Tires spinning, engine humming, toe tapping out of Southwest Alamosa on CO371, zagging and a bit of zigging, bridge crossing the Alamosa River, then the Conejos and a stunning landscape of fall color, water, horizontal clouds, and an internal body check.
I’m en route to the small hamlet of Capulin, which sits within the geological formation known as the Capulin Quadrangle in Conejos and Alamosa counties and was settled in 1867 by families who migrated from Ojo Caliente, New Mexico. There I’ll meet up with the most wonderful Andrés Herrera; I’m listening to his latest two-track compilation, Hypnagogic Terror and the single, Hypnagogic/Hypnopomic, released in mid-October. More about that later.
Andrés is a man of passion matched with the curiosity of a musician. He’s a music producer and podcast host, with the unexpected skills of learning Russian while reading Dostoevsky, as well as a husband, father to two daughters, and soon to be embracing sitting in the middle of Highway 15 strumming a chord or two.
His musical work, social media and podcast are centered around the idea of Entropy, and specifically Entropy in Motion Music on Instagram and his Decibels Deep Podcast, where he just did a “thing” on Stevie Wonder and his “Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants” available on Spotify.
R. Brown: Today I’m talking with Andres Herrera who lives in the small town of Capulin, Colorado. Andrés is a musician, a recording artist, music producer, husband, and the father of two daughters. What else did I miss?
A. Herrera: I also write lyrics, also host a podcast, as well talking about music and reviewing albums to kind of pique the interest of listeners. Pretty much all the audio engineering.
R. Brown: When you are reviewing music on your podcast, is there a particular genre that you are drawn to?
A. Herrera: No, it varies. It could be a funk album one episode; next it could be a metal album or something a little bit more traditional. As a matter of fact, there’s one in particular about the San Patricio Battalion (Irish Catholics who deserted the U.S. Army and fled to Mexico to fight against the U.S. Army in the Mexican-American War) that I reviewed and actually had a professor for Adams State join in with commentary. So, it varies. I listen to a wide range.
R. Brown: Talk to me a little bit about Entropy in Motion.
A. Herrera: OK. I didn’t even look at it necessarily from a musical standpoint, entropy. As much as I did as entropy in society and life and even just from within. For me, it can sound like a morbid thing. Entropy is pretty much the measure of disorderliness and the increase of decrease, if you will. So, I started to think about that and in one of these thoughts I was thinking is it took me to a scripture in the Bible that says, “Outwardly we are wasting away but inwardly we are being renewed.”
R. Brown: Care to expand on that?
A. Herrera: For me, in a personal way, it’s representative of my faith. But also, it goes out more into just the human life to human existence. Meaning, there are times where we have these somber thoughts of, we’re getting older or we’re not going to live forever. But for the most part humanity despite that reality that we’re … with every second that takes away, we’re wasting away, we don’t think about that. We continue to try to progress, make a living, live a life, whatever that may be, so it was more about the reason I called my project Entropy in Motion is the resilience of humans to just continue to move forward.
R. Brown: Right. So, it’s sort of in our DNA. Would you say from your perspective that individuals might not outwardly appear to be moving forward? Would you say that moving forward is more something that we cannot hit the pause button. Does that make sense?
A. Herrera: It makes a lot of sense. I am looking at entropy in that sense. Basically, anything that goes unchecked goes from orderliness to chaos. That could be something inward – for me, introspection is vital. It could be something like you just said, where we’re checking ourselves to make sure we’re still in line with things. Because anything that goes unchecked even within, because of the laws of entropy, we’ll naturally regress.
R. Brown: Regression is a form of entropy.
A. Herrera: Anything that explains even the very chair you’re sitting in, those things they don’t last forever. Or even a home that’s unattended, it’ll gradually go into decline, decay, and fall apart. That’s all part of entropy. And so yeah, I tried to make it more about human nature than about myself personally. Any of those things that go unchecked.
R. Brown: Gotcha. So, how does that ideology manifest itself in your music? Was there a turning point in your life where you started looking at Entropy in Music and that you might have a voice there?
A. Herrera: Yeah, very much so. It was very much entropic in the sense that entropy is a gradual thing, a gradual decline. Most of my music takes on a darker tone. And I think it manifests itself more in the sense that being darker themes, it’s heavier. Even some of the titles that I use hearken back to that propensity of ours to just go into decline if we stay stagnant. So, I think with some of those titles I have in my songs, they kind of remind a person that sometimes human nature is pretty bleak.
