Tijuana Taxi
heavy shoegaze and psych sounds
Tijuana Taxi blends heavy shoegaze and psych sounds to create spaced-out, bass-laden, dream noise. Based in Toronto, the trio that is Tijuana Taxi is composed of Jim Ritchie (guitar), Lucas Anderson (bass) and Ryan Caley (drums). Initially formed in 2013 by Jim and Ryan, Lucas joined in 2017 and the band released their debut EP Paracusis in 2019. Mirages is Tijuana Taxi’s recent full-length with eleven tracks that crush both heavy and light. If you liked their tune “Slip Out” which opened episode 29 of blank mood, check out “Looking at Air”. In this blank mood Q+A, we get to know the band a bit, learn about “Slip Out” and their creative process, and also discover who Uncle Vance is.
How did you choose the name Tijuana Taxi for the band?
Ryan: I hear a lot of people ask if we’re named after the Herb Alpert song but I’d actually never heard of it before we started playing shows. Long story short it was an old Toronto-based limo service that had sort of an unhinged alternative vibe to it. I’d originally only heard of it because I’d spotted their business card in a friend’s wallet and thought the plain Arial black font on a white background just looked like he had some weird code word in his wallet and it made very little sense to me so I just said I’d make it a band name one day-- so I did! We referenced that business card on the album cover of our first demo as a fun little inside joke, mostly for myself.
Is there a story behind your tune “Slip Out”?
Jim: I don’t think any of our songs are conceptualized prior to participating in their creation. Writing “Slip Out” I remember playing a funk riff with the delay on and I liked how the notes blurred together and we took it from there. I relate to it as being so comfortable procrastinating your own development that you don’t realise you’ve fallen into your own inhibitions. It’s like you want a hand-out, but it’s not gonna matter unless you find a way out yourself. Like you’re swathed in a thick blanket that’s smothering you until you Houdini your way out of the situation.
Lucas: To me it always felt a bit elusive and unfinished. There was this nagging feeling that the song was missing something that was always slightly out of reach. It was this weird mixture of knowing something’s not right but not knowing what to change. A combination of happy accidents during recording and last minute polishes finally made the song feel complete. “Slip Out” as a song evokes how I felt about it during its creation; a sense of longing, uncertainty and intangibility.
Mirages is described as the band’s ‘most vulnerable work to date’ and a ‘meditation on lost time, blurred memory and the dissolving edges of the self’. What has the reaction to that vulnerability been? Who do you think is likely to connect with the sounds of the album?
Ryan: I think it’s been thoroughly positive. We’ve always been more of just a fun-loving psychedelic jam band playing with and for friends, but as we’ve aged and matured as writers and musicians, we found a way of expressing ourselves honestly. It still stayed rooted in the joy of playing music together, while also dealing with the growth and emotional turbulence that comes from realising you aren’t just a 20-something messing around anymore. I felt we had something deeply introspective to say on this record, and the reception to that vulnerability has been far more supportive than I could’ve imagined.
What’s the story behind the album’s cover photo?
Ryan: Jim went on vacation last summer and took a bunch of photos, and originally we were planning to use this really trippy shot of some waves that I’d edited to look even more hazy and surreal. Once Jim got the film photos developed, though, the mountain photo we ended up using really resonated with us and the overall vibe of the album. It evokes a lot of nostalgia, and the film burn, at least to me, represents the degradation of memory that comes with growing older. We still ended up using the wave photo on the Side B label of the vinyl release and on our merch.
What’s different about the songs on Mirages compared to Paracusis? I see on Bandcamp that Paracusis was for someone named “Uncle Vance” - may I ask, who is Uncle Vance?
Lucas: The songs on Mirages have a more stripped down feel to them, they’re simpler in terms of recording and substance. Not to say there aren’t a lot of layers or tracks in the mix, but there are less set pieces for each song. It really feels like we’ve figured out where to place each instrument and effect to better serve the song. Less is more.
