Hi, everyone! Last week, I got to sit down with Nacho Cano, the brainchild behind the San Diego solo project, Harmless. Formerly known as Twin Cabins, Cano had his big break wit his debut I'm Sure back in 2012. It's really some amazing stuff if you've not heard it. Cano, now 27, has reinvented himself with a newer sound under the new moniker, Harmless, but he was involved in near-fatal car accident just three short years ago. When Nacho was riding his bike to to work one day, he was struck by a drunk driver at nearly fifty miles per hour, sending him flying half a block down the street. While he has since recovered from broken ribs, failing legs and facial reconstruction, his journey continues to be long and painful. I loved his music after discovering it on Spotify, and I was incredibly interested to learn more about his story.
bazzreviews: Which artists or albums inspired you to start a music career?
Nacho Cano: The short answer would be whatever music I was listening to when I first started out. That was artists like Wild Nothing, the Cure, a lot of bands with cool-sounding guitars. I thought to myself, I’m super obsessed with this music, so why can’t I make it? When I first started making music, I was in my dorm room recording. This was towards the end of the blogosphere era, miles before Spotify and TikTok. I put my first few songs out on Bandcamp and just hoped for the best. To this day, I’m still surprised that this music has survived for so long. I think my influences now are guys like Bobby Caldwell, Mark Hollis from Talk Talk, and Dan Bejar, who is in Destroyer. He’s dropping a new album on January 31, and I’m dropping my EP on that day, too… totally not a coincidence or anything.
br: If you weren’t doing music right now, what do you think would be doing?
N.C.: Before music, I actually went to CalArts and majored in film. I thought it would be really cool to do that, but I learned very quickly that the film industry does not pay very well. I stuck with music, and the rest is history. It’s been tough to find a balance between living and working, but I’ve been getting better at it as time goes on. For CalArts, I ended up doing some work in animation and sound design, plus I did some teaching there on the side. It’s wild, because one of my former students is on the shortlist for the Academy Awards and could get nominated this year.
br: What is the significance behind your stage name, Harmless, and why did you choose to leave the moniker Twin Cabins?
N.C.: See, I get DMs with this question a lot, and I give the exact same answer. It was really because I didn’t want people to keep expecting that I was going to keep playing an electric guitar in some specific way for my entire career. It still makes me feel upset, because to some extent, fans are sort of obligating me to make new stuff that sounded like the songs I was releasing in the beginning. A band doesn’t owe their audience anything, and that’s one of the biggest things I came to learn with the change. I wanted to work with sax, synths and other s--t like that, so I did it to protect myself from any possible scrutiny. It kind of failed in a sense, because people are still asking me if I’m going by one name or another or if I’m going to put guitars on a record.
br: Tell me a little bit about your side collaboration you have with Drew Straus, called Elio?
N.C.: It started before I got hit by a car. It was a way for both of us to separate ourselves from our work and make more pop music. It’s been successful so far, I’d say. We still work on it when we have time, but I’m the more difficult collaborator to work with. Day-to-day, I’m not sure I’m going to feel, because I’m disabled, but it’s something I really enjoy doing. I try not to let it eat at me, and Drew does the same.
br: You just made a reference to the very serious accident you were involved in a few years ago that left a lot of damage, did that change your songwriting or lyrical themes?
N.C.: I mean, it certainly has alleviated the stress of making music just to make music. When you almost die, especially in such a violent manner, it does really allow you to have very positive and prim attitudes about life. The most obvious change for me was realizing, “we’re here, but then we can die suddenly”. The way that I’ve approached music now is just treating it as a thing that I do. It’s not as goal-oriented as it used to be. If you’d asked me this question two or three years ago, I could give you a very clear answer. I guess you could say I’m speaking from a position of privilege, because I’ve had my “break”, so to speak, but I don’t really make plans for making music like I used to. I’ve stopped worrying about it altogether. I see my friends constantly being swallowed by the politics in music and feeling the urge to constantly release music, and I just tell them to not let it get to their heads. That’s why I feel like all of the stuff I made when I was eighteen and nineteen was so successful-- I wasn’t really focusing on the strategic elements of music publicity, so to speak. It was just, “I like it, so I’m going to put it out.”
br: I’ve heard quite a bit about your family and art, what can you tell me about your mother’s art practices? How has that impacted you and your choices to use your own drawings as cover art?
N.C.: It was both my mom and girlfriend encouraging me to use them. I started them six months after the accident simply as therapy, recommended by my doctor. I used photos taken of me in the hospital by my friends and family and added a bit of a Pointillistic twist to them. Both my mom and I made these pictures when I was on my way to doctor’s appointments or during them, and she chose to draw with me because she was as big of a part of the incident as I was. We have always collaborated, and we’re always there to help and critique each other. She was super supportive of me drawing, and when she had a solo show in San Diego, she asked me if I wanted to put two of my drawings in it. I happily obliged, and they’re both in really nice frames! I don’t have them in my house, and I’m not sure what I want to do with them now. I just want to focus on the music.
br: I also hear you’re a big dog lover, too- tell me the story of how you found your dog, Rusty!
