Artists want to make art. Labels want records they can sell.
Rarely does this art/commerce balance feel more lopsided than when looking at the annual slate of Christmas albums. In 2019 we got Judas Priest singer Rob Halford’s second seasonal set, Chicago’s fourth Christmas album, Pentatonix’s first holiday greatest hits package (yes, the group already has a “best of” of just their Xmas output. Then we have Los Lobos’ “Llegó Navidad.”
The legendary East L.A. band’s first Christmas album won’t compete for time on the turntable with Mariah Carey, Nat King Cole or Frank Sinatra platters. Instead, the album will please fans looking for a sequel to “La Pistola y El Corazón,” the band’s 1988 Tejano/Mariachi folk project and Grammy winner for Best Mexican-American Performance.
“Rhino Records approached us in May to do something and things came together pretty quickly,” band saxophonist, keyboardist and co-producer Steve Berlin said ahead of Los Lobos’ two-night stand at City Winery this week. “They were pretty open about what we could do but they did have a general idea that they wanted it to feel like the ‘Pistola’ record. And we liked that. We never had it in our minds that we would do a hard, rock ’n’ roll record.”
On “Llegó Navidad,” the band pulled together a set of mostly Spanish-language Christmas songs from Mexico, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Panama and the United States (and one original). For help with this, the guys enlisted two Massachusetts friends to help.
“None of us are Latin Christmas music collectors so we had input from Pablo Yglesias, who runs Peace & Rhythm records in Northampton, and a good friend named Eddie Gorodetsky (former WBCN talent), who is a huge record collector,” Berlin said. “Eventually, through some people, we had 146 songs then started to knock out the ones that were silly or impossible.”
Although they kept a little silly (see “¿Dónde Está Santa Claus?,” a 1958 novelty hit by 12-year-old Augie Rios) and sophisticated (check out the cool organ and complex chord changes in “Regalo de Reyes”). They also decided to do a version of one standard: José Feliciano’s “Feliz Navidad.”
“We wanted to avoid the obvious, wanted to avoid doing any chestnuts, but then we decided we should give it a try,” Berlin said.
Short and sweet, the song features two dozen people crammed into an East L.A. studio, Nest Recorders, shouting out the chorus.
The album is Los Lobos’ first in over four years, a long drought for the band. Part of this has been because they, like hundreds of other acts, have struggled to figure out how to make albums work in the age of YouTube and Spotify. But it’s also just been hard to find a studio in Los Angeles that’s not a two-hour commute for everyone. For “Llegó Navidad,” the band found a facility in the same neighborhood where they lived in the ’70s, days of playing a hundred dances, parties and weddings.
“I don’t know when the next album will happen but we have a home base now, a familiar place,” said Berlin, who joined the band in the early ’80s. “If you look at the cover of the new album, that’s the street the studio is on. Look on the side with the Cadillac and the studio is right down the street by the traffic light. Just a perfect spot for us.”
Los Lobos, at City Winery, Wednesday and Thursday. Tickets: $65-$75; citywinery.com/boston.
