In conversation with Angelica Garcia, the singer songwriter taking LA by storm

Soulful and free-spirited singer songwriter Angelica Garcia is an artist to watch. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, the singer grew up immersed in the cultural melting pot, reveling in the quirky beauty of Hollyweird. However, after graduating from Los Angeles County High School For The Arts, she relocated to the Eastern Shore of Virginia with her family.

Angelica embraced the culture shock of moving across the country by letting her environment influence her songwriting. The result was her debut album Medicine For Birds off Warner Brothers Records. Angelica Garcia is now on tour promoting her album and has a show in Los Angeles at The Troubadour on Thursday, January 26th. I was able to interview the artist to discuss Los Angeles, her debut album, and what she hopes will come in the future.

What is your favorite thing about both places? Both Los Angeles and the Eastern Shore?

This kind of became very clear to me when I moved to Virginia, but my favorite thing about L.A., no joke, is the tacos. Like it’s so good and I think that I just spent my whole life with all this incredible Mexican food, and I’m Latina too, so it’s important to me and my family. And then to go to Virginia, I ordered an enchilada and they made it with American cheese and I was like, wow.

I’m Latina too, Mexican actually, so I feel that.

Oh that’s great yeah, I’m Mexican and El Salvadorian and so when you go a long time without having a good taco, it’s kind of like, dang this is vital. I need my life source. But, I mean that’s kind of a silly thing, but of course I loved going to see all the concerts when I was a teenager in L.A. and taking the gold line and the red line and going all over the city.

I love Hollyweird, I think that was my favorite part of town, Hollywood and Universal City. Just because it was so different and I love that you never know what you’re going to see in Hollywood. Everyone thinks that Hollywood must be so glamorous and nice, but when you go it’s kind of weird and smelly, but awesome. I don’t know, I always loved it and I would go hang out there after school and it was a lot of fun.

I love that, but as far as moving to Virginia, one of my favorite things was that the nature is beautiful. The trees were nice and big and tall. The skies are blue. There are forests that go on for a long time. Where I live, I don’t live to far from the water. On the Eastern Shore I was on a peninsula. The Chesapeake Bay was on one side and the Atlantic ocean was on the other side and it was totally gorgeous. It really connects you back to the Earth, and I don’t know, it makes you think about how much you consume or what you do versus what you actually need in your life. For that I was kind of grateful because it made me more reflective and I exercised through that I guess by writing my songs. So, I’m grateful to that time.

You have a show on January 26th here in L.A. at The Troubadour, how do you feel playing a show in L.A.? Seems like that is quite an accomplishment.

I’m so stoked. Actually, it’s really funny, I think I played The Troubadour one other time and that was when I was in high school, I was like 17 years old, and the funny thing is that I’m looking back in my brain trying to think about the date and I’m pretty sure it was either on January 26th or January 27th of 2011. It’s kind of hilarious that’s it’s coming full circle.

Definitely. So you’re debut album is called Medicine For Birds. I listened to it and I personally loved it and thought it was very unique. How would you describe your sound?

I don’t know. I guess like for any musician or artist it can be hard to step out of your body and think, “What is my sound?” The point of reference that I have is using things that I like. I know that at the time that I wrote the album I was really a fan of old country songwriters and lyricists. I’m also a really big White Stripes fan, so I’m a total Jack White head. So I don’t know, I guess that it would be a craft between like the rock world and the songwriter world. But, I like to leave things open for interpretations and kind of have people take away from it whatever they take away.

Are you listening to anything cool right now? What’s your current favorite?

Oh yeah, I listen to all kinds of stuff, but right now I’ve been listening to a lot of Hiatus Kaiyote. It’s super different for a record. We were also listening to LCD Soundsystem earlier. I’m a big Radiohead fan, so when that new record came out that was sick. Also one of my really good friends got me into this Sly and The Family Stone album, so that was pretty cool too. It’s always changing and I don’t know I’m definitely the kind of person where I hear something that I like and that becomes what I listen to for the next month or so.

Yeah, I’m the same way. But in terms of your music, what is your favorite song on the album?

That’s kind of a hard one, because I feel like that’s kind of like “pick your favorite child.” But at the same time, I guess the way I kind of like to think of it is that some of them are really close to what I think it would sound like if you cracked open my head and looked at my brain. I kind of felt like that with Little Bird, the first track.

Mainly because when we went in to record it, the only other version that I had recorded of that song was only acoustic guitar with me singing, and if you’ve heard it you know that it’s really different from that. And the cool thing was that it was one of the songs where I locked myself into the room and Charlie hit the record button and was like, “Ok, go.” And that’s why the album starts off with me saying, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Because I really didn’t know what I was doing. I was just kind of like, “Alright, I guess we’re here we better experiment.” That’s why you got all those xylophones and crazy noises and all that stuff. We were up pretty late at night doing that. So I guess someone could say that would be one of the closest to my heart.

I really liked The Devil Can Get In, because it had a gothic blues vibe. And Red Moon Rising was a good one too. 

Oh yeah, well you’re a Latina from L.A. so you know the whole story behind that one. But yeah I realized while in the studio I was doing all these songs I wrote when I was in Virginia, and I was like, “Oh hey, I got to include a song about L.A. too.” Because, even though I love Virginia and it has been very inspiring to move here, I can’t forget where I came from.

I also thought that the inclusion of Tangerine, as almost a spoken word poem, was an interesting creative choice. Because songwriting in itself is poetry, don’t you think?

Yes, it totally is. It is in the sense that you have a structure you have to work with and, as with poetry and the literature, even though there are rules, there aren’t totally rules. It’s at the artist’s discretion, so you can sit there and bend them as much as you like as part of the project. But, with songwriting, a lot of the time you have to fit a whole statement or message in approximately three minutes on average. And you have to think, do I want things to rhyme? And if I do want things to rhyme, what kind of rhyme scheme do I want? And do I want to make them slant rhymes or actual, literal rhymes? Or maybe do I want nothing to rhyme ever? You’re right in the sense that it’s very similar.

And actually Tangerine is a poem that I wrote in my creative writing class when I was in college. And the structure of the poem is a pantoum. So the thing about the pantoums, or at least the ones we were studying, is that it’s a very specific kind of poem where each of the subsequent stanzas takes a line from the previous stanza, until finally you repeat a line from each stanza in the very last stanza. So, it sounds kind of complicated, but all that repetition kind of makes it sound like a chant. That was a lot of fun to write and to study, and I liked it so much that I was like, “What the heck, might as well just put it on my album, and put it in front of this song, because it’s kind of spooky.”

I thought it was a beautiful, creative choice for the album. So with this debut album out, what are you most excited about in terms of the future of your career? Are you excited to do more touring? Meet more people who enjoy your music?

I mean those are definitely a part of it. I guess I just really love making stuff. It’s just either like getting my hands on new equipment, or like meeting new people, or meeting other artists who want to make stuff. Or even getting involved in more projects. Like making music for a movie or music for a cartoon show. I would love that. I love the challenge of making new things and doing things I’ve never done before. And I know that comes from touring and meeting new people all around the country, and the world too. But, I don’t know, the creative process itself. Which is kind of funny because it’s something that’s always been with me since the beginning, like as it is with all artists. But, it’s always ultimately the thing that I look forward to the most.