With all the debate about pot legalisation going on now, my friend Dani Carmona and me had the idea of mixing it up with a more sexual story and experiences with three or four people, which is a very taboo subject but very real too. “This is a throwback to the more casual Calibre and what we were doing in 2010, when we had no shame taking on any topic. It follows a long line of sincere and straightforward love songs which we will never leave behind, because it’s what brings us to the people and it balances out all the crazy things we come up with sometimes.” It’s a ranchera ballad in the typical Calibre 50 style. “This is on the opposite end of the spectrum. So it’s a banda cut with charanga and a little bit of cumbia, which sounds half crazy but it’s really Mexican.” We mix banda and the norteño sound that we’ve always been associated with, but this time we went all the way to the Michoacán rhythms of charanga and huapango, a little bit like the ones that Marco Antonio Solís used in ‘Morenita’. Musically speaking, it’s a very Mexican song.

It’s about old-time romance and how, in a way, we are still doing it the same way because it’s a winning formula-the love letters, the poetry, the flowers-even though it’s all more virtual now. It’s a love song, but the context is different from everything we’ve done before. “The title is a reference to the old school. The pause that the pandemic forced upon us has been a good thing to a point, because we were just going through life way too fast.” Read on as Muñoz details the stories behind Vamos Bien, one song at a time.

“This time we had time on our side and we could work on things that we hadn’t even thought about when we were living on the road. “The pandemic completely changed our creative process,” says the singer-songwriter and accordionist. Amid the corridos, a format they have mastered over the past decade, there is also space for cumbias, ballads and a bolero, as well as one cover song that will surprise many a fan.

Yet the quartet’s new songs explore more terrain than ever before. Vamos Bien returns to the contagious norteño-banda-sinaloense hybrid that has been one of the group’s signatures since 2018’s Mitad y Mitad. “We always try to innovate, to tell different stories in our lyrics and find new ways to talk about love,” Calibre 50’s Edén Muñoz tells Apple Music.

Cover or album calibre 50 vamos bien