Sometimes taking the long way home can be a great way to find appreciation for otherwise overlooked details along the way. For Houston born and Austin based musician Nick Diaz, otherwise known as Buenos Diaz, the lengthy journey toward his new album Fox Street Blues saw him returning to where he began.
“That was a big deal to make a blues record,” says Diaz who will be celebrating his record release this Friday, October 6 at Shoeshine Charley’s Big Top Lounge. The album is available to stream and purchase now.
“I worked on that record for years and really diving into a really deeper study of songs,” describes Diaz who grew up sneaking into Houston’s blues clubs to catch a glimpse and hear the gritty guitar sounds of our city’s scene along with digesting the Sunday Blues programming on KPFT.
Diaz took the name for the album from the street his mother grew up in on the East End with the house serving as the perfect backdrop for the album’s cover and a great visual matching the vibe of the album and shot by another Houston bluesman, The Mighty Orq.
“I grew up listening to old blues classics. I really wanted to nail it stylistically,” he says of his collection of songs which he selected from songs written between 2006 to 2012. Diaz took the old tracks, deconstructed them and built them back up smothered in the blues adding a few new tracks along the way.
Historically, blues albums and blues players often are heavy on the covers serving as a way to pay homage to elder bluesmen. Initially Diaz found this to be a tempting approach but thankfully received some encouragement from blues guitarist Mike Zito to focus on originals only including one cover in the end, Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing.”
“This record has a nice trajectory of my timeline as a blues artist and rock and roll musician too,” says Diaz. “It’s such an important music to me and to blues purists and fans that you don’t want to come in short. Blues is powerful music and if it’s weak, it’s not powerful at all.”
“This record has a nice trajectory of my timeline as a blues artist and rock and roll musician too.”
In Fox Street Blues Diaz nailed it track after track tapping into the down home blues in his songwriting and guitar playing. Songs like “I Got The Blues” and “Bourbon Street Blues” embody the old bluesman longing for the open road and a quest for human connections with the blues serving as the glue that brings the people together no matter where they are from.
“Take that back all the way to the kings of the blues playing juke joints, they were always in the poorest parts of town and people would go there to leave it all behind, unwind to the music dance. They were just leaving the hard times behind for a second and that’s what that music did. It’s the backbone of rock and roll, it’s the roll part. Everybody has hard times, everybody can relate to it.”
Diaz also gets down on “Where’s The Funk In The Neighborhood” where he questions the gradual sterilization of Austin, particularly the South Congress area with its rise in high end stores and loss of eccentricity it was once known for.
Diaz’s return to the blues though logical is still surprising as his solo career has seen him making more indie pop and lo-fi rock records. “It definitely started with the blues,” says Diaz of his musical path. “It’s kind of wild because I definitely have gone into outer space but it’s fun to come back.”
With Fox Street Blues serving as a sort of departure and simultaneous homecoming for Diaz, he enjoyed writing music with the confines of a genre finding it a challenging yet fulfilling exercise in songwriting.
“When you narrow it down to a genre specific record, it’s easier for other people to catch onto it and it already makes me think we are going to have to make another blues record that’s cool because it’ll allow me to expand and explore and do it within that parameter.”
Typically, Diaz is busy on the road touring with Texas legend Alejandro Escovedo so finding time for this project came in ebbs and flows between tours and other projects. In the end, the time it took to make Fox Street Blues worked out just right as Diaz was finally ready to get back to the start.
“It always is full circle for me,” says Diaz. “I go out, travel the world, I get to play and do whatever I’m doing but man, I come home and I come home. My mom is still in the house I grew up in here in the East Side so I think it’s always a pretty nice grounding for everything.”
Buenos Diaz will perform on Friday, October 6 at Shoeshine Charley’s Big Top Lounge, 3714 Main, doors at 8 p.m, $10. Fox Street Blues is available for streaming and purchase now.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2023.
