Freddy Trujillo has a long history in Portland. Originally from California, he moved to Portland in 1993 and has made a name for himself as a bassist. He has performed with Richmond Fontaine and The Delines, but his latest work is a solo project.
“Ave Trujillo,” his fifth solo album, will be released Friday. It is shaped and inspired by his love of avian creatures and birding, which he uses to tell stories of grief, displacement and environmental change.
Trujillo joins us to share more on his latest album and gives an in-studio performance.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Freddy Trujillo has been a part of the Portland music scene since the mid-1990s. He’s played in bands like The Delines and Richmond Fontaine, in addition to his own solo career, which blends bluegrass, Americana, classic rock, traditional Mexican influences, many more musical styles. His fifth album, “Ave Trujillo,” comes out on Friday. He’s having a record release party with The Delines this Sunday at Mississippi Studios, and he joins us now, guitar in hand. It is great to have you on the show.
Freddy Trujillo: Thank you for having me.
Miller: Can we start right in with the song? What do you have for us?
Trujillo: Sure, I think I listed “Crow” first. That’s my latest single that’s been out for three weeks, inspired by the many crows we see flying around Portland right now, and everybody’s love of the corvid. So here we go.
[“Crow” by Freddy Trujillo playing, performed live in studio]
Miller: That is “Crow,” one of the first singles from my guest Freddie Trujillo’s new album. It comes out on Friday, it’s called “Ave Trujillo.” Ave means bird in Spanish. Each of the tracks takes its title from a different bird. When did you first become interested in birds?
Trujillo: Pretty little, I was a little kid. It started with dinosaurs, and then birds of prey always really fascinated me and they’re very prehistoric. And apparently, they have the same skeleton as a T. rex. They have these little, teeny bones under there, like little hands but extended in their wings. But anyway, I just saw similarly in their fierceness, and they’re predators. It just always fascinated me.
And then I kept pigeons as a kid. I was up to like 100 of them at one point. This old couple that lived down the street from me and this other guy, Don Camp, they both belonged to a pigeon racing club. And they gave me my first pair.
Miller: Is that the thing where you have a box somewhere like outside or on a roof, and then they would fly to other people’s boxes and then come back? How does that work?
Trujillo: No, you have these little doors, they call them bobs. The birds can come in through the bobs. You keep a bird like two weeks, and they learn, you feed them, they’ll stay there. But the racing thing, you bring all your birds to a truck, and then they take them to some location. Say the race starts in San Francisco, and your cage is in the LA area or something. And then they have a band on it. It’s a retiree thing. You have to be around when that bird lands, you got to clock it in.
Miller: It’s a retiree thing, but you were doing this when you were like 12 or something?
Trujillo: I wasn’t part of the racing club.
Miller: But you were fascinated by it.
Trujillo: And I kept them and raised them. They multiplied pretty fast. And then I got into fancy birds too. You’d be surprised how many different breeds of pigeons there are. There was like fan tails. I had fan tails and trumpeters. My neighbor and I were part of 4-H.
Miller: So that was when you were a kid. My understanding is now as an adult, and for years, you’ve been a different kind of bird lover, a classic birder. Including like when you go on tour, will you take time off to go add birds to your list?
Trujillo: I’m up to like 40 or something in Australia, and then maybe up to 80 something in Europe. The Delines gets to travel over there, so it’s nice to add world birds. Added 57 to my list. I went to go study Spanish for a month in Guatemala, and on my 57th birthday, clocked 57 new species.
Miller: What interests you now about birds? Why are you a birder now?
Trujillo: I don’t know, I just think they’re fascinating. I see them as also, like the classic canary in a coal mine. When you pay attention to them, they kinda tell you what’s wrong with our environment, and where we’re heading.
But also, I have a bird show thing, a video thing. It’s kinda a pilot right now. It’s called “On The List.” And the whole thing I wanted to do with that is bring musicians out birding, because I wanted to make the correlation between how you survive in this business now, with technology always growing. Jenny Conlee from The Decemberists is one of my guests, and we had a conversation about when The Decemberists broke, and their album sales were off the chain. But because of the MP3, there’s so much file sharing that their sales will never be as big as Kiss, the Beatles or Elvis.