R. Brown: OK, so out of that comes…
A. Herrera: I felt like with my life as I was gradually getting older, that was a catalyst. One day I just finally decided it’s now or never to try to pursue music. When I talk about pursuing music, it isn’t to be famous or rich or anything, it’s the pursuit of the creativity, the outlet and putting it out there.
I had this ’aha’ moment.
So, I taught myself audio engineering from scratch, during the first few releases, I was really just learning as I went. There were a couple people who might have given me pointers or whatever, but for the most part that’s what it was. You can’t reverse entropy per se, but it was more just about moving past those barriers I created for myself.
R. Brown: A recognition of that is life has twist and turns and maybe how we respond to those twist and turns is part of our identity. That if we use that as a motivation to move into some level of clarity.
A. Herrera: Yeah, very much so. A lot of the purpose of my music – even though on the surface the titles, the nature of them sound very bleak or maybe even fatalistic – there’s this underlying current of hope weaved within.It’s more like a diagnosis, but with a cure. The titles, the music, are intended to draw things out of myself as a means of catharsis. Hopefully other people could maybe find that same thing within themselves.
R. Brown: So, your voice is speaking from a dark perspective, could it also be a motivational device to move people out of that? “Oh, OK, I now need to wake up here.”
A. Herrera: It’s more from the perspective of realism rather than positivity or even negativism. Negativism and even a lot of times positivity can be an opiate and it just makes you kind of, I don’t know, oblivious to some of these things. I’m all for positivity, but when it acts as an opiate, I think it’s dangerous.
Outside, along the highway, a flatbed truck heading west to Ernst Auto Wrecking and Truck, a sprawling auto salvage yard, loaded with a 1954 flat-tired, rust-patinaed, some faded green, Chevy flatbed pickup barrels by. Entropy indeed.
R. Brown: We are in Capulin, is this where your family is from?
A. Herrera: I grew up in Manassa but my wife’s family is from here.
R.Brown: You went to Albuquerque for a while, at UNM, the University of New Mexico? What happened there, being the city, that is different than small communities? It seems like from what you’d mentioned earlier, maybe you got what you needed out of that environment.
A. Herrera: Well, yes and no. I think there was a lot that I could have gleaned from and grew in. It was just family circumstances brought me back. But really it was really a great thing for me to leave the Valley. I never had plans to return, never wanted to return. Not that I regret it by no means, but it was just such a quick, short period of my life. Then, suddenly, to come back, it was just kind of last-minute in a sense, so everything was just the adaptability of it all. I went out there as part of, again, growing beyond the barriers of culture or environment and familiarity.
R. Brown: Let’s go back a bit. When did you first pickup a guitar?
A. Herrera: My brothers always had one lying around, so I would fiddle with it when I was younger.
Later, I took it seriously. I was 14.
R. Brown: Prior to that you would just pick it up and just play with it without learning how to use it? Playing intuitively?
A. Herrera: Everything’s self-taught. I started writing lyrics when I was about eight or nine. I got this foundation of what I wanted to hear. When I decided to pick up the guitar, all my siblings are right-handed and so they had right-handed guitars. I’m left-handed, so I actually play with the strings inverted. If I would’ve changed any of their strings to have them the right way, they would’ve kicked my ass.
So, I had to learn it that way. The first song I learned was actually by ear. It was a song called It Came Out of the Sky by Creedence Clearwater Revival. I just played it and I learned it. That’s how I trained my ear to know what strings make what and associated it with the sounds in the chords and everything. I just took it from there.
R. Brown: You were writing lyrics, you said at eight or nine. Was that musically writing lyrics or more poetry?
A. Herrera: Musically.
Because one thing I’ve always liked, especially back then, we didn’t have things like Spotify or whatever. Everything was more tactile, listening to music, to listen to an album and be able to look at all the liner notes and the lyrics and the pictures.
That was all part of my experience. I saw how the format of these lyrics were written and I just did the same thing. When I would write that’s how I did it, very disciplined, all the songwriters that I would look up to, I would just emulate their style.
R. Brown: What were you writing about then?
A. Herrera: Eight or nine, I honestly do not remember. I’m sure it was just some childish ramblings.
Later on, I got more into the subjects of, again, these darker things. Death was always one of them, I think because it was just something I knew so well. In losing my father and my grandmother, that’s really where I gravitated toward. I really got into literature. It started with Edgar Allan Poe and Shakespeare, and then it went into Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn. It’s always come from that. Sometimes I would just glean there, studying through their written works, their mindsets. It wasn’t anything of a personal experience, it was all just writing from absorbing and observation.
R. Brown: Sure. Right. Yeah. And then it evolved over time. Did it happen quickly?
A. Herrera: Yeah, I think so. Most of the music I do is instrumental because I don’t have a way to record lyrics and I wanted to go instrumental anyway.
