From the violence of Ciudad Juárez to a quiet sonic refuge: Mexico’s folk auteur turned geographical trauma into a global phenomenon…

I met walking on sand, surrounded by arid mountains, cacti and the blue of a blurred sky. The border. I met him as a 17-year-old kid who sings with the voice of a man over fifty. Worn out, like his acoustic guitar, after drinking so much pulque and suffering so much loss.

When an independent label from his home state of Chihuahua, Eidan Box Records, released his debut ‘Mix Pa’ Llorar En Tu Cuarto’ (2018), something cracked inside the Mexican sonic landscape. That fragility, that lost love he portrayed in the video for ‘Fuentes de Ortiz’, allowed a society that tends to celebrate pain rather than feel it to let itself cry a little. In silence, in the privacy of its room.

“I’ve always lived on the edges,” he tells me on a video call as he walks through the streets of Paris, far from the sand, hours before starting his European tour. “That’s not necessarily bad, or dangerous. In Juárez, for example, I was on the edge. I could see the border from my bedroom window and there came a point where there was no noise anymore. You just see the sky, the land, and that’s it.”

He grew up in an era of expansion. Before Mexico’s nearshoring boom, which has turned the north of the country into the main factory for US consumption, he remembers that everything around him was barely taking shape.

“I lived in Juárez until I was nine, on the edges, in a housing development they were barely building. My primary school was under construction too, I had to go to school in a portable cabin… You know how it’s all the rage now for people to make shows out of containers? Something like that.”

He remembers the emptiness fondly: the silence, the clear skies and the dust the wind lifts, within those spaces of solitude that used to exist in that limbo, that boundary point between Mexico and the United States.

“I’d catch the bus, just a little kid. And when I got to school I’d realise I was literally on the edge: there was nothing but the school.”

Today the north is very different. Factories from all over the world have set up in these places to produce cheaply, transport even more cheaply and destroy the silence that was once there. They say the region will become the new China. The machinery that will feed the rest of the planet. An economic boom that took away our peace, though there wasn’t much of that back then either.

Ed remembers a moment that stayed printed in his memory.

“I lived in Juárez during Calderón’s presidency and everything you’re telling me happened there too. Beheaded bodies in the street, corpses hanging from bridges,” he says about the months when a criminal group took over his city. “I mainly left Juárez because they burned a car belonging to my family,” he adds, looking up at the sky, the Parisian sky which, according to the news, should be lit up by violent protests, but which is at peace. At peace… at least to Mexican eyes.

In some northern Mexican states, it’s common for criminal groups to leave their mark on local elections. Kidnappings, intimidation, identity theft, seizure and burning of ballot boxes. They do whatever it takes to get the candidate of their choosing elected.

“My mum was asked for her voter ID for I don’t know what the fuck and she refused. That night they came and burned the car. It was about one or two in the morning, they put it right at the entrance and if we walked past there, if it exploded or something, there was trouble,” he says, so they decided to “climb over the wall to the house at the back, with a neighbour who was a mate.”

His sonic universe began to make sense. His city wasn’t just about to become the industrial force of the West; it was also becoming an integral part of drug trafficking into the United States and arms trafficking into Mexico.

Around him, the rise of Corridos Alterados was in full swing, narco culture, the normalisation of violence, with artists like Régulo Caro, El Komander and Gerardo Ortiz, who began singing epics about the cartels. Precursors, in a sense, of the Corridos Tumbados that have taken Mexico and the world by surprise in recent years. Music that today both Mexico and Ed Maverick love.

“It was shop music, you know? If they send you to the shop as a kid for cheese or something for breakfast, that’s normally what I’d hear,” he says. “I was Christian until I was 12 and anything that wasn’t morally correct resonated with me too much,” he adds.

In many Corridos Alterados, the kind of violence inflicted on his mother and his family is celebrated as a display of the power that drug traffickers hold over the rest of the Mexican population.

“I was very repressed in many of my tastes and passions, but it also drew me in. There was a strange contradiction,” he says. “The first time I heard a corrido alterado, it felt like sin. It was very destructive for me. I wouldn’t label it that way, but since I was Christian, it’s the only relatable feeling there. It was like: man, this is forbidden. I listen to it and I know it’s not right.”

