La Fonda At The Dinner Table
Photo by Rachel Bennett.
On a chilly January evening I’m surrounded by six people, each of them perched on chairs or reclining on a stiff couch. Five of them regularly play music together in a band called La Fonda. The sixth is named Amado, and he’s barely two years old. He’s sitting semi-patiently on the lap of his mother, a woman named Valerie Topacio, and he’s making music all on his own - the kind that tends to incite both joy and fear in intermittent, primal measure.
As the rest of the group talks about their upcoming record, We Are Infinite, Amado occasionally makes himself known. He babbles and exclaims in that familiar proto-language once owned by all of us in our early lives. His tiny hand clutches a toy car the color of a robin’s egg, and at times he bangs it in blissful revelry against the side of a wooden dining table. At some point he signals to his mother that he’s hungry, and she instinctively responds by lifting her shirt to breastfeed him as her sister, Veronica, talks about the mordant background behind the record’s title track.
VALERIE (On Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart)
Her sharing so much of herself
about her mom
and what she went through with
getting an abortion and
having it debilitate her from traveling
I've thought about that deeply.
What it means to have a child
when you're a musician or you want to travel the world.
having somebody tied to you.
It was so beautiful.
In my years of interviews with musicians, children have never been part of the process. I didn’t know how I would feel working with this potential source of chaos, but Amado is a pleasure to be around. Well-behaved and inquisitive, he exudes an innocence and a wonder at the world. When the interview ends (or, rather, when it slides out of formality) he plops down onto the hardwood floor and rolls his toy car back, watching it careen around furnitures and structures that yet tower over him, observably lost in a vivid, uncorrupted imagination.
What strikes me about the Topacio sisters, as I listen to their words about the making of the record and about La Fonda in general, is how much of that youthful wonder seems to have remained intact in both of them. They speak effusively about the magic that comes from being in this particular group of people. You’d need a certain kind of magic, after all, to propel you through the typical trials of being in a local band. In 2023 La Fonda will have been doing it for for eight years, and it’s only just now that they’re poised to receive a larger sense of recognition from the nation. I can sense their palpable excitement as the fruits of their hard labor - from the recording of this new album to the tireless organization of the annual Belltown Bloom - are finally ready to harvest.
The rest of the band vocally follow suit in their enthusiasm. Guitarist Jesse Cole speaks at length about the process of recording We Are Infinite, which took place over several months at Hall of Justice Recordings. Bassist Bryan Dever is the time capsule, recounting memories both old and new, like the time he dressed up as a hippo for the band’s Day In Day Out DJ set last year. That was also the day we met. I remember him backstage sweatily emerging from the cheap plastic suit like that scene in the Ace Ventura sequel, looking like he had nearly killed himself from heat exhaustion.
The band’s newest addition, drummer Jacob Whinihan, perhaps best exemplifies the ineffability of the band’s inner alchemy. His participation in the group started hard and fast; only five practices after joining, he played a sold-out show at the 2019 Belltown Bloom and left on a three-week tour right after.
JACOB
Honestly, they were strangers to me.
It was a baptism of fire.
I'm so glad though.
I love these people.
A band need only weigh a few mutual ideas about music, maybe inhabit a dysfunction or two that allows the music to gel. This group feels more like a family, a description that implies their involvement in each other’s lives transcends the practice space. To them, playing music is not an obligation as much as it is a privilege. The enjoyment they share on every tour, at every show, is as plainly obvious as the enjoyment on Amado’s face as he basks in the simple pleasures of living, tiny toy car rolling by.
The backdrop of We Are Infinite is a tapestry of the band’s history, so it’s worth it to start at the beginning. Because as much as La Fonda is spiritually a family, real blood ties lie at its core.
-Valerie and Veronica are Filipino-American sisters who have lived in the greater Seattle area for nearly their entire lives. Valerie, the older of the two, entered the world a resident of Alameda, California, until her parents relocated to the greater Seattle area in her infancy. Shortly after, her mother gave birth to Veronica in Capitol Hill. The two spent their childhoods in Mountlake Terrace, a suburban area north of the city proper, sandwiched between Shoreline and Lynnwood.
-A small but significant discrepancy in age, among other things, caused them to naturally drift apart as they entered adulthood. Valerie eventually moved eastward to Spokane and lived there for five years, leaving Veronica back in Seattle. But in the process of earning their sea legs, both women found their individual lives unsatisfying, even treacherous.
VALERIE
Veronica and I
we weren't close.
We were estranged because
we were working
we were in school
we were in relationships.
We were trying to survive ourselves
by ourselves.
-One day, at the start of 2016, Valerie received a phone call from Veronica. She spoke at length about the distress of her environment and her dissatisfaction with her life in general. The sentiment rang too true for Valerie, prompting her to relocate back to the city and reconnect with her sister. Within a month the two moved in together, landing a typically pricey apartment in Belltown right near the old Crocodile on 2nd Avenue, and began working on music.