I knew from the moment I picked up a guitar that this was something that I was going to invest a lifetime in. For me, I was very noncommittal in life. When I picked up a guitar, I just knew that’s what it was going to be. I was determined I was going to play left-handed; I didn’t have the means to find or buy a left-handed guitar or even the money to switch them around. Out of being stubborn I circumvented that by just playing the guitar upside down.
R. Brown: Out of curiosity I wonder how that impacted your music, playing upside down, if you’d been playing left-handed instruments this whole time, would your music sound any different because of that?”
A. Herrera: It’s very rare that I think about that because it’s normal to me. I think to other people, because it’s not normal, they think about it more than I do.
Now there’s certain things, techniques that had I learned to play the proper way, it would’ve worked to my advantage. I’ve had to find a way around them the best I can.
R. Brown: You have some new tracks out now, well actually, you are very prolific in your work. Tell me a bit about the two-track Hypnagogic Terror and particularly, the Hypnagogic/Hypnopompic track.
A. Herrera: Sure. It’s all about sleep and the dichotomy between the hypnagogic state (Briefly, a transitional stage between wakefulness and sleep) and the hypnopompic state (Briefly again, the state of consciousness leading out of sleep). In my experience, during the hypnagogic state there are countless times where I have experienced lucid nightmares and other experiences. Conversely, I’ve also experienced good dreams in the hypnopompic state.
R. Brown: Another recent project is “1596.” Care to expand on that?
A. Herrera: The San Luis Valley was once a northern frontier of the Spanish Empire and the region was first explored by the Spaniard Juan de Zaldivar in 1596. I wanted the specific year, so it serves as a point of reference to either move forward or backward in my pursuit of knowledge about where I am from. “1596” is a musical amalgamation of my three favorite genres – Stoner Rock, Desert Rock and Doom Metal – mixed with other genres I fully enjoy: Latin, Post Rock and Funk. “1596” has some obvious references like “Punche Valley,” “Sisnaajini (Blanca Peak).” It was important to me to name the song after Blanca Peak’s Navajo name. “The Paranormal Waltz,” and the little more oblique “Soapweed Yucca” (about local flora), “Cumbia de los Arboles” about the trees and the wind. “This Blackened Hellscape” is about what the Valley went through as expansion of America continued westward.
This all started from a thought that I had about longing to live in Iceland. Particularly, somewhere near Reynisfjara. It led to me being more appreciative of where I do live, and I wanted to make an album to reflect that.
R. Brown: So, the classic question: Who were the musicians and writers that influenced to you around the ages of 14, 15, 18, that provided some kind of direction in your music?
A. Herrera: In the years of being a guitar player, the blues is my first love for sure. Jimi Hendrix of course, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. It also, especially, the Chicago blues from the mid- to late fifties, anything that came out of Stax Records, Chess Records, Cobra Records. It’d be Magic Sam, Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Shakey Jake, as well as Albert Collins, Albert King, Freddie King. I could list you a whole bunch of them. But they were all blues-based at the beginning.
R. Brown: OK, so, mostly the instrumentation or was it the content of their music and the lyrics or some of both?
A. Herrera: It was everything. Blues, again, you hear a lot of dark themes in there, but they found a way to make it positive for themselves by creating music. There was that underlying current of something positive. But it was really the darkness of it all, especially those Cobra Records that I had mentioned earlier. They had a certain heaviness. We think in terms of heaviness as being a whole bunch of distortion and all these different things. But to me as a musician, it’s the choice of notes and your approach and everything. You can be heavy without having all this extra stuff to it. I heard that, and I was driven toward that sound. And one song I want to mention that it came out in the sixties, but it could have easily fit back then in the mid- to late fifties on Cobra Records, was the original version of Black Magic Woman by Fleetwood Mac. When they were a blues band, they were dark and ominous and yeah, they just kicked ass.
R. Brown: What about country music?
A. Herrera: I listened to a lot of that with my dad. Faron Young, Roy Acuff, all of those, any kind of music that deals more with the reality is more what I’m into, more than the negativity or the positivity even. I’m drawn more to reality, whether it’s positive or negative. It’s been about 15, 20 years since I discovered a country artist on my own that really impacted me. One of my favorite artists of all time is Townes Van Zandt. It also helps that he lived in Colorado, he just had such an interesting story to me. He’s the best songwriter of all time, better than Dylan, better than McCartney, better than all of them. Townes Van Zandt is just that one for me as a songwriter.
R. Brown: You don’t really have that pressure on you to tour or to be in public as a device for you to sell your work. It’s not necessary, is that fair to say?