However, he attributes his feelings more to his inexperience at the time than to the music itself.

“I think the fact that violence and the perversion of the world were hidden from me makes you get very frightened when you encounter it.”

Construction. The city, the factories, the war on drugs. Everything was under construction. Like Ed Maverick. As a child, finding something to hold on to in a very concrete and very Mexican space.

“As a kid, what I wanted to hear the most was my family. When I got to my grandmother’s house, she’d put on romantic music. 102.1. Seventies music, beautiful, romantic, lots of strings, interesting synthesisers, all of that,” he describes, as I imagine his grandmother’s house.

Mexican grandmothers. The archetype has become a meme. Strong women who enjoy keeping everything tidy in their home, who can laugh but also scold their grandchildren. A in hand and all the food you could want. Walls with floral prints, golden frames with family photos, the plastic still covering the television, the Pope’s blessing on a sheet of paper.

“She knows how to be comfortable and that comfort reflects a hell of a lot on the people around her,” he says, with tenderness. “That’s what I felt when I was with her. It was silence, and if music came on, it was the calmest in the world. It was order. Order, plain and simple.”

Far from the violence, from those flames that burned the sky of his Ciudad Juárez, Ed began to fall in love with the music that would end up turning him into an icon of Mexican popular culture: Ana Gabriel, Roberto Carlos, José José.

“I’d just sit with my grandmother and relax: oh, how great this song feels, the strings, the lyrics, what this lady or this gentleman is saying, right? With old music I always think of them as old men.”

And that’s where we all recognised ourselves. In the voice of this kid who sang like an old man, replicating the calm he felt at his grandmother’s house. 2018. Nine songs of romantic folk, just his voice and an acoustic guitar narrating poetry like a revolutionary troubadour. “Mix para llorar en tu cuarto,” recorded in his room. It goes up on streaming services and suddenly ignites.

17 years old. From living on the edges, facing nothing but sand and a blurred sky, to being the centre of a national conversation. From the border to the centre of Mexico City. Hundreds of millions of streams in a few weeks, gigs in small bars that later became theatres, arenas and stadiums.

All over the course of a year. A signing with Universal Music and a success as fast as a gunshot in the desert. It burns, but there was already heat anyway.

“It was a trip,” he says about the instant fame. “I really didn’t have anyone at that moment who could understand me and exchange information about how to live with fame and all that shit. There was no place for it at all, so it was complicated.”

He takes a break to smoke, outside the Parisian theatre, walking around without letting go of his phone, without stopping listening to me. 

I ask him about those years of bullying he suffered. Thousands of internet users, connecting weekly to the “Thursday of telling Ed Maverick to fuck off.” Harassment, not a joke. Harassment that lasted for years and that weekly gathered thousands of Mexicans to torment a 19-year-old youngster.

“Man, a lot of perceptions got altered in general,” he says. “Going out on the street was a nightmare because I thought people were going to hurt me. Both sides were intense: the people who hated me were very intense, and the fans were weird too, because at the same time as I had this malignant stimulus, I had another very exaggerated one, for my taste,” he declares.

I spoke to him during that period. He seemed defensive, irritable, and misunderstood. It was not a good chat, he didn’t want to talk. Today I look at his eyes and I see a gaze that has seen too much, that can express too much and that doesn’t need anyone else’s gaze. He feels way more free.

“Self-esteem issues, the little emotional intelligence I could have had at my fucking 19 years old. It was very confusing: man, do they hate me or not, do they love me? What it caused was that in the end I told everyone to go fuck themselves. As difficult and painful as the process has been, there is a slightly more macro understanding of these situations,” he says.

“It sounds funny now, but understanding how the relationship works between being an artist and having this product, the fans, the haters, the attention and all that, made me understand that it all stems from a capitalist practice,” he adds. “The fact of having these things in your musical project serves no purpose other than to make money, that helped me relax a lot.”

