The Brenda Vaqueros as told by Kenna Burima

I play keyboards and sing in this band called The Brenda Vaqueros. People ask me all the time what kind of music we play and the only way I can describe it is garage-rock-psychedelic-country. What that actually means is hard to say as I usually leave these kinds of things to our guitarist and vocalist Adam Kamis.He says it’s kinda like Mars Bonfire meets Morricone, or Hazelwood meets Hawkwind. Most of the time I have no idea what Adam is talking about. His musical knowledge is quite vast as is his knowledge of military history, which comes in handy when we have exhausted talking about music.

The other guys in the band are pretty cool too. Daren Powell plays drums. He also plays in another band with me called Woodpigeon. We like to make fun of Woodpigeon at Brenda Vaqueros rehearsals.

Steve Elashuk plays bass. He’s the most famous of the group having played in bands such as The Daggers, Wagbeard, The Neckers, and Falconhawk. There are others but I can’t remember the names right now.

Brent Crosson plays guitar and sings sometimes. He’s the silver fox of the group and usually comes up with crazy ideas like dressing up as robots riding a rocket for our promo photo or dressing up as hobos for a short film called Oil City Showdown we did with award winning filmmaker James Reckseidler.

I’d also like to mention that Oil City Showdown made its International debut at the Calgary International Film Festival in 2007. I think Brent likes to play dress-up, which is fine by me. I had joined the band initially to just play a couple of tunes for the ill-fated covers festival called Moustache Rock at the legendary Night Gallery. Sadly, Moustache Rock failed to launch that year (it was a tough year for the Night Gallery I recall), but I asked the Vaqueros nicely if I could stay on and play keys. They said yes, and since then I’ve learned a lot about garage rock, drinking beer, the genius of Pee-Wee Herman. While we were recording our 4 song EP, we realized that we could drink a lot more beer if we took the time to record a full length. So we went into the basement studio of Cam Hayden of Huge Ear Studios and did just that.

The finished product will be released to little or no fan fare on Friday, May 29th at Broken City. I’m really proud of the record because it features a pretty kick ass Leslie that we hauled into the basement (not the girl, it’s a speaker usually used with Hammonds). Anyway, the only way you can hear the album is if you have a record player. If you don’t have one, Brent Crosson is willing to dub the album onto cassette for you.

The Brenda Vaqueros are: Brent Crosson - vox, guitar, Adam Kamis - vox, guitar, Kenna Burima - vox, keys, shakings, Steve Elaschuk- monster bass, Daren Powell – drumbs