Rainbird

Wayne Holtzman stopped listening to music thirty years ago. Like a bird staggering under sheets of rain Wayne (a.k.a. Rainbird) squirmed under the weight of his own stormy mind for years. Stuck in a groove of perfection and negativity, Wayne retreated from popular culture while taking refuge in the songs that filled his head. "Playhouse of Your Mind" is his first attempt to share these songs with the outside world.

Although Wayne is only now discovering much of the great music of the last few decades, this lack of exposure helped him remain uncontaminated, in a sense; the time-capsule quality of his voice is often compared to Burt Bacharach or Scott Walker. Somehow he preserved his singular style of music, influenced by country, folk, and traditional Latin American styes.

Growing up in Austin, Texas in the 60's, Wayne immersed himself in that city's country and folk scenes, before studying classical guitar and Latin American rhythms under a Venezuelan bolero player, and voice under an elderly French Count who claimed to have been Frank Sinatra's first voice coach. After meeting the Mexican ranchera singer Lola Beltran at the World's HemisFair '68 in San Antonio, she invited him to play in Mexico City, where he then lived for two years in the early 70's, playing folk at coffee houses and on television variety shows.

Around the late 70's Wayne put a lid on all things popular culture. He set his radio and TV stations to the daily news and checked weather reports three times a day on a handheld transistor radio. His family and career as a psychologist sidetracked his budding music career and he stopped performing except at family gatherings.

Fast-forward thirty years to Wayne's daughter, now living in Mexico City, with fond memories of those strange songs of her youth, which took the place of children's records and teenybopper pop hits. Buoyed by her enthusiasm, he agreed to return to Mexico City in 2008 to record some of the songs he'd been amassing since the 70's.

The album was recorded at Vinyl Studios and produced by Andres Torres, who gave the songs a fresh lift with fuzzy, wet electric guitars and psychedelic synths. Andres invited musicians from the local indie rock and jazz scenes, including the prestigious jazz bassist Agustín Bernal, Carlos Maldonado (Los Dorados, El
Regimen) on upright and electric bass, Rodrigo Barbosa (Los Dorados, Paté de Fua) on drums and Hugo Quesada (Robota, Nos Llamamos) on keyboards.

The result of this collaboration bridges generational gaps with its strange confluence of styles. ¨Doubt¨ harks back to early Bowie, while ¨Red Opium Poppies¨ has the laid-back vibe of Sea Change-era Beck. ¨Do You Remember¨ recalls the playfulness of Feist and the country-smudged grandeur of recent Cat Power. The intentionally melodramatic tone of ¨Tears of Stone¨, on the other hand, pays homage to traditional Mexican boleros (¨Teardrops of desperation/Run down my face and hit the floor/Memories of situations/I just can´t bear them anymore…¨), but strays from tradition with its modern production and drugged-out upright bass.

These days, Wayne opens the windows more often, lets the breeze in, tries not to get too cooped up in his psychological playpen. He constantly discovers new music, and eager to share his own music, he´ll soon be playing live shows with a band from Mexico City.