I tell him we’ve talked a lot about vulnerability. The guitar, heartbreak, the experiences with violence, none of that broke him; on the contrary, they made him show himself more naked. “I think what annoyed people is realising that you had the strength to be vulnerable,” I tell him as he watches me through his phone screen.

“Well, yes: when you’re a kid, people respect the tough one, and the one who’s super chill, the one who shows what he feels, is more likely to have people want to take advantage of him,” he says. “The vulnerable one isn’t to blame, because he’s not necessarily weak, it’s just that for people it’s easier to prove they’re tough and strong if they bully the one who shows his vulnerability.”

And then, after everything, he left. Again. To another edge. After the Ciudad Juárez episode, his family gradually moved to Delicias, Chihuahua, the place he considers finished shaping him. There he has his home, his studio, and even ventures like the Centro Cultural Armónico, set up to develop local talent.

“When I arrived, I went to live in lots of places for a while, until my dad managed to buy a house on credit.” His home, as usual, was “on an edge, all countryside and that was the cure. I’d go out onto the street and literally go for walks in the fields,” he says. “There were some with no crops or anything, so I didn’t disturb the cycle by stepping on them.”

This was the place where he found refuge. First, from the violence of the cartels, and later, from the violence on social media.

“My studio is still there, on the edge. You go out and it’s pure countryside. It’s a city that’s growing very fast. It’s a good moment right now. It hasn’t gone to shit yet,” he says as he extends an invitation to see his space.

There, next to the pastures.

“I think the good thing about all this is that a really great record came out of it, called Eduardo,” he recalls about his escape from fame. “And I also started doing a lot of hallucinogenic drugs, I had moments of eating mushrooms and bailing for hours, man, which sounds sad, but I purged myself hard of a lot of emotions. That was beautiful too.”

I imagine him, in the centre of his studio, in front of the piano and the microphone, lying on a wooden floor. The windows open. A cold breeze comes in, burning on his sweaty face. A gulp of air.

Ed Maverick’s music has become much more complex. Today the acoustic guitar is still his most important compositional tool, but around him there are string quartets, pianos, horns of every kind, and even the experimental, hard-to-classify force of a composition by or .

At the time, Eduardo was a revelation. An experimental album with intimate folk as its backbone, but with Fluxus moments that clash completely with what a Mexican major label would normally release to the public. 

Today he’s about to release a couple more albums: ‘Sin Agua Es Ruta Yerma Vol. 1’ and its ‘Vol. 2’, two records that, like his studio, exist on the edge: off the map, without asking permission, expanding more than ever this commitment to creation without chains.

I tell him the album reminds me a lot of Dave Fridmann’s work with Mercury Rev and he responds excitedly:

“That mixed one of my favourite records of all time, which is ‘Lonerism’ by Tame Impala. He also mixed one by Café Tacvba. I can’t remember the name of… the white one.”

“Cuatro Caminos,” I reply quickly about this beauty from the most acclaimed Mexican rock band of all time.

“That’s the one,” he says, smiling. “That mixing approach, heavily compressed and with lots of ambience, makes me feel like the old records, but on steroids, you know? That’s what I like.”

His mind goes back to his grandmother’s house, as I see Paris around him and ask him what he’d like someone who doesn’t speak Spanish to understand when they hear his music.

“Everything we perceive is a mirror, so I feel that expecting or wanting people to perceive one thing is limiting their independence, their experience of how they should live it,” he says. Calm, honest, wise. “What is beautiful is that the project has a fixed identity that’s about feelings and vulnerability.”

“And what would you say to your teenage self who started writing songs in northern Mexico?” I ask him.

“That I love him very much,” he says. “I really needed a safe place, a place where there was more affection, you know? So I think mainly I’d make him feel confident.”

The call ends. I stare at my computer for a few seconds. That black screen of goodbye, before putting it back: Eduardo, that 17-year-old kid, surrounded by arid mountains and the blue of a blurred sky. As he sings “Fuentes de Ortiz,” I try to whisper to him: “Ed loves you very much.” And then he hugs his guitar.

Ed Maverick plays Islington Assembly Hall in London on November 13th.