5/5 JAY LENO
5/6 CRAIG KIBORN
6/12 BONNAROO
6/15 LETTERMAN
8/3 CONAN O’ BRIEN

TRACK LISTING:
1: “La Venganza De Los Pelados” featuring Café Tacuba (Garth Hudson – Keyboard)
2: “Rita” (Mitchell Froom – keyboard)
3: “Is This All There Is?” featuring Willie G.
4: “Charmed”
5: “Somewhere In Time” featuring Dave Alvin
6: “Wicked Rain / Across 110th Street” featuring Bobby Womack
7: “Kitate” featuring Tom Waits and Martha Gonzalez
8: “Hurry Tomorrow” featuring lyrics by Robert Hunter
9: “Ya Se Va” featuring Ruben Blades
10: “Wreck of The Carlos Rey” featuring Richard Thompson
11: “Matter of Time” featuring Elvis Costello
12: “Someday” featuring Mavis Staples
13: “Chains of Love”

The Ride, the much-anticipated new CD by America's premiere roots rock band LOS LOBOS, is well worth the wait. With an all-star cast of contributors who highlight the band’s artistic diversity and brilliant musicianship, The Ride is everything a contemporary music lover could want—and more.

"We're all very proud of this new CD," says band member Louie Pérez “It reflects our evolution as musicians who have been playing together for a long time and have worked to absorb a lot of different artistic ideas during a long and enjoyable musical journey… it was great to make music with some of our good friends."

The members of Los Lobos explain that the title of the CD seemed a natural way of reflecting the musical journey—the adventure—they've shared since they started 30 years ago. "It's been one heck of a ride," says singer/guitarist David Hidalgo. "And it just gets better all the time.”

The Ride represents several milestones. Los Lobos produced themselves for the first time. The album came together in a leisurely, unhurried way. Some guest artists showed up in at Cesar Rosas’ home studio. Other times, musical tracks were ferried back and forth via express delivery service. Some of the collaborations were done face-to-face; some by correspondence.

Los Lobos say making this CD was a bit like sitting around the living room with good friends, reminiscing and making music just for the pure joy of it. "Working with all these people was great, especially Bobby Womack," says bassist Conrad Lozano. "When we got in the studio, it didn't take long for him to become one of us."
Singer/guitarist Cesar Rosas points to the contribution made by Rubén Blades. "He is just such an impressive musician and it was terrific working with him."

Tom Waits used a tape he received from Los Lobos in the mail as the foundation for the wild and raucous musical adventure "Kitate." It means "get away from me" in Spanish, but Waits purposely misspelled it. The song is neither English nor Spanish, but its own hybrid version of Spanglish with a similar mix of musical styles, including Jamaican ska, Mexican mariachi and New Orleans funeral band.

There's a touch of the spirit of the Grateful Dead, a band Los Lobos opened for on several occasions, in the album. So it seemed natural for the group to bring in Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter to collaborate on “Hurry Tomorrow,” co-written with Rosas.

It has been a remarkable career ride for the four Chicano musicians from fabled Garfield High School in East Los Angeles: David Hidalgo, Louie Pérez, Cesar Rosas and Conrad Lozano, with the addition of consummate musician Steve Berlin, who joined the band as a full-time member in 1983. Los Lobos have gone from garage band to internationally acclaimed and celebrated unique purveyors of what they dub "roots music and a whole lot more," incorporating folkloric, blues, rock, R & B and Latin threads into their melting pot tapestry. As musicians, they are as stunningly accomplished as they are versatile.

Recorded primarily in Los Angeles, The Ride reveals that versatility. Los Lobos and salsero legend Rubén Blades hook up on a tropical Latin tune titled "Ya Se Va," with the Panamanian Renaissance Man contributing an irrepressible liveliness as Los Lobos match him stride-for-stride in a pulsating rhythmic experience.

There is similar vitality—of an altogether different sort—in the blues-tinged tracks which team the band with R&B great Bobby Womack. "Wicked Rain"/"Across 110th Street" features his distinctive voice, a driving straight-outta-Harlem beat and exemplary percussive touches.

In keeping with that gritty, urban feel is the Lobos’ own "Charmed," a moody, seemingly ominous blues-rocker that grabs you by the throat and takes you for a musical ride. Sung by Cesar Rosas, it evokes vintage Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Howling Wolf.

Another unforgettable collaboration is “Someday,” featuring the achingly beautiful vocals of Mavis Staples. It is a perfectly executed song of longing and hope, as Staples emotes, "I know down in my heart, I will fear no more," with a prayerful hope that conveys a subtle sense of the inevitable vicissitudes of life.

The sheer joy of music-making is evident in Los Lobos' teaming with Mexico's popular Café Tacuba on a darkly surreal, yet mysteriously humorous tune titled "La Venganza de Los Pelados" ("The Revenge of the Underdogs"). The song evokes the magic realism of Latin American literature exemplified by the likes of novelists Gabriel García Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Another old friend of the band, Elvis Costello, works with Los Lobos on “Matter of Time,” a venerable early original which he’s often played in concert as one of his favorite Los Lobos songs. He plays piano and sings in a manner that punctuates the tune’s elegant simplicity, evocative of a musical haiku. Costello recorded the basic track in a church in Oslo, Norway and shipped it to East L.A., where Los Lobos put on the finishing touches.

As long-time fans of Fairport Convention, Hidalgo and Pérez were especially excited about the participation of Richard Thompson. The master guitarist’s touch is evident in "The Wreck of the Carlos Rey," a song written and performed in the classic storytelling tradition of sagas about ships lost at sea.

One of the more memorable tracks on The Ride is “Is That All There Is?,” featuring veteran Chicano pop singer Willie Garcia, better known known as Little Willie G when he fronted now-iconic East L.A. band Thee Midnighters when the guys in Los Lobos were growing up. Louie, David, Cesar and Conrad all listened to Little Willie G and Thee Midnighters with pride and admiration for a Mexican American group actually making records and having success as professional musicians, something quite rare at the time.

“Somewhere In Time” is a warm and affecting collaboration between Los Lobos and Dave Alvin, one of the founders of the original rockabilly-roots-blues-Cajun-rock band The Blasters, who helped bring Los Lobos from East L.A. to Hollywood by asking them to open for largely white punk-rock audiences.

With a mixture of old favorites reworked with guest artists and new creations, The Ride highlights the grasp the Lobos have of all sorts of music and the pleasure they still get out of playing, 30 years later, and still looking to grow. That long, strange trip, to paraphrase the Grateful Dead, is ready for yet another leg.