A. Herrera: When I mentioned about not being around people, again it’s … I don’t want to sound ungrateful because there’s been many people who have been huge supporters of what I do and I’m grateful, thankful, for that. Being around a lot of people, it’s just not for me, and going into recording, I always told myself, “I’m going to have to not only prepare myself for the supporters or the detractors, but also those who are indifferent.” I try to keep a perspective, but it surprises me how much support I have gotten from people’s comments they’ve said about my music. It’s been in a good way overwhelming. Not that I necessarily need the justification or the approval, but it’s nice to get somebody to connect.
R. Brown: So, touring, specifically?
A. Herrera: I don’t want the spotlight; I don’t want to be around a lot of people. I would love to tour if I could just go back to a bus and not have to talk to anybody. I know I might sound like a jerk saying that, but it has nothing to do with that. I’m more comfortable being alone. So, I guess in a perfect scenario, I’d live in Iceland somewhere in a small village where I could just work on music all day, that’d be it. But yeah, if the opportunity came, I know I would adapt to it. If it’s really something I wanted to do I would live with the consequences of being around people on tour.
R. Brown: If you wanted people to know what you’re about, what would that be? Who the hell are you? Is that an unfair question?
A. Herrera: It’s not an unfair question. I guess it’s all within the parameters of try to find out who I am through listening to my music, and if maybe it resonates with the listener to find out who they are, that’s important. That’s just one of those questions. If you really want to know me, you’re going to have to get close to me and I don’t know if that’s possible and I don’t know if you would really like that.
It all goes back to the music. The whole intrigue of that is the process of trying to figure out somebody, trying to understand them and not finding that definitive, this is who they are. So that’s why I would rather listen to music and if you want to take the time to invest and to know who the hell I am, that’s fine, but if it helps you in some sort of way, that’s more important.
R. Brown: It that altruism?
A. Herrera: Well, I can answer that for you. I mentioned I’m introverted, but I’m also a huge nerd. I love literature, I really enjoy learning foreign languages. I’ve studied Russian for the last three years and I want to learn something else, don’t know what, but that’s really what I’m about. I like solitude and learning different things. I’m really into Krav Maga, a form of self-defense, different things like that. I’m all about trying to find a way to relate to people and respect where they are whether it’s spiritually, politically, whatever, and maintain the integrity of who I am, to find a connection, whether it’s through differences or similarities – and not in any way try to force who I am or how I think on somebody. I want to find the connection and the differences between me and somebody else.
R. Brown: Learning Russian, not everybody does that so there must be a curiosity, not only just about learning another language but a little bit of the culture that’s expressed through language.
A. Herrera: Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn … All of them, yeah.
R. Brown: What was your motivation? To learn Russian or to have a different reference through their work?
A. Herrera: Maybe in part, more the mystique of reading his (Dostoevsky’s) works that might have been part of it, as well as Solzhenitsyn and Mikhail Bulgakov. I never really thought, “Well, because I do this, I want to learn it now.” I think it was just a natural progression and I just ended up in my constant journey of wanting to learn new things. That’s kind of where it went. I started out learning Swahili before Russian, and the only reason I deviated from that was there was more resources for Russian. But that’s the other language, Swahili, that I want to get back into learning because that’s a great language and the cuisine is really good too. I had a couple of friends from Kenya who introduced me to a lot of things there, and it was great. So yeah, I would say it was just there was more resources. That was probably the biggest reason for it.
R. Brown: You seem to be in a good place. That balance between creating your music, producing, your podcast, having a full-time job and balancing those things. Does it feel like it’s in balance? Could you see yourself devoting full time to music? I guess the question is, where do you want to go with this?
A. Herrera: Well, to answer the first part, everything is pretty much in balance. I give 110 percent to everything. When it’s time to work, it’s time to work and at the same time, when it’s time to not devote time to work, I want to take something else seriously.
Whether it’s music or learning a new language or whatever the case may be. A lot of that balance though, actually comes also from having an understanding family.
A lot of times I get into my own head, either I’m thinking of what I want to write, or I sometimes feel emotionally or mentally something needs to come out that I can’t process unless I pick up a guitar or sit at the computer, coming up with a melody.
My family knows when I get in my own head that there’s like a do not disturb sign. They’ve been helpful in being able to identify when I’m in that process. It helps to have a wife and my two daughters who are very understanding and supportive. Sometimes she will ask me, “What’s wrong? Is everything OK?” and it always is OK and even when it is, it’s not because sometimes what needs to come out is something dark or painful or whatever. How do I say this? It’s controlled emotion, controlled pain, controlled release. think that’s the crux of the balance of everything for me, I have it all being filtered through the process of being creative.
