The Blessing And The Curse

“The big buzz at Folk Alliance this year was around Lance Canales, who had us all on the edge of our seats as he stomped across the stage delivering a stark blues twang-and-thump set that sounded like it had been born somewhere between a back alley and a field worker’s camp. If this isn’t authentic roots music then I don’t know what is.” Eliza Gilkyson Lance Canales & The Flood are a roots-blues influenced Americana trio from California’s bre­adbasket, where Canales lived the life that so many songs have been written about since the birth of roots music – hard labor, one room shacks and taunting ghosts whispering of a better life. Canales’ guttural vocals combine a hard edged storytelling approach beneath a stripped down, foot-stomping, acoustic instrumentation. The Flood are made up of standup bassist, David Quinday, whose mournful bowing can be found on tracks such as “Hummingbird Blues” on the bands most recent album “Elixir” and roots percussionist Daniel Burt. During a live performance Burt sings backup vocals and stomps on a wooden box as Canales—described on the blog “Bound for Glory” by music Journalist, Robin Wheeler— “… plays hollow-bodied, anger-fueled blues guitar. He growls and stomps with his feet clad in the heavy work boots of his grandfather…” Canales garnered a reputation as a child of being able to train wild horses and for years was forced to take his lumps in order to help his family make ends meet. It wasn’t until he confiscated an older sister’s beat up guitar and combined it with vocals he’d discovered in his mother’s fire and brimstone church that he was able to slowly carve a way out of the hard toil life with his music. While Canales may have left that life behind that life has never left his music. Such is the case with the bands 2012 released album, “Elixir.” In the song “Digging” a desperate man enters a church house where finds a, “Preacher screaming fire and hell. People screaming, running, crying, but still I felt no soul.” Canales played solo for years until he began craving a fuller sound and energy to his music and enlisted “The Flood.” They’ve been together since 2009. In 2012 Lance Canales & The Flood did the soundtrack for the award winning documentary, “Dancing the Salmon Home.” In February 2013 Canales released the single “Plane Crash at Los Gatos: Deportee” labeled by Saint Louis Magazine as a, “gut-wrenchingly beautiful rendition.” Originally a poem written by Woody Guthrie in 1948, the song has been covered by many stellar musicians, but what makes Canales’ version so important is that it reveals the names of the Mexican nationals that were simply dubbed as “deportees” in the original news article. He also had a personal connection to the song with his father and grandfather having literally driven the Bracero trucks Guthrie writes about in the song as well as the discrimination they experienced by farmers as they worked in cotton fields and avocado orchards and many other crops and the many towns where they were explicitly not welcome.