-The Belltown apartment would become a haven for the sister’s creative endeavors. It was at the Crocodile, during a Night Moves show just weeks after they moved in, where they ran into Jesse, a familiar face from their school days. They offered their apartment for the trio to jam, and after a few sessions with an accompanying drummer the idea of a band began to bubble to the surface.
-After renting a space at the Old Rainier Brewery and hiring Bryan as a bassist through Tinder (“We would literally swipe right to anyone in their profile pictures holding an instrument,” said Veronica in an interview with The Evergrey), the group started the long process of finding their voice as a unit.
Jesse Cole:
I’ll always feel like this band is a journey, and this record is the story of the band. It’s a story that’s being written every second.
-That process has taken them to places not most bands dare to go. Though they’ve released an EP (the four-song Good Love) and an LP (the ten-track New Self Old Ways) since their founding in 2016, they’ve practiced, played, promoted, and toured consistently. Most of their organizational efforts come from the sisters themselves, who treat it like a full-time job. In the early days, the duo would work full-time jobs to scrounge rent and spend their free time going to shows, talking to people, and raising interest in their music. Their apartment’s proximity to several Belltown venues, from the aforementioned Crocodile to the Rendezvous and Ohana, allowed them to easily network with musicians both local and national. They and the band have since become a well-known local presence, lifting up other voices in the process.
-Those efforts have recently culminated in Belltown Bloom, a local music festival with aims to platform primarily femme and queer acts. The festival began as Belltown Bash in 2019, and though its momentum was cut short by the COVID pandemic, this May will mark its third year in operation. Last year’s Belltown Bloom saw the sisters triumphantly landing lauded indie band Alvvays as a two-day headliner; this year sees grunge titans L7, Russian polemics Pussy Riot, and L.A. firebrands Mannequin Pussy as bill leaders. The festival makes the Topacio sisters an uncommon force in the Seattle scene, displaying both a passion for live performance and the chutzpah to organize it into something so audacious.
-Recently, the sisters left the 8-to-5 grind to run a booth called Delusional Bird Shop at the Fremont Market. Every Sunday they set up shop, selling Y2K-era clothing to Gen Zers and others interested in the currently-chic retro fashion. The transition has turned the two into full-on entrepreneurs who devote their energy toward their music and their business, a tireless prospect that’s nonetheless extremely fulfilling to both of them. And of course, Valerie also has Amado, and the flexibility of being a musician and a business owner allows her room to tend to his needs, even if it’s yet another full-time job.
VERONICA
Valerie and I
we always call ourselves
"delusional birds."
Anytime we start something new
every time we come up with an idea
it feels delusional.
How do they manage it all? In an era when it’s getting tougher and tougher to make a living on music, how do they wake up every morning and decide to keep going? There’s no way to say for sure, but during our talk I sense a pure passion behind their words, along with a gratitude in understanding where they were and how far they’ve come. There’s not a moment where they, and their bandmates, don’t outwardly project graciousness for their circumstances. I watch Valerie gets caught up in the recall as she lets out an ardent torrent about the band’s charmed origins, Amado still strapped to her chest.
In its numerous epiphanies about touring life and the distance of dire pasts, We Are Infinite channels that gratitude. It makes its presence known right at the start on opening track “The Calling,” where the sisters harmonize on musings about the hustle and the reality they’ve been drawn to. In its pristine guitar work and swirling atmosphere, the vibe they land on immediately is “dream rock,” and you can surmise what that might sound like. But that label also earns multiple meanings. To pursue creativity as a career is to chase a dream, and We Are Infinite documents La Fonda committing to that chase.
The recording sessions were helmed by Mike Vernon Davis, whose name you might already recognize after the twin successes of Great Grandpa’s masterwork Four of Arrows and Pool Kids’ well-received self-titled album. Davis has made himself known for enveloping his clients’ compositions in lush productions, and what he adds to La Fonda’s music makes the distance between their EP and this LP almost unfathomable. The brooding moods of “Kaleidoscope” and “Poison” feels that much more palpable, and the guitar pauses in the muted “Salt Lake City” feel like ravines. Perhaps his best work here is in calibrating the sisters’ vocals harmonies, already a key element of the band, for maximum effect; hear how they come together in anthemic fashion on the chorus of “New Mexico,” a pop track that bounces comfortingly like a van on a gravel road.
According to the band, Davis contributed much more than sound. As a multi-instrumentalist, he helped workshop songs in the studio, often working late nights as the band juggled unformed ideas around. The easy rapport between him and the band was undeniably helped by Jacob’s familiarity with Davis as a musician; in the past they had played together as part of the sprawling lineup of SEACATS and its prog-folk splinter project, Talktin and Easy. But Davis is also simply a stellar “producer,” a title that goes beyond the engineering duties required to make a good-sounding record.