So I wanted to strike those conversations. And I see the similarities of birds being colorful characters, and they sing, we migrate to find food. The Delines has to go all the way to Europe because we don’t really have the same audience in America as we do over there.
Miller: But if you’re in Ireland or England, there’s serious fandom there?
Trujillo: Yeah, we’ve grown in London. We play the Barbican. We play the Union Chapel, which holds about 1,000 people. And it’s really an honor to have people like you anywhere you go.
Miller: Can you make bird sounds yourself?
Trujillo: Some. When I was a kid, I was a lot better at it, before puberty. My voice got a little deeper.
Miller: What can you do now?
Trujillo: I can still do crows.
Miller: Can we hear a crow?
Trujillo: [crow sounds]
Miller: [Laughter] I understand that your initial idea for this album is that it would be a children’s album. That didn’t happen. Why not?
Trujillo: Well, the first song was “Chickadee,” thought that’d be a cute little tune. The second song I had ready for it was called “Mourning Dove,” and that was a good friend of mine and singer of a band I was in, Caguama, that sadly died of a drug overdose. So I don’t know if I think that’s subject’s good for children.
Miller: The song’s gonna be what the song’s gonna be, and that defines what the album’s gonna turn into.
Trujillo: And then I co-wrote a tune with Willie Vlautin, who I’m a bandmate with and famous author. I gave him the idea of writing about a missing girl. I’ll play that song, “Canyon Wren.” So some of these subjects got dark.
Miller: Well, can we hear another song? I do wanna hear “Canyon Wren” later, but can we hear “Mockingbird?” And what should we know about this before we hear it, if anything?
Trujillo: When I lived in LA, I grew up down there, I used to see the mockingbird a lot more than I see them now. Just having that memory. And I mentioned malathion spray. There was times in the ‘80s when there was like the fruit fly and stuff. As musicians we’d always be charged up and coming home after gigs and be out late. But I have one particular memory with my dad sitting out late, and around 4 a.m. a mockingbird started singing. And then I started whistling things at it, and it copied me at one point. And my dad was blown away by it. So there’s sort of a memory of that in there.
And when you see habitat loss … In a lot of my songs, I mention a lot about, because I’m a Chicano, Californio, our family history predates belonging to the United States in the California area. That’s a point I always make, and I made it again in that one by making a stab at gentrification. You’ll hear the song.
Miller: This is Freddy Trujillo and the song “Mockingbird.”
Trujillo: Alright, here we go.
[“Mockingbird” by Freddy Trujillo playing, performed live in studio]
Miller: I mentioned that you have played in a bunch of bands over the years in Portland. What was it like to start your own solo career, to be in charge of the music, deciding what you’re going to play, where, how?
Trujillo: It was good. As a bass player, I was fine. I wish I would have started at it earlier, but I never had the ego for it. Like some people just are just born front person. But I was in a band with Luther Russell for a while. We were on this big record deal. I was in college, I left that. And he kind of walked me through my first record, and I realized maybe I can do this. And then it took me another 10 years to do another one, but now I’ve been more prolific. So it’s nice.
Post pandemic, something happened to me. I was playing in the basement, I realized what an addict I am with music and my need to sing it. And singing for people online, a lot of people told me I saved their lives, helped them through that. And I had people tuning in from England. I’m laid off right now from helping musicians for years through music distribution, the physical kind of thing’s dead. So this is what I’m doing now. It seems like the universe is telling me this is what you should be doing right now.
Miller: Do you feel more like a frontman now? You said some people aren’t necessarily born that way, with Mick Jagger swagger and desire like that. Do you feel like you have that now?
Trujillo: Yeah, I do feel like I have that confidence now.
Miller: And where do you think it came from?