R. Brown: When we were texting back and forth to set up this interview you were at work. Do you mind sharing a little bit about work and where you work? And what occupies your time and provides for your family?
A. Herrera: I work as the custodial manager for Friday Health Plans. I just recently started there on the 26th of September after 17 years at Adams State as a custodial manager. I made the jump, it just felt like it was the right time. The opportunity came and I took it. It’s more advantageous for me and it provides more, it helps provide for my family as well. When I say that my wife is also a provider. Now I’m able to help more on that end.
R. Brown: You went from one management position to another.
A. Herrera: I’ve always been a leader, showing people how to do things or people asking me questions. When I was in Albuquerque I did the same thing, I was a supervisor there. So, it really was nothing different for me. It’s just now it’s a whole different environment and a whole different set of faces.
R. Brown: Were you that way when you were young, or did you feel like you had ideas and wanted to be influential? But where did that come from?
A. Herrera: I can’t tell you where it came from, I really don’t know. Honestly, now that I’m thinking about it, the fact that losing my father when I was nine and having eight other siblings, it was just a survival thing. Having to grow up fast and having to figure things out for yourself. Do for yourself in a lot of ways, that’s probably where it came from. But by no means do I have these ambitions to lead people or to dictate to people like, “This is the way we should do things.” It’s not something I’m comfortable with.
R. Brown: Nevertheless, you’re in that position. Some leaders will have a pretty aggressive style. You’re a little bit, as you say, in the background. People also know that ultimately, you’re going to be the one that makes the decisions.
A. Herrera: I won’t shy away if I have to. It’s imperative that I learn from the people that I work with and know their story, even just how they approach things, because there’s always room for me to grow. I still have the confidence that if I know the way to do something, I’ll make sure that I state that, but I have no reservations at all if somebody has a better idea, we’ll run with it because I’ve always been fascinated by other people’s thought processes and ways of doing things. The mannerisms of people just fascinate me, I really get to tap into that and into how they think, and I guess the mechanics of who they are by doing that.
R. Brown: Let’s move to the issues about water, scarcity of water, drought, and climate change. It seems like everybody has a strong connection to agriculture. Would that be true for you and your family, to have some connections maybe historically with agriculture? Any sense of how far can you go back with your family in this part of the world, the history in the Southern San Luis Valley?
A. Herrera: That’s an interesting question for me because we are very tied to the agriculture of it all. Growing up we raised animals as part of our means of survival.
We lived right there, (looking out the window) our yard it’s bordered right there by the Acequia. So, I always saw tractors and farmers and that was life to me.
I never looked at it as any other way, really, because my parents, more specifically my mom, just made such a good life for me that I never realized that there were these issues going on, I never took the time to really look into them. It wasn’t until elementary school, sometime in the late ’80s when the AWDI (water exportation plan) began, that’s when I became aware of it. But, there again, my mom had provided such a good life for me and for the rest of my siblings that it really didn’t look like an issue.
R. Brown: What does that look like now?
A. Herrera: To be here, where I live now, my father-in-law raises cows in nearby fields. I hear him talk about water all the time.
Hopefully we get rain, then it’s time for cutting, he doesn’t want the rain.
You can really see over the years, everything looks different. The ground looks different, it’s not as lush, you look up and not even the sky seems as vibrant, the whole situation of water. I look at the ground and I look at the sky and I wonder what the water situation’s going to be like.
That’s entropy in nature, that’s a perfect example of that right there. Growing up, hearing my dad talking about the river, it always seemed like it was a constant for them, that it was always there, and it was always in its prime. Growing up it was always that way for me, I always thought it would be here.
It seemed like this past spring there was not so much of that this year, we got a lot of rain. I heard the river for a lot longer getting up in the morning. At any point in time, it’s one of those things now where you don’t invest in the hope that it’s always going to be there.
There’s a certain sense of assurance when you hear the river, it really does bring a sense of calm. You feel, at least for this time, that things are going to be okay. But there’s always that in the back of my mind, “When am I not going to hear it again? When’s that coming?”
The light coming through the north facing picture window of Andrés home suggests a lightness, brightness, one of great creativity and passion. His commitment to family and culture, his curiosity about the physics of life is inspiring in his understanding of what some might say is the inevitable degradation of organic organisms while referencing that reality in the journey of living a full and balanced life.
Walking out to my car, looking down stream at the Acequia flowing to the east and south, I find myself whistling, hearing, seeing, experiencing in a way I didn’t two hours ago.
