Mobile indie band El Cantador is riding a wave of local recognition after taking home three 2009 awards, including Best Local Band. Bassist Johnny Gwin won Best Area Bass Player, and frontman Heath Underwood was named Best Area Singer, capping a steady rise for a group that started as one songwriter’s home recordings and has grown into one of the most talked-about acts on the Mobile music scene.
For a band that has only been playing under its current name for a few years, the sweep of honors landed quickly. El Cantador did not simply win a single category — the group’s rhythm section and its lead voice were each singled out alongside the band itself, a rare combination in a market crowded with cover acts, church worship teams and weekend bar bands. The recognition has raised the band’s profile just as it prepares for its most ambitious stretch yet: a fall run of out-of-town shows, a hometown slot at Bayfest, and the start of work on a full-length album.
The story of the band begins with Underwood, who started writing songs as a teenager but says the material did not take real shape until his early twenties. Like many songwriters who grow up along the Gulf Coast, he spent years letting ideas accumulate — fragments of melodies, half-finished verses, home recordings captured with whatever equipment was at hand — before the writing matured into something he considered ready for an audience.
At the end of 2006, Underwood reconnected with an old bandmate, drummer Sean, and the two recorded a batch of songs at Backdoor Studios, Sean’s family studio. The sessions gave the material its first real form. Six of those recordings became El Cantador’s first EP, loosely titled “Orange,” a release that introduced the band’s early, quieter sound and gave the project a name and a direction after years of existing mainly as sketches and demos.
Gwin, who had previously played with Underwood in the rock group Morris Minor, joined on bass soon after. His arrival reunited two musicians who already understood each other’s instincts, and it completed the low end of a band that, at that stage, was still finding out what it wanted to sound like. The Morris Minor connection also meant El Cantador inherited a small following of local listeners who had tracked Gwin and Underwood through their earlier project.
The lineup settled into its current form in July 2008 when multi-instrumentalist Melody Duncan, who plays violin and sings, came on board after a couple of earlier members cycled through the group. Duncan’s addition mattered more than a simple personnel change. Her violin and harmony vocals gave the band a second melodic voice and a texture that distinguished El Cantador from guitar-bass-drums acts playing the same Gulf Coast club circuit, and since her arrival the group has operated with a stable roster for the first time in its short history.
An Evolving Sound
The band describes its songwriting as having shifted over time, from quieter, contemplative early material toward more experimentation with electric textures, noise and studio layering. The change is audible when the “Orange” EP is placed beside the songs the band is now playing live: what began as intimate, acoustic-leaning writing has been stretched into arrangements that lean on amplified atmosphere, dynamic swings and production ideas that only became possible once the group began rehearsing and recording as a full unit.
Underwood still handles most of the songwriting, but the group says the full band now shapes how newer songs come together. Rather than arriving at rehearsal as finished compositions, newer material is increasingly treated as a starting point — a melody or lyric from Underwood that Gwin, Sean and Duncan rework collectively until it carries the imprint of all four players. The approach has slowed nothing down, members say, but it has made the catalog more varied, and it reflects the confidence of a band that no longer has to guess at its own identity.
Members point to acts like Broken Social Scene, Colour Revolt, Spoon, Arcade Fire, Sonic Youth and TV on the Radio among their influences. The list says a great deal about where the band sees itself. Broken Social Scene and Arcade Fire represent the large-ensemble, emotionally maximalist end of indie rock; Sonic Youth and TV on the Radio point toward the band’s growing appetite for noise and texture; Spoon and Colour Revolt — the latter a Mississippi band with a strong Southeastern following — suggest an affinity for tension-and-release song craft that translates well to a live room.
Asked which song best introduces El Cantador to a first-time listener, the band pointed to “Glean,” calling it a song that captures their sound lyrically and melodically and that helped point the way toward newer material. For a group in transition, having a single track that summarizes both where the band has been and where it is going is a practical asset — it gives new listeners reached through the awards coverage an obvious entry point into the catalog.
Fans can also catch newer songs, including “Dull Age,” “Summer Dog” and “If Heaven (redux),” at upcoming shows. The band has been using live sets as a proving ground for the material, working arrangements out in front of audiences before committing them to tape. That habit of testing songs on stage has become part of the group’s working method, and it means the set lists on the fall run will double as a preview of the album sessions ahead.
Within Mobile, the band’s rise has tracked with a broader stretch of visibility for the city’s original-music scene. Local awards and year-end lists tend to reward cover bands and tribute acts that fill clubs on weekends, so a hometown original indie band collecting multiple honors registers as a notable shift — and it has come while El Cantador’s members have continued to hold down day jobs and rehearse on evenings and weekends like any other working Gulf Coast group.
Fall Tour Dates and a New Album
El Cantador has booked fall shows in Oxford, Athens and Atlanta, plus a hometown stop at Bayfest in Mobile. The routing gives the band its first extended look at audiences outside the immediate Gulf Coast, hitting college-town rooms in north and northeast Alabama before the trip builds toward the Atlanta market, the largest music city within easy driving distance of Mobile and a traditional proving ground for Southeastern indie acts looking to widen their reach.
The Bayfest appearance carries particular weight. The downtown Mobile festival is the Gulf Coast’s largest annual music event, drawing tens of thousands of attendees across multiple stages each fall, and a slot there puts a hometown band in front of exactly the casual, walk-up audience that award recognition attracts. For El Cantador, the set functions as a homecoming and an introduction at once — a chance for listeners who have read the award headlines but never seen the band to finally hear the songs in person.
The band says it is about to begin recording a full-length album, taking the songs it has been testing on stage into the studio for the first time as a stable four-piece. The project will be the group’s first proper LP, and it arrives at a moment when the band’s profile is higher than it has ever been. Building the record around material already road-tested on the fall dates is a deliberate strategy: it reduces studio time and cost, and it means the versions committed to tape will already reflect how the songs behave in front of a live crowd.
Timing the sessions around the tour also reflects the practical economics of a young independent band. Gulf Coast acts rarely have label backing to fund extended studio stays, so El Cantador’s plan — play the songs, refine them, then record — is the standard path for regional groups trying to produce a full-length record without going into debt. The award recognition should help on that front as well, drawing bigger crowds to the fall shows and, with them, the door money that will help pay for studio time.
For Mobile listeners, the fall schedule amounts to several chances to catch the band at different stages of its development — early in the run in out-of-town rooms, at the height of the festival season at Bayfest, and in the studio shadow of the album sessions. Few local acts get a stretch that combines a clean sweep of area awards, an interstate tour, a hometown festival slot and a debut LP in a single season, and El Cantador’s members have made it clear they intend to make the most of it.
Whether the record and the tour convert the band’s local momentum into a regional following is the open question the next year will answer. What is already settled is the group’s standing at home: a Mobile band that began as one songwriter’s home recordings now holds three of the area’s top music honors, a settled lineup, a growing songbook and a full-length record on the horizon — with Bayfest still to come.