After a successful appearance at the Rock Al Parque Music Festival in Bogota Colombia this past weekend, De La Tierra (DLT) is gearing up for their U.S. Debut starting off at the Regency Room in San Francisco on September 1st and continuing through some of the most important music cities in the U.S.
When Sr. Flavio (Fabulosos Cadillacs), Alex González (Maná), Andreas Kisser (Sepultura) and Andrés Jiménez (A.N.I.M.A.L. / DMente) announced that they were joining forces to play heavy metal, many people laughed and they were ridiculed in the press and music blogs, but after the their self titled album, De La Tierra, came out; things changed, people realized that De La Tierra were playing real music and this wasn’t just a whim of 4 music super starts, these were 4 music lovers who have humbly put together one of the best albums of the year and have earned the respect of not only the music fans, the Latin press, but even the Anglo heavy metal community is now curious about this band and their impact has been so strong that even Metallica invited them to share the stage on their South American tour.
To learn more about the U.S. Tour and what has transpired in this first year of De La Tierra, we spoke via telephone from Miami, FL with drummer Alex González and here is an excerpt of our conversation:
Al Borde: Tell us how the band dealt with the initial bad reception your announcement of the band had?
Alex Gonzalez: We never cared about what people said, whenever something new comes out, there is always prejudice, many people are close minded and don’t have the capacity to understand new ideas or see that we were just 4 musicians and friends of many years who love metal and had wanted to work together for a long time and finally the time was right and we did it.
Once the album came out, many skeptics changed their mind about De La Tierra, but there still some who still had doubts, how did that make you feel?
The first five shows were very important so people could see us and then they realized that we were the real deal. Playing the Vive Latino Festival, people began to see that it wasn’t just a myth and we had a great reception, then we opened 4 shows for Metallica in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Paraguay and the Metallica fans also took us in as one of their own, so we are very humbled and we really appreciate all the support of the fans, the press, bloggers and the heavy metal community.
Since you mention Metallica, how was it to share the stage with probably the biggest heavy metal band in the world?
It was definitely one of the best experiences of my career, they were really great to us and so was their crew. Andreas had shared stages with Metallica with his band Sepultura, so there was already a friendship there and It was great to hang out with their bassist Robert Trujillo who is a great guy and the same with James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich with whom I was able to have great conversations about drumming and I just hope we can work together again in the not too distant future.
With the promising start of the band, are there future plans for De La Tierra?
Yes, we are actually throwing around ideas about a new album for the end of 2015. We’ve had a great time recording and playing together, we have a great chemistry on stage and I think it shows with the sound that we are creating so we definitely want to keep it going, but we are all still working in our original bands and projects, so it takes some careful planning and maneuvering.
To end the interview, we had some of our readers send us some questions and one of them was, “how did you come up with the name De La Tierra?”
When we decided to put the band together, we all decided we would all come up with names for the band and then we would decide the best one of all the suggestions and Andreas came up with De La Tierra and we all liked it right away. We asked him what it meant and he explained that “De La Tierra” (from the land) is Latin America, the land where we come from, where we have made our careers and Latin America is part of our culture, so we thought the concept was very deep because it exemplifies a positive union of our Latin culture.
De La Tierra will be playing the Fonda Theater in Hollywood on August 31st and to stay in touch with what is going on with the band, you can visit their official website at www.delatierramusic.com and Facebook.
De La Tierra – U.S. TOUR
September 1 – San Francisco, CA – Regency Room
September 3 – Houston, TX – House of Blues
September 4 – Atlanta, GA – The Masquerade
September 5 – Miami, FL – Grand Central
September 6 – New York, NY – Stage 48
September 7 – Chicago, IL – House of Blues
