“If you build a wall, we’re going to tear it down, brick by brick.” Those are lyrics from the title track from The Soft White Sixties new single, “Brick by Brick.”
Penned by frontman Octavio Genera, the song was recorded on the night President Donald Trump was elected. It also was the anniversary of the day Genera’s grandparents and mother immigrated from Guadalajara, Mexico, to Stockton, California.
“It was hard not to take some offense to someone claiming that a wall — and the people on the other side of that wall — were the cause of so many problems,” Genera said. “The song is my version of my grandparents coming here to better themselves and their children, and I’m thankful they did. I am here, and I am who I am because of it.”
Recorded at New Monkey Studio in Van Nuys, California, an upcoming album will be released in both English and Spanish (“Piedra a Piedra.”) It will be the band’s second full-length album. It also has released a pair of EPs. The single is as been released on 7-inch vinyl as well as digitally. The album come out in early 2018.
The Soft White Sixties continue to shine a light on Reno. The band makes its debut at The Saint on Saturday, Oct. 28. It also has appeared at the Cargo Concert Hall, St. James Infirmary and Shea’s. The Reno stop is the third on a 10-show run from Phoenix to Salt Lake City.
The band recently moved from the Bay Area to Los Angeles and has added a fifth member, Rob Fidel, a guitar and keyboard player who was with the Tumbleweed Wanderers. He joined Genera, Aaron Eisenberg, Joey Bustos and Ryan Noble, who have been together five years.
Coincidentally, the band is now located in the area that is home for who Genera calls his influences: The compelling, authentic soundtracks that accompany movies produced by Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese and the Coen Brothers.
The Soft White Sixties took a movie soundtrack mind-set into the studio for the “Brick by Brick” sessions. It previously would work out and perform the songs before recording them.
“We took a different approach,” Genera said. “We wrote the entire album in the studio together with Elijah Thomson.”
Thompson plays bass with Father John Misty and has produced records for Delta Spirit and Everest.
“He would keep us moving in the studio,” Genera said. “Writing everything together in a room, you can get hung up. It was nice because he made us push through. It was one moment of where we were at that time, (as opposed to) going home and listening to something 30 times in a row and finding everything wrong with it, which we’d done in the past. If you do that too much you can kind of suck the life out of something. You can fine tune it so much that all the character in the blemishes are gone.”
Dan Luke and the Raid will open the show at The Saint. The bandleader is Daniel Shultz, the younger brother of Cage the Elephant’s Brad and Matt Shultz.
Related story: Dan Luke and the Raid open for The Soft White Sixties.
- The Soft White Sixties
Opener: Dan Luke and the Raid
When: 8 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 28
Where: The Saint, midtown Reno
Tickets: $10 in advance or $12 at the door
