Christian Lopez is releasing his new full-length album, Magdalena, on June 9th, 2023, following on from his 2022 offering, The Other Side. While The Other Side documented a kind of internal journey into the unknown, but at the same time unleashed a lot of energy on the audience, Magdalena reflects a journey into a new way of living for Lopez, and aesthetically, it reflects that naturalness and directness. This was a literal journey for Lopez when he and his wife moved to a small town in New Mexico for him to create this collection and the texture of the desert is reflected even in his recording techniques. UK-based Producer Robert Adam Stevenson and his wife joined Lopez there for the project.
Christian Lopez went through some big life changes and emotional experiences during the time leading up to work on the album, including getting married and losing his younger brother to a Fentanyl overdose. Some of that awareness of the duality of pain and growth is threaded through the new songs and a portion of the proceeds from the album will be donated to Fentanyl outreach programs, including the Michael Leanordi Foundation and VoicesForAwareness. I spoke with Christian Lopez about taking the long road into the desert to work on Magdalena.
Hannah Means-Shannon: I was pretty fascinated by your previous album, The Other Side, because I’d been thinking about how people develop as artists. But I actually find that Magdalena is, in some ways, more of an outward-turning album. The Other Side was more intentionally about going in. Do you feel that way?
Christian Lopez: It’s interesting that you say that because, when I think about it now, The Other Side was definitely the breaking down of understanding and a kind of rebirth. With Magdalena, just in terms of the chronology of my life, is the resilient stage, like I’m coming back. It’s a follow-up when I’m building and continuing to understand after that spiritual growth.
HMS: There’s definitely a core element of confidence with these new songs that seems like it’s part of that openness. There’s a directness to these songs.
CL: That’s exactly what I’m going for. I’m just saying what feels natural, what comes up first, and trying not to overthink a thing.
HMS: It sounds like the writing process needed to be about that, too. When you were writing, were you resisting self-editing and throwing things out too soon?
CL: There were songs that I didn’t want to compromise on. I worked on them over the course of a year and a half. Some flowed out within a day or two, and some were a whole year and a half of working. I think it’s just one of those things where I’m tired of thinking too hard. I listen to other acts who do this, and I’m trying to give off that same energy. When you’re listening to Isbell, to so many great writers, it’ll make you want to overthink your own songs. But life is short, and I think just getting them down and done is an important tool to capture the magic if you’re going for an authentic sound.
Honestly, when I was working with Dave Cobb as a kid, he was the first to teach me that. I think I’m just now really tapping into what he meant. I think I was too young to understand that before and that Red Arrow, the album that I did before The Other Side, was more of an experiment in the other direction, with in-depth studio process. Now that I’m completely unchained, the most satisfying thing for me is doing things in an organic way.
HMS: I think for a lot of artists, that’s something they have to come to, having been as far as they can go in the other direction and looked at different angles to methods of recording to find that place.
CL: And that place is simply whatever is most satisfying to you. Because kind of on a spiritual level, with everything that’s been going on in the world and in my life, satisfying that inner need the most is what has the best chance of resonating with someone on the outside. It’s almost a secret ingredient!
HMS: That’s a great phrase. I was just reading something today that said that in any art form, in order to enchant other people, you have to enchant yourself first.
CL: That hits the nail on the head.
HMS: A lot of people will spend a lot of effort trying to build things the other way around because, logically, it makes sense to try to please the audience first.
CL: It’s a total paradox. That paradox exists in so many other forms in the universe, too, like “less is more.”
HMS: What do you think that your setting contributed to all this? I know that you moved out to New Mexico and away from LA for this album. Was that part of this mindset?
CL: One hundred percent. We wanted to make that decision. It was around the time that I got engaged to my now wife. We were ready to start somewhere new and at the same time, I knew that I wanted to do something unique and different on this album. I wanted to do what my heroes had done, like Levon Helm on The Big Pink, and John Denver. I wanted to find somewhere that looked like a movie set. I wanted to feel like I was stuck inside a movie! I found it. It was the first place that we found on Zillow, a little casita in a town called Magdalena, New Mexico.
We just went straight there and set up a studio there, and my mission was to write and record the new record. We brought my Producer, Robert Adam Stevenson, and his wife out there and we buckled down. We recorded outside, and we also used the sound of the casita, with ambient tile floors. We lived there, too, while I was writing. I think the settings show through on this album. I think there’s a raw, roomy sound. A lot of this was written about the highway, and there are long, hundred-mile roads there. There’s also the magic that you get from the sky and the mountains.