N.C.: I love Rusty! I got him after my accident, too. I asked my mom if I could get a service dog to help me walk because I still have a hard time walking. We looked it up, and training them and s--t is super f----n’ expensive, man. And they’re not even covered by most insurances either. We thought instead, let’s get a rescue dog, and we found this organization that brings in those types of dogs from Baja California. We met Rusty’s dog family, and he was so difficult at first. he wouldn’t budge, and wouldn’t even let me touch him. The moment I got home, I looked at my mom and said, “Holy s--t, I think this was a huge mistake”. We got better as we got to know each other more, and now we’re best friends. I saw a lot of myself in him at the time, and still do to this day. He loves me, but loves my girlfriend just a little bit more, I think. It’s so funny, because he and my girlfriend’s dog are in love, too. We joke that if we break up, we have to give both of the dogs visitation rights.
br: Can you describe your process for how you make a song?
N.C.: It usually starts with me messing around with different chord progressions. Sometimes, I’ll even record an entire improvisation to a tempo and just start to chop it over a beat. I will send it to my friend Daniel in Mexico, and he’ll send me some saxophone parts back. My process is a lot like Talk Talk’s, which was finding compositions through improv and having no plan.
br: What’s more important to you when you’re making a song- the lyricism, or the production value and instrumentation?
N.C.: Production always comes first. I rarely write lyrics before a full song is finished. I will compose what I think is a verse, bridge, or chorus, without any words to fill that space. I’m sure there are eight to ten songs that are fully fleshed out, but they have zero lyrics. I’ll just walk around with my headphones for a few days and just wait for the lyrics to come. Hell, sometimes it’ll even be longer. Some of my songs were completed from start to finish over the course of four years. You can change songs, but not lyrics, you know? It’s more of a personal things I guess, I want my lyrics to be timely. I change my mind a lot. Say I want to write about someone I love, but then they go away. I’ll be finishing up the lyrics for that song, and it just seems weird to be writing and singing about. If you look at some of my bigger songs, like “Swing Lynn”, they started out as one set of lyrics but changed as time went on.
br: You’re originally from Mexico and have songs sung in both English and Spanish, which I think is very commendable. Why do you feel it is important to do that?
N.C.: Thank you! I feel like artists are more afraid of making music in their native tongue because they’re concerned it won’t make them much money or get written about. That may have been true when I started making music ten years ago, but I think that has changed. I’m grateful for that. People kind of overlook the fact that I’m Mexican when I talk about my music, and I think that gets attributed from the fact that I overlook it, too. I don’t want to be afraid of being Mexican in American society. I’m an immigrant, and I became a citizen very recently. After living here and reading various essays about Mexican heritage, it just comes to show Americans are a culture of assimilation, and they only accept you once you’ve ridden yourself of your past identity. I think that’s wrong. Because of that, I felt that I needed to embrace that identity more than anything. The way I see it, writing music in Spanish is also kind of an invitation for people who have liked me for x, y or z reason to like me for this reason, too. I want you to know about who I really am and what I have come from.
br: I know you mentioned earlier that you have an EP coming out around the end of January, can you tell me a little bit about what it’s going to have in store?
N.C.: It’s definitely not in the same vein of things I’ve made in the past, it’s more of the same that I’ve been putting out recently. There’s gonna be a lot of sax, samples, and all that good stuff. I made this record while I had been recovering from the accident, and it kind of grew from there. Making these songs was a form of therapy, so there really was no plan from the start. What I mean by this is, it’s really tough to say what it’s going to have in store. I put out one of the tracks last November, and apparently a lot of people were inspired by it. Everyone told me to do something with this new song, so I took heed to that calling. Now we’re here. I really want to make a big part of this EP about being loved. I love my girlfriend so, so much, and I’m not in it for any financial gains. I just want to make songs that show how much I care about her.
What music goals do you have for the future?
N.C.: I don’t know, really. Like I said earlier, it’s tough to really have expectations after you almost die. I’ve been having more life goals than music goals. Since I’ve had my break, my only goal in making music is to not consider myself more than a person. When people reach out to me on Instagram or Facebook, I want to engage with them because my art is larger than I am. The way society treats music and musicians is something I don’t agree with. I’ve never thought of myself as famous, and I’m still surprised when people reach out to me and say that my music has inspired them. I just think to myself, “Why wouldn’t reply?” I want to welcome interaction with other people, because it’s the most gratifying component of all art.
LIGHTNING ROUND:
Name one album you think is overrated and underrated
Overrated- Yeezus by Kanye West
Underrated= Nothing 2 Loose by DJ Healer
What was the first album you ever bought? Toxicity by System of a Down
If you could have any actor play you in a biopic, who would it be? Mark Ruffalo
If you could put together a band with any four musicians, living or dead, who would it be? Mark Hollis, Questlove, Ryuchi Sakamoto, and Jonny Greenwood.
I want to thank Nacho for sitting down and talking with me, I had a great time with him! He's a super nice guy and makes some amazing music! I hope you guys are going to rep him! Thanks again for checking this piece out, and more amazing BR content is coming real soon!
To hear Nacho's music, head over to https://twincabins.bandcamp.com/
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