Jim: About half of these songs were written around the same time as Paracusis, I think we developed as better musicians with them over the years. So I guess the album is a continuation of what was and what’s to come. As for my uncle Vance, he was always hyping us up and I always remembered him asking me about the band and how he wanted to hear something new all the time. He passed away before we started recording Paracusis so I wanted to honour him on the record.
Ryan: It’s probably worth noting that a lot of the songs on Mirages had been played for years and recorded and re-recorded countless times. By the time we reached the final sessions with Jesse Turnbull, who produced the record, we just felt more comfortable and intentional in the studio. We knew what we wanted from the sound and how to achieve it. With Paracusis, since we’d never been in a professional studio before, there was more of a ‘kid in a candy store’ vibe where we wanted to try everything. I think only “Sonder” and “Erasure (January)” were truly new songs that we hadn’t already been playing live before Paracusis was even released
How do you work together as band members? What are the influences that each of you bring to your creative process?
Jim: Our influences are pretty all over the place but have their groundings in shoegaze, lo-fi 90s post-rock groups and stoner rock/metal. We all have different tastes that bring something new to a session, which keeps things interesting, but like I said it’s not really conceptual and it’s more like riffing on each other and breaking it down to make a track.
Ryan: I honestly love that we all have very different listening habits. There’s a ton of overlap, like Jim said, which is what brought us together in the first place, but there are also big differences that let us combine influences in ways we wouldn’t expect. I’m a huge Midwest emo guy who loves a good pop hook, Jim brings a lot of dissonance and experimentation, and Lucas is all about nasty bass tones and dark atmospherics. The end result tends to be heavy, catchy, dark, and abstract, and it just works for us.
Lucas: Generally speaking each member is given ownership of their part in the song, we’re all responsible for our own parts. That being said, I feel we do a great job of communicating ideas and feedback between one another with the goal of amplifying and propelling the song further.
How do you stay connected with your fans and attract new listeners?
Ryan: I manage all the socials. I try to be as active as possible on Twitter because it’s a fun way to keep an open and casual conversation with fans and the online music community as a whole. No one takes things overly seriously there and I really do value some of the insight people give there. As for the more serious things like gig announcements and whatnot I keep all that on Instagram. It’s actually kinda funny because we’ve sorta cultivated two different fan bases where the Twitter one is a lot of silly, fun banter while the Instagram one is a bit more serious in tone and more about informing people on what we’re up to. Different strokes for different folks.
How did your album release show for Mirages go?
Lucas: Best show we’ve ever played.
Ryan: Yup, great turnout for a show in the dead of winter, and we owe a lot to Graham Galbraith-Nolan. We brought him in to handle sound and lights, and he’s incredible at what he does. We sounded massive, and every photo I’ve seen looked amazing. We played all of Mirages front to back including the “Ostinato” interludes and everyone we talked to after the show said it was the best we’ve ever sounded live. The opening acts, Luster Dust and She Wears Black were great too, highly recommend checking those guys out. There was a song in the Luster Dust set that got me choked up a bit with their Starflyer-esque brand of beautiful noise.
What else do you have planned for 2026?
Ryan: We took almost two years off from gigs while we completed Mirages so we’re just itching to get back into the swing of things. We don’t have anything locked in at the moment, but we’re hoping to break into the local festival circuit this year and put together a Canadian tour in the fall, with possibly something bigger afterward if time and money allow.
Anything else you’d like to mention?
Ryan: This entire release cycle has been funded by us and us only, we’ve got vinyl on the way so if you want to support us directly, check out our Bandcamp, buy a record or just tell your friends about us, every bit helps us keep the dream alive. Thanks for having us!
You were onto somethin’, Uncle Vance.
Follow Tijuana Taxi on Instagram for news and on Twitter to let them know you can’t understand their lyrics. 😂 Keep the DIY spirit alive by pre-ordering their album Mirages on Bandcamp. And after all that, give the Herb Alpert classic a spin.
//wendy