Take “Living in the Amazon,” an ode to the city creative and the corporate culture that undermines them. Davis asked the band for audio or video of the band to introduce the song, and Bryan responded with a video he had secretly recorded of the band eating dinner at his house in Ballard. The conversation, the clinking of forks on plates, captures the band in a candid moment that implicitly contextualizes the struggle illustrated in the song’s narrative.
JESSE
Food is a big thing for us.
I think with a lot of things in life
with people eating around a dinner table
you kind of let go of all the bullshit.
VERONICA
The audio starts with Jesse going,
“So how is everyone's day?"
We're all grinding
we have our nine to fives
(some of us still do)
and this life can just be so tiring
and yet we still make the time
no matter how tired we are
to show up.
Davis’ hand in the making of We Are Infinite is clear, but the rest comes from the group’s ability to transform songs from nascent skeletons into full-bodied arrangements. The process to make each song starts with a series of lyrics and chords from the sisters and continues as Jesse, Bryan and Jacob fill in the gaps with their instruments. This makes La Fonda a distinctly democratic band from a compositional standpoint; whatever you’re listening to, it’s undoubtedly a group effort.
“We Are Infinite,” for instance, traveled quite a long way from its origins. One late night, mired in personal turmoil, Veronica found herself drug-addled and on the cusp of self-harm. She decided instead to open up her voice memo app and freestyle, spilling words about being exhausted and jaded with her surroundings, and yearning to return to the carefree limitlessness of her earlier self. The band took this raw material and worked it into a slinky, affecting track anchored by a switch between the minor-key verse and a major-key chorus, reflecting the shift between a turbulent present and a placid past.
VERONICA
I’m so glad that I saved it
because I would've been
too fucked up
to remember it.
That classic dilemma - living a live of creativity in a cold, cruel reality - forms the crux of We Are Infinite. The record functions like a cosmic war between these two sides, and almost every track feels like a tug in one of these directions. Tellingly, the lighter fare (like “New Mexico” and “Salt Lake City”) take place on the road, in transit, in the distance. The album’s darkest moments contend with what’s being left in that distance: a toxic relationship (“Poison”), an addiction (“Kaleidoscope”), or the amalgamative weight of life (“We Are Infinite”). And, at the end, there’s “Spokane Views,” a track so plainly powerful it makes the entire record feel like a vessel for its delivery.
The seeds of the track come entirely from Valerie, who conceptualized the track right after Covid cancelled a tour in the spring of 2020. Two months after the cancellation, as the pandemic hit the brakes on the band, she discovered she was pregnant. The discovery threw her into a tailspin, forcing her to reevaluate her life and the value systems she had once taken for granted. In the flood of emotions that resulted, using chords played by her partner at the time, she wrote about the phone call that brought her and her sister together as musicians. It would become the first track written for the new record, and at the Whidbey Island apple orchard the band fleshed it out into a resulting six-minute epic.
“Spokane Views” opens slowly with oceanic guitar, like a sunrise after a ruthless night. Valerie’s voice enters in reminiscences, and gradually the band add measured touches of synth, background vocals, and propulsive drums to the momentum. The song becomes a masterclass in climax-building: the choruses are less refrains than engines that propel the song forward, and each element, from the ascending keyboard arpeggiations to the introduction of a high harmony, add to the tension. It crescendoes and plateaus and crescendoes again, the sisters full-throated in unison, until the tsunami finally breaks in a cathartic double-time rush of guitar strums and cymbal crashes until resting on a lingering chord, a long-fading sunset.
VALERIE
I yearned to be home.
I missed my parents
I missed Veronica
I missed everything
and thank God I moved back because
what would I be doing in Spokane now?
I happened to be at the Nectar Lounge show where La Fonda debuted the song for the first time. It made for an obvious closer, and the force of its impact hushed the audience before inciting rapturous applause. Perhaps more than any of their songs, “Spokane Views” details the potential of La Fonda as a musical powerhouse, and yet its potency is bottled lightning, its provenance borne from a fortunate turn of events yet honed through years of dedication to the craft of songwriting. If the band claims they are infinite, that song is Exhibit A.
Finally, after about an hour, we end our interview. Or, rather, I just stop the recording. Nobody wants to stop talking, and there’s too much to talk about. Besides, there’s an impetus for the entire band coming over to my house, and its because my roommate Kelsey - a longtime friend of the Topacios - wanted to cook us all dinner. The entire time we’re discussing the record, a delectable Thai curry simmers in a pot mere feet away. Halfway through, I get a text from Kelsey asking if she can sneak in quietly and finish the dish.
This is how my time with La Fonda ends, us all circled around an island table savoring bowls of warm jasmine rice tinted by curry spice, bouncy tofu and tender vegetables. Some of my roommates emerge from their rooms to join in, and the room quickly becomes a buzzing hive of activity. At one point, Valerie separates from the pack to place her child down on the ground and let him roam, and Amado happily obliges. He crawls across the crimson rug to a spot in front of a replica pump organ, rolls his toy car back and lets it loose, watching it zoom toward some unknown destination.
Phot by Rachel Bennett.