We were surrounded by Navajo reservations and I loved being in a totally different mindset. I tell my friends this, I think you have to change the literal around you, sometimes, if you really want to change the internal. I used to tell my brother, “Get in the car and leave, and go where you want to go.” If you’re looking for the special and the beautiful, sometimes that requires the outward balance of movement.
HMS: It seems like a respectful thing to realize the effect that an environment can have on a person. If you pretend like it’s not a big deal, you’re selling yourself short. Human beings have always been affected by their environment.
CL: I couldn’t agree more. That’s kind of what my song, “The Morning” is about. It’s like what Sturgill [Simpson] said, “There’s no point getting out of bed if you ain’t living the dream.” It’s almost about letting go and listening to that voice inside. The song “Can’t Hide” says, “Can you fight the holy voice inside? I’ve tried, but it always wins. You can’t hide.” You might as well listen, and that’s the first step to the journey.
HMS: That’s an interesting aspect to going somewhere more remote in New Mexico. Do you feel that it’s easier in a place like that to hear your internal guide and instincts better?
CL: For sure. The seclusion was something that we thought we could handle, when we moved there, but once we were there, it was like, “This is REALLY seclusion.” The beauty of having my wife there is that I had an ego check at all times, too. When you’re stuck alone, emotions are exposed, and you really have to look inward for solutions.
HMS: I noticed that what you said about getting out and driving is very much the kind of idea behind the song “Save the Day.”
CL: One hundred percent. I posted about it at the time, but when we were going through covid, that was what we did. I called it “mobile distancing.” We just went joy-riding. For us, that was one of the best ways to feel alive. I have this old 1966 Dodge out here that I drive around. We like to hang out with the retirees and go to the car shows.
HMS: The first single from the album that’s come out, “Girl & a Gun”, conveys a lot of these elements that we’ve been talking about. It’s a statement of what’s valuable to you, but it doesn’t try to over-explain it to other people. You even seem to say that you can’t totally understand it yourself, but nevertheless, it’s true.
CL: Yes. It’s like listening to the internal voice, like we were talking about, but at the end of the day, it’s all just still a mystery. It’s also an acknowledgement that pain never really stops, but sometimes knowing is not knowing.
HMS: That song kind of lays out the contrast, too, between the desert and being in LA. The speaker doesn’t feel right in LA, and needs to find their center by going to the desert again.
CL: Exactly. That was a big part of the whole move to New Mexico, because my wife didn’t want to move to West Virginia, and I didn’t want to move to LA. So we went to the middle of the desert!
HMS: I love New Mexico, by the way, so I get it. It does have an effect on me when I’m there.
CL: A lot of people make the pilgrimage to our town just to do stargazing. And looking for that internal peace.
HMS: I know you’ve enjoyed making videos in the past. What were you thinking about when it came to the video for “Girl & a Gun”? We’ve go low-fi footage, we’ve got sharper footage, we’ve got desert roads, a little bit of LA. It’s a bit of a travelog.
CL: I love working with this director, who also did some videos for The Other Side. He grew up with me in West Virginia. We have a close creative relationship. For this one, we wanted to recreate a certain aesthetic about where the songs were coming from, what the environment was like. We didn’t do that shoot in Magdalena. We actually shot that in Joshua Tree. He had a Super 8 camera and a couple of VHS cameras. We just set up in a house and what I was doing in New Mexico, I recreated there.
HMS: Places play a role in some of the other songs, too, like “Harper’s Ferry.” Is it the case that being away from places makes them easier to write about? We’ve got the song “California”, too.
CL: Exactly! [Laughs] It’s things at a distance. When you’re away from there for a while but you’ve had experiences there, you can kind of see them for what they are a little better. West Virginia is home to me, and Harper’s Ferry is fifteen minutes from there. I love taking my wife out there. It’s just a place that I love and when I was in the desert writing these songs, I wanted to talk about things I love, and that was one of them. For “California”, I’ve always wanted to tell that story of driving my car out there. It was such a memory for me, driving my Dodge out there when I was 21 years old.
HMS: With “Harper’s Ferry”, I found it really poignant because it has all these beautiful details that set the scene, but it’s even more emotional because there’s this idea of these conversations between two people that happen there. You get the idea that those connections, those conversations, are also part of the significance of the place.
CL: It’s almost like those kinds of settings, when you’re somewhere that beautiful, open you up. Now that town that’s already so historic and magical leaves you with another magical memory. Those places open you up, break you down, and stack memories upon memories. It’s one of those places we were talking about. It’s that kind of environment.
