Calexico's Favorite Musical Thrift-Store Finds

(Above [L-R]: Calexico's Volker Zander, Jacob Valenzuela, Joey Burns, John Convertino, Martin Wenk, Paul Niehaus. Photo by Dennis Kleiman.)

Every Calexico album is full of unusual instruments and Garden Ruin is no exception. Behind its acoustic-based songs, listeners will find trumpets, cellos, vibes, banjos and a glockenspiel.

Where do they get all this stuff? Anywhere they can find it cheap. We asked singer/multi-instrumentalist Joey Burns about the band’s five greatest low-budget discoveries.

1. Emerson Answering Machine: “A lot of the songs on our first album were recorded on that machine using the ‘outgoing message’ feature,” says Burns. “That Emerson was the first thing that allowed us to get our sound recorded and play it back.”

2. California guitar: “A friend bought the guitar for me for a dollar, but when I played it, I noticed a buzz coming from behind the bridge,” says Burns. “I wound up putting a folded dollar bill back there, which deadened the buzz and doubled the value of the guitar.”

3. No-name violin: “I played a gig in Prague as part of Giant Sand where we weren’t allowed to take the money we made out of the country, so I used it to buy a cheap violin,” Burns explains.

4. '60s Italian accordion: “We bought this great old accordion in Boulder, Colo., and have been using it ever since,” Burns says. “Recently, it started falling apart, so our bass player dissected it and gave it new life by using the reeds as a makeshift bass harmonica.”

5. 1950s blonde K1 Upright Bass: “I bought this from a pawn shop in Salt Lake City, then realized I had to make space for it on the bus,” Burns says laughing. “I wound up giving it my bunk. It slept there for the rest of the tour while I was on the couch.”

(To read Paste's in-depth article on Calexico's Burns and Convertino, click here.)