D.C. bilingual band got community help with debut album
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Elena & Los Fulanos present Miel Venenosa tonight at Tropicalia
Elena Lacayo, the lead singer, guitarist and banjo player of the DC-based Elena & Los Fulanos fully embraces her bicultural and bilingual identity. Elena was born in New Orleans in the 1980s when her parents fled to the United States for political reasons. She moved back to Nicaragua while in grade school, returning to the States about eight years ago to attend Notre Dame in Indiana before moving to DC. She’s lived here ever since, working for the National Council of La Raza on immigration issues for a period before going on to pursue her musical interests.
Hola Cultura sat down with Elena to talk about her debut album, Miel Venenosa, a testament to her bilingual talent that includes songs in both English and Spanish.
“I feel like a lot of people that didn’t grow up in two cultures think that being fully bilingual and bicultural is impossible, like you can’t possibly fit into two worlds. I don’t even know how to exist if I wasn’t both things at the same time.”
Hola Cultura:What was the inspiration behind this first album?
Elena Lacayo: I really wanted it to showcase the broadest array of my music so far. Something that was really important to me when writing these songs was just to make sure there was some form of language balance. I tend to write more in English, I think mostly because I live in the States and my everyday is in English, but I really wanted to make sure that it was as bilingual as possible.
I do tend to go towards love songs, sometimes I give myself a hard time about it but I’m not sure if I need to. Amor Migrante is a love song, but I decided that instead of it being a love song between two adults, it be from a mother singing to a child that she has left behind in her home country. I worked on immigration issues for five or six years here, so it’s an issue that is really near and dear to me. I really like that song because it tells a story that I think it a very powerful thing to think about—a parent being separated from a child, doing it for their sake, but also sacrificing that relationship because of it.
HC: Growing up did you hear any music from Nicaragua that has influences you now?
EL: Growing up I wasn’t interested in it, quite frankly. I was sort of American, sort of Nicaraguan. I knew how to speak English. I watched MTV. I really liked American music – that was really my jam growing up. I just kind of felt that the traditional folky stuff was kind of boring, but now that I am developing as an artist, I feel like I have a much greater responsibility to go back and revisit that and really integrate it in an authentic way.
HC: You conducted a successful online campaign to fund this album. Can you tell me more about that and about the support you received?
EL: It was really great. I would actually recommend crowdsourcing for anybody who is doing a project for a number of reasons. We did the preparations to launch the campaign sometime late in October and it finished right at the beginning of the year. It really gave me a way to connect with the audience and figure out who was listening and was really passionate about our music. We got a lot of support, we raised $8,000 and our goal was actually $7,000. I was going to do the project anyway so whatever I raised was going to be better than nothing. It was good too because it made me come out of my shell about my music and really made me talk to people about it and it made me perform more. It’s been really encouraging and empowering.
HC: Can you explain what the word “fulano” means and why you included it in the name of your band?
EL: It’s kind of a weird word. It doesn’t sound like a Spanish word so at first I was wondering if it was a Nicaraguan term. But then I just asked a bunch of people. I asked an Argentinean, I asked a Mexican; they knew what it meant. I asked a Colombian; they knew what it meant. I thought, ‘OK, this is universal,’ so I took the name. It’s kind of a word you use for ‘so-and-so.’ So a person whose name I don’t know is ‘fulano.’ Through giving away promotional material I met an Egyptian, and he looks at the poster and he says ‘oh, fulano, like so-and-so.’ And I’m like, ‘you know Spanish?’ He’s like ‘that’s not Spanish, that’s Arabic.’ So, immediately, I Googled it. And sure enough it’s a term that is originally Arabic and came through Spanish, I’m assuming through the Moors.
I wanted to choose something that was sort of bilingual, that’s why we use the ampersand instead of ‘y’ or ‘and.’ I want it to be whatever people want it to be. I think that’s what makes us stand out—that we’re bilingual. It’s always been a quality that I value in myself. I’m fully fluent, fully bicultural, fully bilingual. I feel like a lot of people who didn’t grow up in two cultures think that being fully bilingual and bicultural is impossible, like you can’t possibly fit into two worlds. I don’t even know how to exist if I wasn’t both things at the same time.
HC: Tell me about the album title ‘Miel Venenosa.’
EL: Miel Venenosa is the title track to a song on the album. I used to write songs like a singer-songwriter, because I wrote them before I had a band. I experimented with writing songs onto my computer and then making all of the layers of the song myself. Miel was a whole two-week obsession and relationship. It was kind of crazy. So I wrote it, and I had this idea that eventually became the banjo line. I tried it on guitar a bunch of times but I couldn’t figure out how to play it so I thought I would try it on the banjo and it worked out.
This is an interesting story, one of my favorite artists is Gustavo Cerati of Soda Estereo. They were big in the ’80s, they’re an Argentine band. They’re a behemoth in Latin Rock, basically. So I wrote Miel Venenosa and then I Googled it to see what happened. Gustavo Cerati comes up and I’m like ‘whoa what’s going on.’ So I click on it. Turns out ‘miel venenosa’ is in one of his songs called Fue. I love this song. After I heard it again, I remembered liking this concept of a person, or like a relationship being so sweet but then having this underlying evil thing flowing through that’ll poison you and make you sick and possibly kill you. So that’s where that phrase came from. It’s amazing what stays in your brain and where it comes up. I feel like art is the best thing to influence or inspire other art. You just don’t know where you get all this stuff but you’re constantly receiving.
—Alicia Santana
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