand Records was born, an indie-startup record label celebrating Chicano musicians, stories and heritage, with a specialty in Chicano Rock.
Delgado is the head of the label, which launched in 2024. Josué is one of the artists under the label whose new album, “Broadcast to the Surf Ballroom,” is a tribute album made up of demos and unfinished songs from artists Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens, two musical inspirations for Josué.
Delgado joins us to share more on the record label and its creation. Josué also joins us to discuss his music and share a few songs, with performances from Ben Rice, Nick Skalberg, Marilyn Darrel and Yoshi Sheetz.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We’re going to end this week with music. Shorty Delgado started the label Electric Chololand in 2024 just to release his own album called “Tin Corazón.” Then he had a fateful conversation with two other Chicano musicians in Portland, Joshua Josué and James Jones. They connected over their overlapping and complicated musical influences – rockabilly and punk, mariachi and Americana.
Electric Chololand has now released two albums by Joshua Josué. The latest just came out. It’s called “Broadcast to the Surf Ballroom.” He joined us in our studio recently, along with Shorty Delgado. We started with a performance. This is “Solitario,” the title track from Josué’s debut album on the Electric Chololand label. It came out last year.
[“Solitario” by Joshua Josué playing]
Miller: That was “Solitario” by Joshua Josué. We heard Ben Rice on guitar, Marilyn Darrel on accordion, Nick Skalberg on bass and Yoshi Sheetz on drums.
Joshua, what’s the story behind that song? You said you wrote it when you were in Guatemala.
Joshua Josué: Yeah, so I’d spent fair amount of time in Mexico and Central America on my motorcycle, and I had my guitar with me and that song sings about a guy that rides through the night on his horse to get back to the one he loves. I was riding on my motorcycle and I always kind of fancied myself an old bandito or cowboy, so that was my horse. And I wrote that song for the woman that waited for me back at home while I went on this disappearing act in Central America.
Miller: How long was that act?
Josué: That was over the course of a couple of years that I was doing that.
Miller: How long ago was that?
Josué: So that was a pre-pandemic. And I would say that was about 2015, 2016 when I was doing that.
Miller: What were your early musical influences? What were you listening to as a kid that you think formed the music you want to make now?
Josué: Early on was Johnny Cash. I actually lived in Germany when I was a child because my dad was in the military. We had some Johnny Cash and Hank Williams that we listened to; but it was when I was a teenager, I saw the movie “La Bamba.” And when I saw “La Bamba,” that’s when I decided I wanted to play music. Ritchie Valens’ story just impacted me tremendously. So I walked out of that movie, and I had $100 saved from mowing lawns. I went to the pawn shop and I bought a guitar. And that was my biggest musical influence, when that happened.
Miller: What was it about Ritchie Valens?
Josué: The story is a great story. I always liked old rock and roll, and I would look at the pictures of rock and rollers and imagine myself in their shoes. But then I saw the movie “La Bamba” and it was the first time that I’d seen Latinos on screen, for one, as a musician, but also in a starring role. And generally, as a child growing up, whenever I saw people that looked like my family, they were either the drug dealer or the guy getting arrested – never in a positive light. So then I saw “La Bamba” and I was like, whoa, these people look like my tíos, my aunts, my uncles, and they look like me and they’re playing music that I like. I just gravitated towards Ritchie Valens at that moment, to the “La Bamba” story and the band Los Lobos.
Miller: And also, I mean, famously for Ritchie Valens, combining Mexican musical traditions and American musical traditions … Was that also part of what grabbed you?
Josué: Yes, it was a whole package. I mean, the rock and roll, the traditions, the sound of the music, the Spanish and rock and roll coming together, but also the lifestyle of that Southern California Chicano Movement. I could just see it all in that film and I could hear it in the music. And like I said, I had nothing that I related to on that level in my life at that point. And I saw that and I was like, this is what I relate to, this is what I want to do, and these are the people that I identify with.
Miller: Shorty, what about you? What were your early musical influences?
