Westmoreland Feels It All
Westmoreland speaks on his debut album, offering a glimpse into the well of loss and love that inspired it.
These days, Zach Alva thinks a lot about the people in his life. How to cherish them. How to be cherished by them. But moreover, how to mourn them once they’re out of reach. His new album Latino Ballroom, is an exercise in the latter. Throughout, he rifles through the compounding grief of the last few years, attempting to come to terms with the passing of his father.
“In that time, everyone was losing something,” he says of the pandemic’s onset. Zach had lost two friends of his own in that initial year, and in 2021, his father, who the album is dedicated to, passed away from kidney failure. “A month after my father, my grandma passed away. Personally I was just experiencing a lot of grief," he says. "Still am. It just doesn’t really stop, you know?”
While the album is often indirect with its underlying subject matter, listening through feels intimate. These songs are uniquely tactile, where you feel placed within them like a visitor. Songs like “Corner Store,” and “Alice Barroom” feel almost like a play-by-play of a scene, circling around something that stirs in its center. The former, echoey like a street emptied by nightfall, takes you from the corner store through the haunting halls of a home. The other leads you through a smoke cloaked pub, the red-glow of neon signs shadowing its various characters. Each song is rich with color and images that the listener is left tracing in its wake.
The place-heavy leanings of these tracks is an attribute that extends to the album title. “Latino Ballroom” is borrowed from the name of a building Zach often passed living in East Texas. “I’d never been inside because it was this big event hall, so like, why would I have? But I used to drive by it all the time,” he says. The selection of it for the album had nothing to do with the songs directly. Rather, something about the name encapsulated the way he felt, with these two words seeming alien to one another, as if derived from different worlds. “I think it resonates even musically,” he says, “Like, I don’t know very many people that make music like mine and look something like me. And that’s strange. I simultaneously feel like I belong to a culture and group of musicians, but when I look around I’m often the only brown person in the room. It’s easy to feel both like I belong and am also a little out of place.”
Still though, he’s been finding bright spots in the connections he’s made through local music. Having just moved back to Seattle after several years in Texas, the first two months of his return to the city were spent familiarizing himself with the local music scene. He was dropping in on something like four shows a week, just to see who was here and what they were playing. From the looks of it now, you’d think he’s been integrated for years. In the last few months he’s shared a stage with plenty of new friends and some of his old PNW heroes like Bryan John Appleby and Damien Jurado. He’s also a standing member in both St. Yuma and Dining Dead, who he’s recently joined as their bass player.
Where Westmoreland allows Zach to traverse the more difficult emotions, he likens the rest of his musical landscape to a playground—a way to experiment with style and genre. Aside from his own bands, he’s been finding a bit of freedom in project hopping and joining acts in need of an extra set of hands, picking up opportunities as they come. “I think last year I got to play with 10 different bands, and this year I’ll probably do more. That’s the cool thing about it—it allows me to get involved with so many different communities of music. It’s brought a lot of really amazing people into my life.”
Prior to Latino Ballroom, Zach had recorded most of Westmoreland’s releases on his own. This time he wanted to do things with a little more intention. “Some people are really good at every piece of it, but I don’t really think I am," he admits. "For this project it was important to me to have help shaping the aspects of it I wasn’t as confident in.” At the time, Zach was still living in Texas, and rounded up a group of seven friends to join him in recording the album at a remote studio. "We all lived there for a week, waking up in this beautiful space. I’d brought my dog too. Every day was just getting up, having coffee, hanging out, and making some music.”
By the time we meet to talk about Latino Ballroom, the album has been complete for some time, but the themes that inspired it are still very much at play in Zach’s life. “A lot of it is just kind of circling,” says Zach. “The grief, loss, thinking about my family a lot and the dynamics.” The album came into focus along these lines. Just a day after his father’s passing, Zach sat with a guitar, plucking out the beginnings of “Machine,” the song that closes out “Latino Ballroom.” It’s an idea that troubles him, seeing this pattern of inspiration sprung forth from the aftermath of personal tragedies. He notes that much of the music he’s making post-Latino Ballroom has been some abstraction surrounding the fallout of his recent divorce. “As much as I want people to like me, and have fun at my shows, this is what I've got right now. I’m pretty unwilling to do things that feel inauthentic to me. And unfortunately, what’s authentic to me right now is all this sappy shit.”
“Hopefully playing them live gives you some new associations,” I offer.
“God, I hope so,” he laughs. “My hope is that it will be healing to put it out and play it.”
While these songs offer a means for Zach to grapple with the reality of the last few years, catharsis might be too resolved of a word for its process. At the outset, the song “Botham Jean,” opens the album brimming with a sense of injustice, searching for some sense of reassurance, and in an absence of clarity, urges you to “feel it all, feel everything.” And it seems like ultimately, that’s what this album seeks to do. These songs are not a cleansing of the years past. There’s no noticeable relief at their conclusions. Just a feeling something has been observed and expressed with a kind of honesty that’s hard to distill in anything but art. They’re patient, like one must be with grief, and the nature of them within the album is often temperamental like the storm that it can become. Zach is weathering it though, these songs are living proof.
Latino Ballroom will be out on all platforms 2/24/23.