Trujillo: Friends dying. I had a bad year in 2010 when I did my second record. Like Raul, the one I mentioned, died, and Barry Hampton. And I just feel like sometimes I have their power. They were natural-born frontmen, you know what I mean? It just keeps happening. Like I said, I think the universe is telling me to do this. And I have the confidence. And to tell you the truth, more than anything, it’s fun and I enjoy it, even if I’m playing and barely anyone’s paying attention at the beach. I’m just doing this now, all the time. So yeah, I do feel like a frontman.
Miller: Can we hear another song? This one is “Vermillion Flycatcher.” And when folks hear the words, they’ll understand this is about your father.
Trujillo: Yeah, and my first time seeing that bird, a lifer bird.
[“Vermillion Flycatcher” by Freddy Trujillo playing, performed live in studio]
Miller: You mentioned Luther Russell earlier and making music with him years ago. That was co-written right, with him? A lot of the songs on this new album you have co-credits, you wrote them with other people. What was it like to collaborate on songwriting?
Trujillo: It’s good. I was working at CD Baby, and they were giving me some tuition reimbursement. I took some publishing classes online at Berkeley, and that was suggested, co-writing with other people. And [the] more confident I get and less precious about my song, it’s awesome. But I really, really wanted this to happen. When I felt like it started to flow, it was time to do this one.
“Chickadee,” I wrote with this lady I met at Berkeley online, and she wrote these real folky kind of children’s songs. I wrote with her. I didn’t like everything she did, but she kind of put me in a new direction. And then I rock and rolled it out, by saying, like, “All the boys at the feeder says your life were done,” much like how John Lennon and Paul McCartney would work. People always say Paul McCartney, he’s kind of sappy. But I think that’s what made Paul and John so great.
Miller: He’s also a pop genius.
Trujillo: Yeah, they would balance each other out.
Miller: It’s interesting though, you had to have enough confidence in yourself before a collaboration like that would work?
Trujillo: Yeah, me and my friends always talk about it seems like the more green a musician can be in the studio or in writing with other people, they feel intimidated, and then their ego takes over and they self-sabotage. I did that same thing. I remember I was working with Mel Brown, the drummer, with Luther. Luther was gonna produce this record and we had John Fischbach, a friend of Luther’s who was a veteran engineer and worked with Stevie Wonder and stuff. And I remember I was like, “I need to fix that.” And he’s just like … It’s the first time I ever learned like sometimes it’s more about the big picture, what the group’s throwing down, not about your one little lick.
So it’s that kind of thing. So the confidence even in songwriting. It’s like, this guy’s changed this, but in the end, is it gonna be cool or not?
Miller: That’s the songwriting piece of this. Am I right that, at this point, you brought in a bunch of old bandmates to play on a lot of these tracks. What’s it like to be in the studio with musicians you’ve known for a long time and played with for a long time?
Trujillo: It’s great. I did a record with Luther for one of his next releases, and the drummer of Richmond Fontaine, Delines and Paul Brainard – everyone knows Paul in this town. But man, we cut that record, 12 songs in 10 hours.
Miller: Old-fashioned fast.
Trujillo: It was cool to do it like they used to do it.
Miller: Because you were just clicking and you could read each other?
Trujillo: Yeah, me and Sean played together forever. Me and Luther known each other since 1990. There’s like several songwriters I just know. They’re great songwriters, like Fernando Viciconte, Willie Vlautin, Luther Russell. These guys I’ve played on some of their tunes, and it’s like an old shoe or whatever. It fits. And it’s trust. It’s just great.
Miller: Which you need if you’re going to play together well?
Trujillo: In the studio, you just wanna do the best you can in there.
Miller: Freddy Trujillo, it was a pleasure having you here. Thanks so much.
Trujillo: Thank you.
Miller: Freddy Trujillo is a Portland-based musician. His fifth solo album “Ave Trujillo” is coming out on Friday. Again, there is gonna be a record release show this coming Sunday at Mississippi Studios. We’re gonna go out with the last track on the album. It is edited of bird songs. It’s called “Flap Party.”
[“Flap Party” by Freddy Trujillo playing]
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