Chattanooga Times Free Press entertainment reporter Casey Phillips spoke with Steve Berlin, saxophonist/keyboardist with the Grammy Award-winning Los Angeles Chicano band Los Lobos, about what’s kept the band lineup so solid, writing for film scores and why they struggle with writing new material.
CP: Los Lobos is fast approaching 40 years together as a band. That’s a pretty big milestone. Has that been at all on the band’s mind lately?
SB: You know, it’s not honestly anything we think about that much. (Laughs.) I think one of the keys of doing this for so long is not thinking about doing it. Not really, it’s certainly not come up in the conversations we’ve had, and if it did, it wouldn’t last very long.
CP: Looking back, is there anything about the band’s development that surprises you, in terms of the ways in which you’ve developed or how your approach to music has changed?
SB: Again, it’s one of those things we don’t think about all that much. I guess somewhere around the “Kiko” era, we sort of realized that we had a mildly unique toolbox. (Laughs.) Taking that and realizing that we had something that was kind of unique, once we figured that out that, we figured out, “Hey this is kind of cool.”