Shorty Delgado: In a very similar vein to Josué, my uncle was the greatest male figure in my life. He was a military man as well and was an old greaser. So I spent my summers cruising around Albuquerque in his hot rod, listening to ‘50s and ‘60s rock and roll. That was my first kind of introduction into this lifestyle of music.
In a very similar way, my uncle actually took me to see “La Bamba.” And when I first met Josué, one of the first things I said to him was, “oh, you do that Ritchie Valens night, right?” And we met at a dog park, and we hit it off immediately because we both were very inspired by that movie to pick up the guitar and to play.
So really, that’s the first real main influence that I had. Other than that, I kind of grew into punk rock and skater rock as I was growing up, yeah.
Miller: Why did you want to start your own label, to fast forward?
Delgado: Yeah, I’d always wanted to start one since I was in high school. I was in high school when the grunge thing hit and labels were starting up a lot. I also had the opportunity to work for Alligator Records, which is an independent, traditional blues label that has a handful of Grammy Award winning artists on it. So I spent six years at that label, starting as a receptionist and then working my way up to an executive role.
This is the worst point in time you could ever start a label, but it’s also a very important time to start a label, particularly for this type of music.
Miller: OK, there’s a lot in what you just said. So let’s start with the first part of that sentence. Why is it the worst time to start a label?
Delgado: It is the worst time to start a label because there’s no product. Even on a good product day when we’re selling products off the stage, it pales in comparison to what it used to be in the ‘90s.
Miller: That was the heyday of selling CDs and before that, the heyday of selling vinyl.
Delgado: Absolutely, absolutely. So we do have a vinyl resurgence, which we’ve been tapping into. There’s a CD resurgence which we’ve been tapping into as well.
Miller: People like tapes, too … mystifying.
Delgado: [Laughter] They do, yeah, I don’t own a tape player. People like tapes. But yeah, it’s a real mind shift. There’s a lot of unlearning that I have to do right now. And I think that right now the main focus is the artist. I think that the artist is the product now.
Miller: How’d you come up with the title Electric Chololand?
Delgado: It was actually a joke. When I started recording “Tin Corazón,” we started recording right as the pandemic hit. My producer has an analog studio and he said, “well, we’re going to go digital for this and we’re going to just start swapping files so we can just start getting this thing done.” And as I was sending files back and forth, I jokingly called my home recording studio – which was just a desk and some microphones – Electric Chololand Studios. So that’s kind of where that name came from.
Miller: After Electric Lady Studio?
Delgado: So one of my best friends is a mastering engineer. The architect who did the acoustical architecture for “Electric Ladyland” did my friend Colin’s studio in Chicago’s The Boiler Room. So I was teasing him about that. So I started saying, “Well, I have Electric Chololand.” [Laughs]
Miller: Joshua, can we hear another song?
Josué: Absolutely.
[“Beneath the Sand” by Joshua Josué playing]
Miller: That is “Beneath the Sand.” It’s a title track from Joshua Josué’s album that came out last year. It’s a haunted song. These are the beginning lyrics, in case people missed the very beginning: “Motorcycle in the jungle, I’m going somewhere, any place that I can run, a place to disappear beneath the sand.”
What prompted that song?
Josué: The song is about a devastating loss I had in my life. My father had passed away unexpectedly, and that’s the catalyst that sent me on a motorcycle excursion into Central America. I just wanted to disappear, run away, live off the grid. When I was recording that last album, Ben Rice and I were sitting in his living room heading to the recording session, and Ben said, “Oh, I have a guitar lick I think you might like.” So we started singing over that guitar lick with no idea what the song would be about. We were just like, “let’s write a song.”
We ended up at the recording studio out in the Mojave Desert, recording with Pat Kearns. And that night we went to a small cabin and sat down with a songwriter named Roly Salley, who was the bass player. He won a Grammy for writing for “Killing the Blues,” and the bass player is Chris Isaak. I asked Roly, I said, could you help us finish writing this song? And I think Ben and I approached it from a technical standpoint, and Roly, as we sat there, we had a couple of Modelos, and he said, “Just keep singing whatever you feel.”
