This week, Hacienda’s Abraham Villanueva expounded on the significance of the Band’s 1969 eponymous album as an influence on his own quartet. Next month, Hacienda releases its official debut, Loud Is the Night (Alive Natural Sound Records), which unloads slinky, Sixties garage pop embellished by soulful harmonies between the three Villanueva brothers (Abraham, Jaime, and Rene) and cousin Dante Schwebel. To expand the sound, Hacienda traveled to Akron, Ohio to record with the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, who became a fan after the group opened for the Keys and Dr. Dog at La Zona Rosa back in 2006. Auerbach also brought in members of Dr. Dog to contribute extra vocals to the sessions. Villanueva gave us an idea of how the recording went down as they prepare for the album’s release and a tour next month with Dr. Dog.
Austin Chronicle: How was it working with Auerbach as producer?
Abraham Villanueva: He was great. He wanted the four of us to play together as much as possible. Even when doing overdubs he wanted us to play together. So when we wanted to add bongos and maracas, he had us do all the percussion and just put one mic in the middle. He’d say, “OK, we have a rhythm track, let’s do a track of overdubs, let’s do a track of vocals, and there you go.” Some of them we had to separate, like lead vocal and background vocal, some of them we sang all together. But we had some help with the vocals, which was nice.
AC: The guys from Dr. Dog?
AV: Yeah. That’s one of the reasons we definitely didn’t want to do it live, because we said if these guys are coming in, let’s just wait. We showed them what we had, and they liked it, but would say, “You know what might sound cool is if you do this or that.” Being able to take advantage of that was great. It’s not everyday that you get to have somebody tell you what they think and put their perspective in it.
AC: Were y’all trying to keep it loose or really precise? There are so many different elements to your songs.
AV: We had a pretty good blueprint when we came in. We would demo them here in Texas, pretty much in the bedroom, and we would write out most of the parts so everyone knew what they were going to play. And before we would record them, we would kind of play them together just to make sure it had a good feel and we felt comfortable with it. Also, we were so limited on time, we didn’t want to be doing 50 takes on each song and spending half a day on each song. We only had four days to record and we wanted to do 15 songs, so we had everything written out. The first day we came in, we just kind of played it as if we were playing live, doing rhythm tracks one by one. If there was a mistake, we’d start over, so a couple of them we did in a couple of takes and some of them we did in just one take. When Dr. Dog came in, we finished up the last three tracks and started on the vocals. Those we kind of took our time with, because we had kind of a vocal coach. And they also just helped us fill out the sound. Before it was just three of us singing three parts, and they made it six people singing three parts, so double each one and it sounds more like it should instead of being really flat and dull. Otherwise it would just get lost with the music.
AC: Loud Is the Night is being presented as your debut album, but y’all have had another one out before this one, right?
AV: Yeah, the self-titled one we had, but it was never really released. We made it ourselves pretty much, and those are the recordings from our house. We had that one, and were originally just going to release that, but Dan started building a studio and said, “If you guys want, why don’t you just come up and record up here.” So originally we were just going to put that out and hopefully next time get ourselves to a real studio, but he said he’d do it right now. We still have these [self-titled albums] because people were asking for things at shows, so we would hand them out. But they’re really what we’d consider the demos, what we made ourselves that we were recording locally. [Loud Is the Night] is the first thing that we’ve sat down and recorded and released. We talked with Alive [Records] and they’re going to put it out in September.
AC: And y’all are heading out on tour in support of it then with Dr. Dog?
AV: Yeah, on September 15. We’re going to be out there, I think, four weeks, so until mid-October. We’re going out west, up through California, and then zig-zagging all through the Midwest to the East Coast and finish in Massachusetts. There’s a lot of stuff going on, put it’s pretty exciting and we’re looking forward to it.
Hacienda plays the Beauty Bar on Wednesday, Aug. 20.
This article appears in August 8 • 2008.
