Although now based out of the Bay Area, Jacob Aranda was raised in a Latino household in rural Illinois. His musical journey since then has taken in a stint at The Chicago School of Violinmaking, and travelling to Siguenza, Spain to learn how to make classical guitars. His respect for those crafts seems to drip into his own music and the music he makes with others as a frequent collaborator. As a solo artist, he emerged back in 2018 with his debut album, Great Highway, “an expression of hopelessness and longing”. Five years on, for his second record, War Planes, Jacob digs into something a little more personal, exploring ideas of healing intergenerational trauma, rebirth and reflection. Ahead of the album’s September release, today Jacob is premiering his new single, Dream Of Mexico.

Dream of Mexico is one of a number of tracks on War Plane that look back into Jacob’s roots, and the struggles he has inherited, in particular from his education activist and Latino political organizer father. Jacob recalls how “he wouldn’t teach me Spanish. He kept me at a distance from Latino culture while at the same time fighting so hard to carve out a place for Latinos in the US…he didn’t think it was safe. In rural Illinois it wasn’t”. Despite his father’s attempts to protect Jacob from the struggles of his background that too has a knock-on effect, “I truly believed he helped change the culture for the better, the best way he knew how. But the theme of social alienation is ever present, being Mexican in white culture“.

Fittingly the track begins in dreamy musical territory, Jacob accompanied by just an acoustic guitar and an ethereal swirl of electronics, as his slumbering thoughts take him back to Mexico, and the loneliness of not knowing your roots, “it’s lonely what I’ve become when I don’t know where I’m from”. As it progresses the track gradually becomes sharper, as if the picture has come into focus as the propulsive upright bass and shuffling drum beat snap reality into crystal clarity, before textural violins arrive to take the whole thing towards a close, “there’s no home to be had, when you come from a violent past, you just keep running from who you are, you never get very far”.

Read Jacob’s thoughts on the video, and view it for yourself below:

“The video shows me interacting with various artifacts from my childhood that I recently inherited, my father’s diary from when he was 19, several photographs we grew up with, a painting of his, two photographs he had recently acquired showing Chinese laborers building the railroads in Mexico. It all serves as a long meditation on inherited trauma and my family history. “Chino” is a book my father and I read at the same time. It gave us vital context to the racism and genocide my grandfather survived.  The drawings I make run off the page, away from me, disappearing. The struggle to create, the feeling of being haunted, by objects, memories, the weight of history.”

Jacob Aranda on the Dream Of Mexico video

War Planes is out September 1st via Speakeasy Studios SF. For more information on Jacob Aranda visit http://www.jacobaranda.com/.