This song came out and I didn’t realize that I was still grieving the loss of somebody close to me. I thought I had moved on a bit, but I hadn’t. And as we sat in that cabin, the words to this song just came out and I found myself in tears. I was like, oh my goodness, I’m processing this loss, and that song just let itself be known. I felt like it came to us from somewhere in the desert and said this is what you need right now and this is how the song goes. And we walked out of the cabin about midnight that night with this song and recorded it the next day.
Miller: How did being in the Mojave Desert and being near Joshua Tree, where I’ve read that you’d go for walks with the band in the morning and record in the afternoon, and then go to that cabin and drink Modelos ... What did being in that place mean for the creation of the album?
Josué: I feel like it’s a really special place. I don’t know, but it almost feels like it’s a very spiritual place. And it’s quiet, you can hear the desert, you can hear, sometimes, the wildlife. And I think being out there gave myself and I think the entire band a chance to just be at peace with their soul, be at peace with their spirit, and let the music begin to speak for itself. And it ended up feeling like a very magical place.
On the final day of recording this album, everybody left, they flew out, drove home. And I took a piece of paper, and I wrote everybody’s name down as on that recording session, including our producer Pat Kearns, his wife Susan, who helped with things out there. And I just walked out in the desert and I built a fire. I lit that piece of paper on fire with everybody’s name on it and watched the smoke go up, and thanked the desert, and thanked whatever energy is out there for this special moment to be able to record this album out there and send everybody’s name back into wherever we came from.
Miller: Shorty, why do you want to have Joshua on your label?
Delgado: Well, Joshua and I struck up a friendship. One evening we had dinner and drinks. And I was giving him some lessons learned from releasing my own album. I was going through a couple of things to look out for, some things to maybe do that might help him out. And he paused, looked at me and said, “Well, why don’t I just release it on your label then?” And initially, I busted out laughing and I thought, that’s the most hysterical idea I’ve ever heard. You’ve got to do it.
The next day after we woke up, had a little coffee, he started texting me and said, “I’m actually really serious about this.” So I said, “Well, let’s give it a go.” It was at a really odd time in my life. I just quit a job in the tech industry and was trying to figure out my next steps. So it was a bit of kismet and also a bit of luck because he had a really great album that he had finished and was ready to go.
Miller: I’d love to hear one of your songs. You mentioned your album from 2024 is called “Tin Corazón.” The band is Delgado Y Los Conejos De Amor. So, Delgado and the Rabbits of Love?
Delgado: That’s correct, yes.
Miller: Who are the Rabbits of Love?
Delgado: On the recording, the Rabbits of Love is essentially myself and my producer. Live, I generally will have Matthew Peluso on pedal steel. Yoshi plays drums for me quite a bit as well. I have a bass player named Hunter and also a guitarist, Cameron Morgan, who’s an amazing guitarist as well.
Miller: All right, but this is the album version which is where the Rabbits are you and your producer. This is the title track. This is “Tin Corazón.”
[“Tin Corazón” by Delgado Y Los Conejos De Amor playing]
Miller: This is “Tin Corazón” by Delgado Y Los Conejos De Amor. Shorty Delgado is the Delgado of that.
How do you describe the music that you made?
Delgado: One of the reasons why I started Electric Chololand for my own release was that I was coming out of a 10-year retirement from music. I had hung up the guitar. And when I started writing again, I was suddenly in the position where I completely had creative control for the first time in my life. So if I have to describe my music, loosely, we call it Chicano rock. But my producer calls it dark desert swoon because it kind of has that underlying desert-y element to it as I was kind of getting back to my roots a bit, back to my New Mexico roots.
Miller: What does it mean to you to call it Chicano rock?
Delgado: That’s a good question. That’s a very good question. The term Chicano started really as a derogatory term that the Mexican nationals were calling the Mexican Americans. And there’s always been this odd, almost caste system between the two groups. For me, it harkens back to a bit of history, but it also is something that we can evolve past that point. One of the things I would like Electric Chololand to be a part of is kind of deconstructing that barrier between the two groups of people and to start embracing the cultures that we all share as a whole.
