A Laboratorio of love: Carrie Rodriguez relaunches Latin-themed concert series in Austin

Carrie Rodriguez is getting the band back together, and she couldn’t be happier.

Five years ago, Rodriguez launched a new occasional concert series called Laboratorio, assembling an all-star band of local musicians to explore new avenues in Latin music through collaborations with fellow Austin artists. She’d just wrapped up the January 2020 show and was preparing for a spring follow-up when the coronavirus pandemic put everything on hold.

“I’ve missed that live-show energy so much,” Rodriguez says. She recently revisited a recording of a 2019 Laboratorio show, in which Tejano legend Ruben Ramos was performing a song called “El Rey” by Mexico mariachi and ranchera legend Vicente Fernandez, who died in December 2021.

“It's this amazing mariachi, macho, beautiful Mexican song, and people were screaming in the audience,” she recalls. “You could just feel the electricity from hearing that recording. So I'm really looking forward to that again.”

After a monthlong postponement to avoid the worst of the pandemic's omicron wave, Laboratorio returns with a Sunday show at Stateside at the Paramount (7 p.m., $49.50). It's a new venue for the series after 16 concerts at the Cactus Cafe from mid-2017 to early 2020.

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From 2017:Carrie Rodriguez launches new concert series at Cactus Cafe

Rodriguez's core band for the series is bassist Roscoe Beck, keyboardist Michael Ramos, drummer Alex Marrero and alternating guitarists David Pulkingham and David Jimenez. “I think of it as a collective,” she says, noting that Grupo Fantasma/Brownout linchpin Greg Gonzalez has filled in for Beck on occasion.

“I’m sure there will be more players introduced in terms of the core band," she says. "It's just a great way to learn. The beautiful thing about music is that you can learn until you're in the grave.”

Sunday’s show will feature Austin-via-Italy ace Stefano Intelisano subbing for Ramos, plus three special guests who’d all appeared in previous shows of the series: Ruben Ramos, Suzanna Choffel and Jaime Ospina (of local band Superfónicos). “We wanted to make this first show back a review,” she explains, noting that future Laboratorio shows will return to having a single musical guest (plus possibly a non-musical artist, such as a poet or author).

As much as Rodriguez is looking forward to Laboratorio’s return, she’s hardly been idle during the pandemic. Fans who subscribe to her mailing list or follow her on social media likely will be familiar with two music video projects that helped keep her busy. “A Song for You” featured Rodriguez and husband Luke Jacobs (with occasional cameos by their young son, Cruz) issuing a song from home every week or two via YouTube, often covers of a favorite artist.

That continued for almost a year until they shifted gears in spring 2021 for a Texas Monthly-sponsored series called “From Texas With Love,” which involved local collaborators such as Ruthie Foster, David Ramirez and Jimmie Dale Gilmore performing with Rodriguez in bucolic outdoor locations around Central Texas. Rodriguez says more episodes are in the works for 2022.

More:Carrie Rodriguez teams with fellow musicians in the great outdoors for new video series

A more intensive project, one that began before the pandemic, has been her involvement in “¡Americano! The Musical,” a theatrical collaboration with Arizona’s Orkesta Mendoza, for which Rodriguez is the composer and lyricist. The production had a strong debut in Phoenix in February 2020, and a soundtrack album came out later that year. Now an off-Broadway run is in the works, with Rodriguez set to spend much of March and April in New York working with the onstage cast.

Now in her early 40s, Rodriguez has been performing in Austin since accompanying her father, the late singer-songwriter David Rodriguez, on violin as a teenager. Her career blossomed during a decade-long partnership with songwriting great Chip Taylor (“Angel of the Morning,” “Wild Thing”), during which she also launched a solo career that has produced a half-dozen albums.

Becoming parents a few years ago, combined with the pandemic’s limitations, led Rodriguez and Jacobs to explore different models for making a living as musical artists. For the most part, it’s working.

“We're not rolling in it, but we still are able to buy groceries and have good food, and we have a house in Austin, which is a miracle,” she says. “Having a husband who has such a diverse set of skills has been a huge asset to our family; not only is he a wonderful musician, he's also a great videographer and editor. We’ve definitely leaned on those things to help us get through the last few years.

"As I'm getting older, I'm realizing there are other places to look for funding for the arts. You just have to kind of get in there and do some serious research and fill out the forms and apply for grants. That's a new thing to me, and it takes a lot of work. But when you get one, then you get to keep making art.”

We spoke with Rodriguez earlier this month about all of these things and more. Here are some highlights from our conversation.

American-Statesman: What led you to create the Laboratorio series back in 2017?

