Gabriela Quintero happily grabs the Grammy statuette and, giggling and proud, holds it up to the webcam. She and Rodrigo Sanchez won the Best Contemporary Instrumental Album category, for Mettavolution – which features their monolithic duo-guitar version of Pink Floyd’s Echoes – at the January 2020 ceremony. It should have been the start of a globe-trotting year. But the year had other plans.
Today Rodrigo y Gabriela are in their studio and HQ in Ixtapa. The town overlooks the Pacific on Mexico’s west coast, and sits just 15 minutes’ drive from Zihuatanejo, the beachy paradise that Tim Robbins’s character Andy DuFresne escaped to at the end of The Shawshank Redemption. Bandmates since their teens, both Quintero and Sanchez are approaching their fifties now. They were a couple once. Today they’re best friends, and the easy way they share answering questions – giving each other space, occasionally talking over each other with passion – speaks of the pair’s chemistry. It’s like they’re the left and right hand of one guitar player, in sync.
Ixtapa was a welcome refuge when everything went to shit in 2020. “We had a full year ahead of non-stop touring for Mettavolution, all over the place,” Quintero says. “We won the Grammy, spring came, then the Apocalypse! So we came back down here, as we always do in the worst situations. Even when we were busking we’d always come back here and just play. That’s how we process our emotions when things get a little tough. Playing guitar heals us.”
The latest manifestation of that healing is In Between Thoughts… A New World – perhaps R&G’s heaviest, rockiest work yet, with Sanchez favouring electric guitar for much of the record.
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