Miller: Do you still feel that barrier to some extent?
Delgado: Sure, yeah. Up to about the last couple of years, I think that I felt it a little bit more heavily. And I think that the reason that that shifted is that a lot of the Gen Z and millennials have now gone to college and have taken classes from Gen Xers, and they’re coming out and they’re saying, you don’t have to speak Spanish to be Chicano, to be Mexican, to be anything. It’s a colonized language. It’s not your indigenous language. And so suddenly it kind of leveled the playing field there for everyone.
Miller: So before that, what had it meant to you that … Do you not speak much Spanish?
Delgado: Yeah, that was a big point. If I would speak my terribly broken Spanish to someone who spoke Spanish, well, it was an immediate shutdown, like you’re not authentic, you’re really not. You’re a pocho, you’re someone who’s kind of abandoned his roots a bit. And kind of having that democratization across the board now enables us to take the Selena route and OK, I can sing in Spanish. It might be a little bit broken, but it’s still part of my heritage. It’s still part of who I am.
Miller: Joshua, how do you decide what language to sing in? Most of your songs, I think, are in English, but you sing in Spanish as well.
Josué: Yeah, I think about probably 40% of the songs are in Spanish. I don’t really choose. I always feel like the song chooses me. So yeah, some songs I think are just better told in Spanish and some are better told in English, and I do my best to listen to the song for what it wants to be.
Miller: Shorty mentioned Selena. Can we hear the song “Oh, Selena” from your new album, the album that just came out?
Josué: This is “Oh, Selena.”
[“Oh Selena” by Joshua Josué playing]
Miller: That’s “Oh, Selena.” And [it’s] tight, something like two minutes and eight seconds. In the 1950s, you could do short songs, you could pack a lot in two minutes. That is from Joshua Josué’s new album. It’s called “Broadcast to the Surf Ballroom.” We heard Yoshi Sheetz on drums, Nick Skalberg on bass, Marilyn Darrel on accordion, Ben Rice on guitar.
Josué, what is the Surf Ballroom?
Josué: Surf Ballroom is the final venue that Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper played. They played there on February 2, 1959. Left that night, and their plane crashed and they died. So I recorded this album kind of as a letter or a broadcast to the Surf Ballroom, to that time and that place. That song is an original, but many of the songs on the album are incomplete songs by Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens that I finished writing and recorded for that record.
Miller: What was it like for you to flesh out, to finish these songs by your heroes?
Josué: Intimidating and actually very exhilarating. To be able to take a part of, for example, a song that Ritchie Valens had started, and I’d been listening to that demo since I was a child, then to be able to sit down and complete it was very exciting. I hope Ritchie would be proud or happy with what I did with his song, since he didn’t have time to complete it. And I don’t know if he would or not, but I did have the opportunity to share it with some of his family a couple of weekends ago, and I got a thumbs up on it. So that made me feel very good.
Miller: Shorty, I want to go back to what you said before, near the beginning. Even though it’s a hard time technologically or maybe in terms of the marketplace to open or start a label, it’s an important time to do this. What did you mean?
Delgado: I think there’s a lot of levels to that. I’m not much of an optimist when it comes to AI, particularly as it applies to the music industry. So for me, to be an artist, to be creative and to foster that is a big part of that. Also, with everything that’s going on in the news right now, I think it’s really important to be able to elevate the visibility of Chicano artists in general to the public eye. So it’s a bit of a responsibility to do that as a label owner and as an artist.
Miller: Shorty and Joshua, thanks very much.
Delgado: Thank you so much.
Josué: Thank you so much.
Miller: Shorty Delgado is a founder of Electric Chololand Records. Joshua Josué’s new album, which just came out, is called “Broadcast to the Surf Ballroom.” We heard along with him Ben Rice on guitar, Nick Skalberg on bass, Yoshi Sheetz on drums and Marilyn Darrel on accordion.
We’re going to go out with another one of Shorty’s songs. This is from his album “Tin Corazón.” This is “Night Owl.”
[“Night Owl” by Delgado Y Los Conejos De Amor playing]
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