Carrie Rodriguez: I wanted to get to know the Austin music community in a better way. I wanted to create something that would bring the community together, I wanted to explore Latin music and all of its forms, I wanted to learn, and I wanted to meet other Latinx musicians that I hadn’t met yet and get to know their style of music.

When Cruz was a baby, Luke and I continued to tour quite a bit. I won't say that was easy, but it was sort of doable when he couldn't move around too much. But as he started becoming mobile, it became tougher to be on the road for long periods of time.

So that's when I started looking to Austin and thinking, “What can I build at home that will fulfill me musically, that will help me grow, and that will connect me to the Austin music community?” Because up until that point, I was on the road most of the time I lived here, and I really didn't know that many local musicians. It was just a way to connect, and to do something from home.

Laboratorio was monthly at first but soon shifted to every two or three months. What do you envision for the relaunch of the series?

With the core band, everybody has their own busy touring and recording schedules, and it was often hard to get everyone in town at the same time. Ideally, we would like to have one show per season — winter, spring, summer, fall. So we’re currently booking one for the end of May. And we'll see if we do summer, but definitely we'll do one in the fall.

Photos:Patty Griffin and Carrie Rodriguez at Long Center Lawn in March 2021

Another big change is that we have the support now of a nonprofit called Austin Artists Project. Their mission is to support diversity and inclusion in the arts and music. Basically, we are now under their wing, and they are helping finance the project; they're out actively looking for grants to help us. We've got ideas about bringing this into schools — having an educational arm as part of the Laboratorio. That's new and very exciting.

You did five episodes of “From Texas With Love” last spring. What’s in the works for this year?

I’m going to try to fit in at least four video shoots in March, once it gets warm and green. It's a challenge to find locations that are out in the middle of nowhere, but when it works out, it’s just magical — like the one we did with Ruthie Foster on a ranch outside of Round Top. We were playing in the middle of a vast field with wildflowers.

I think there's something so special about playing music outside. I did that a lot growing up; you’d go to a party and be out around a campfire and playing. But now as adults and as professional musicians, I feel like we don't do that enough — playing music outside just for the joy of playing music. So yeah, I love making those. And Luke is just such an artist in putting all of that together, editing and shooting all of it.

Can you tell me more about “¡Americano: The Musical!”?

That's been a big part of my life the last few years. I wrote probably 30-plus songs for it, and we've whittled it down to about 20. It's a true story about a young man who grew up in Phoenix; his parents brought him from Mexico when he was 2 years old and did not tell him that he wasn't born in the U.S. So he grew up assuming he was a U.S. citizen. His dream was to become a Marine.

When he was 18, he went to a recruiter and was shocked to find out that he wasn't a citizen. Once the recruiter started asking questions about his Social Security card, it kind of dawned on him — “Well, why did my dad always say my (Social Security number) was in process? What does that mean?” He confronts his parents, and he is devastated to find out he's not a citizen.

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So we made a musical out of his story, and what happened to him after he found that out. It debuted in Phoenix in February of 2020. We had a three-week run, and the last 10 shows were sold out. We were able to get the entire run in before COVID hit, so that was very lucky.

I kind of thought maybe that would be the end of it, just because of the pandemic; it was hard to keep things alive. But we've managed to get this thing to New York City, which is crazy. We had a workshop in November that was my first real trip out of Austin (during the pandemic); I had to fly back and forth a few times for that. And now we're starting rehearsals March 1. ... 

It’s been an incredible experience. I have learned so much. It's been the hardest thing I have done so far in my musical career. Just having to write songs about such specific material has really stretched me and challenged me.

Between the theater project, and the video series, and the Laboratorio shows, it seems like you’ve found a different way to exist as an artist beyond the old album-and-tour model.

It really is. I was 21 when I met Chip Taylor, and we started touring all the time in Europe and here — so I spent almost 20 years of my life being on the road and doing that cycle over and over again. I have incredible memories from it, and I love talking about it. Just the other day, my son was asking me, “Well, have you been to Norway? Have you been to Spain?” And naming all these countries, I'm like, yeah, and I'll tell him something about each one.

But as someone who's now in a different part of my life with a kid, it’s very important to me to find ways to do music that allow me to be home with my son more and allow me to grow in different ways. Doing the “From Texas With Love” project is so cool, because I'm collaborating with just one other musician. We have to make the song sound good with the two of us, and that's a wonderful challenge.

It's great for me, as a violinist and as a singer, to get inside of someone else's music and learn from them, and grow from that. It’s the same with Laboratorio. All of these things are things that I can still get so much out of as an artist and have helped me become a better artist, and I don't have to be away from my family.