It’s still dark here in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Dawn hasn’t broken yet as I begin speaking with Alejandro “Alex” Garcia and Salvador “Sal” Samano from Thee Sacred Souls, who are in London on the last day of the band’s European tour. After today, they’ll take a week-long break before heading back to promote the group’s second album, Got a Story to Tell, out October 4.
If you haven’t heard Thee Sacred Souls before, listen to any one of their songs and you’ll swear you have. There’s a familiarity to the band’s music, an old-school vibe predicated on early ‘60s soul.
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When Garcia and Samano met at a show in 2018 they were both playing in separate groups. While each was waiting to go onstage, they began chatting about music they grew up on and discovered a shared love of soul. They bonded over acts like Brenton Wood and the Delfonics, but it was a mutual love of Thee Midniters that inspired them to start a band together.
Thee Midniters—not the Detroit-based vocal group the Midnighters with Hank Ballard—helped define the Chicano soul movement that flourished in Southern California and South-Central Texas between the ‘60s and early ‘80s.
Garcia had already been working on the instrumentation of “Can I Call You Rose?”, the first track on the band’s self-titled 2022 debut, when Samano, a bassist, suggested they should collaborate. “I remember just kind of reaching out and being like, like, ‘Man, that’s the one we should work on that has the sound,’” Samano tells SPIN.
Singer Josh Lane had just moved to San Diego to pursue a music career when he met Garcia on Instagram. Lane liked the songs Garcia was posting, and the two began DMing each other about setting up a time to jam. When Lane met Garcia for their first session, he wanted to recruit Garcia, who plays guitar and drums, to play on his solo music. But when Garcia played him the “Can I Call You Rose?” instrumental demo he and Samano had been working on, Lane knew there was something there. “I really liked the chord progression, and it instantly made me feel certain things,” Lane tells me. “So we started writing on that at the end of that session and essentially came up with most of the song, ‘Can I Call You Rose?’, within 30 minutes. I think at that point we knew that there was some kind of energy to be pursued between us all.”
Lane, who grew up singing in churches, joined Garcia and Samano, bringing his diverse musical tastes (from Marvin Gaye to Simon & Garfunkel to Nick Hakim), and they named themselves Thee Sacred Souls, an ode to Thee Midniters, Sunny & the Sunliners, and other Chicano soul bands. Then Thee Sacred Souls evolved, incorporating R&B, Motown, doo-wop, and Brill Building girl groups like the Ronettes and the Chiffons, but with a contemporary sound.
“I think, at the end of the day, we’re a very mixed band,” says Samano. “The inspiration of Chicano soul is definitely in the music. But, in terms of different types of soul and music, I’d say the inspirations come from a lot of different places.”
Lane says that while the idea of Chicano soul is important to the band because of their fan base, as a Black man he sees Thee Sacred Souls as a straight-up soul band. “A lot of headlines in the early days of our band were saying we’re like a ‘Chicano soul band,’ which is kind of just false,” he says. “I think it is more helpful to notice that it’s a soul scene and there are Chicano culture influences. But a lot of the bands, some of our contemporaries like Thee Sinseers and the Altons, I think are more closely connected to the Chicano culture. Overall, what I can say about Chicano culture as someone who is technically on the outside of it, I think it’s been a really cool archiver of soul because when you just look at the history of Black Soul, it just kept evolving until it became other things like the R&B that we know today.”
This blending of classic styles on the group’s first album has helped Thee Sacred Souls garner more than 6 million monthly listeners on Spotify. The band has played large-scale festivals—Bonnaroo, Newport Folk, Austin City Limits, and Lollapalooza—and has appeared on NPR’s Tiny Desk, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, CBS Saturday, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and other shows.
Constant touring, of course, has also helped propel the group. The pressure of how to top their first album was on Lane’s mind a lot. “It was interesting because we were on tour when we knew we needed to work on the second record,” he says. “And so for me, it was stressful, but as a singer, a lot of my time I spent warming up throughout the day and trying to get in the right headspace. And I wasn’t really in the headspace to do any writing.”
But Lane says that Garcia—who does a lot of the band’s songwriting—found it comforting to be in various green rooms before shows, noodling on the guitar, experimenting with drums, working out phrases and melodies, forming skeletons of songs. Samano would help flesh out the instrumentation and then, during the brief breaks between touring, Lane would work on lyrics, developing the stories with the rest of the group. Lane says the difference between making the new record and the group’s first was in how those stories were told. “I wasn’t really pulling from my own experiences as much as maybe [on] the first record,” he tells me. “[With] a few songs, like the songs about really trying to figure out my place in this world and the humanity that we share, like ‘On My Mind,’ I was kind of writing from different places, telling other people’s stories, which was a whole new experience for me.”
Now with Got A Story to Tell, Garcia, Samano, and Lane solidify their skill with classic songcraft, a testament to the band’s growth and their deepening connection to the soul music that inspired them. The album’s rich instrumentation—strings, smooth guitar, piano, congas, and horns—is woven into tales of love, struggle, and triumph.
Lead single “Lucid Girl” champions independent women—it’s a song Garcia wrote on Christmas Eve after having trouble sleeping. “I had just come back from hanging out with my family, and I was like, well, maybe I should go into the studio really early before seeing family later on,” he says. “I started on the keys first and kind of came up with that chord progression. And I felt like I needed some heavier drums.” Before leaving to see his family again on Christmas morning, Garcia titled the song with the first words that came to his head, “Lucid Girl,” and then sent it over to Lane and Samano. “Maybe a week later I went into the studio with Josh, and we started talking about what the title means to us and coming up with a storyline for it and wrote the lyrics together.”
In what perhaps is a full-circle, karmic moment for the band, saxophonist Larry Rendon of Thee Midniters makes an appearance on the new album.
Rendon’s daughter contacted the band’s producer on his behalf, asking if he could play on the album. “She reached out to Gabe [Album producer Gabriel Roth] and was just like, ‘Oh, man, I really, really would like to play with them. How can we make that happen?’” says Garcia. “And then Gabe was like, ‘Yo, you guys want him on the record?’ and we’re like, ‘Hell yeah!’”
Samano says having Rendon play on the new album felt like a stamp of approval.
“I’ve also been lucky enough to sit down with Little Willie G., the lead singer of Thee Midnighters,” Samano says. “He’s a fan too. I remember him bringing up when “Weak for Your Love” came out, he had brought out his little Bluetooth speaker and started playing it to show me that it was on his playlist. So it’s pretty cool.”
Thee Sacred Souls are back out on the road for the second leg of their tour. Visit their site for info.
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