Los Lonely Boys had a surprise hit with “Heaven.” Now they’re entering Sacred ground.
By Mikael Wood

Heirs to a Mexican-American musical tradition handed down to them from their father, Enrique “Ringo” Garza Sr., Los Lonely Boys rocketed out of San Angelo, Texas, two summers ago with “Heaven,” a perfect slice of backyard boogie that won the Boys a following far beyond the cantina circuit they’d been playing since guitarist Henry, bassist Jojo, and drummer Ringo Jr. were elementary school kids. Many fans hadn’t even heard of the band before “Heaven” took up permanent residence on radio. To eldest brother Henry, though, the rise didn’t seem quite so meteoric.

“When you see all these good things in your dreams, your dreams don’t show you all the hard work it takes to get there,” he laughs. “Music, for us, has just been a way of life. We didn’t know anything about making it famous or being successful when we cut our album. We were just trying to eat!” Featuring cameos from Enrique and vocal fan Willie Nelson (who lent the Boys his Texas studio to record their self-titled debut), the new Sacred (Epic) stays true to the band’s good-times vibe even as it highlights a road-toughened attack and a broader sonic palette (see review). We reached Henry, an avowed auto enthusiast, at Texican Chop Shop, the auto-body shop the brothers own in San Angelo, and asked him about the new sounds.

Now that you know quite a bit about making it famous and being successful, is playing music with your brothers in Los Lonely Boys a different experience than it used to be? For us, it doesn’t feel any different, except for the fact that now there’s somebody who knows us. That’s the only thing I think that’s changed — we got a little more popular than what we ever thought we would be. It still feels the same, except that it moves at a hundred miles an hour.

What’s the impact on your lifestyle? Is your daily routine in the summer of 2006 different from what it was in the summer of 2004? Yeah, it’s a night-and-day deal. Plus, we’re fathers, too — we’ve got children, so that’s the most important thing in our lives. Between being fathers and being brothers playing out on the road, it’s a constant way of living.

Carlos Santana and Willie Nelson talked a lot about your debut. Is it gratifying to get those kind of compliments from fellow musicians? Yeah, man. We knew that if we could catch someone like Willie Nelson or Santana’s attention, that’s all that mattered. If we could please those guys, we didn’t care if we pleased the next crowd or sold a million records. Willie Nelson dug it! Santana dug it! That really just says it all right there, ’cause those are the guys.

Your skills as a guitarist in particular have been admired by many musicians and fans. Are you comfortable in a sort of guitar-hero role? I love that I’m inspirational to guitarists or people that love music. To be able to be influential upon the youth, I feel real proud of doing that. It feels like having a big responsibility, too, because now a lot of people are paying attention. It gives me an opportunity to tell my story, you know what I mean?

You might be impacting some young guitarist somewhere in the same way your idols impacted you. What he gets from me is what I got from Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimi Hendrix and B.B. King and, first and foremost, our father. That’s an incredible opportunity to have, just a complete blessing.

Describe the band’s mind-set going into the studio to make Sacred. Were there specific ideas about what you wanted to do? Actually, a lot of the songs were written like they’d never been written before. We never wrote on a piano before, and a lot of these songs were conceived on a piano. That was a pretty cool change for us; it offered a lot of different melodic structures and a different way to approach a song.

Why use the piano this time? We were able to afford a piano.

An excellent reason. Sacred sounds both rawer and more streamlined than Los Lonely Boys. That’s the way it was, doing this album. There was a lot of pressure to get the record done, and a lot of that came out in the songwriting. “My Way,” for instance — that’s a song that says, “Hey, we’re gonna do it my way, because I believe in miracles, and I believe they happen every day.” And that’s the way we’ve lived our whole life.