Driven by themes of place, Aaron Garcia moves a mile a minute

Photo by Samuel Bendix

The Tobin Bridge juts over the Mystic River, a leading line towards Boston skyscrapers in the distance. 

A few blocks from the base of the bridge, marinas, docks and shipyards cut portholes in the brick consistency, sharing views of East Boston across the smaller Chelsea Creek. Still, those tall buildings downtown and in the Seaport District backlight it all with a million distant office lamps and bedroom fairy lights shining coincidental faux starlight.

Aaron Garcia remembers that sight. Living in Chelsea, Mass., near the terminus of that aforementioned bridge, he’d gaze at the night with a mix of his family’s Latin music and his own hard rock soundtracking his thoughts.  

He dreamed of the city. He longed for the city. 

When he looked at them, he saw himself one day living in a high-rise apartment.

Years later, Garcia has burgeoning fame and recognition. 

He’s a respected indie rock artist. 

He’s got eyes for the future and, before COVID-19 hit, he was traveling the country.

He says he feels closer to the city and his future in it than he’s ever felt before. 

In reality, though, a highway and a tangle of backroads now mark his physical distance from Boston. He’s no longer just a river away, these days living in suburban Marlborough, Mass. 

On the eve of his debut album release as Pillbook, Aaron Garcia speaks with clarity about his past, his music, and the role of place in his life. 

To get all that the mythic “big city” offers, he had to leave the metropolis of his childhood.  

Garcia spent his whole life, until 2018, in Chelsea. 

The small city is one of a handful of municipalities closely linked to Boston through a series of highways and a public transit network. 

Garcia had access to Boston as a child. And the bustle made him feel alive.

“I knew that’s where I wanted to be,” he says. “I love the noise of it. I love the way people interact in the city.” 

As much as his community closely revolved around Boston, however, Chelsea was and still is a satellite to the city, orbiting the urban core, but distinct in its own culture.

Busses run through town. But they only arrive every 20 - 30 minutes at peak hours. The nearest subway stop, meanwhile, is almost three miles away from Chelsea City Hall.

“Even though I lived really close, I just felt so far away [from Boston],” Garcia explains.

Chelsea is predominantly working class. Roughly two thirds of its residents are Hispanic or Latinx. There’s a massive immigrant population. So, Garcia says, there’s a near constant pressure to conform to strict cultural standards of work. 

“You come to the US and you grind,” he said. “You go to college and you grind. I totally understand. But that’s just not the path I want to take.” 

Garcia’s family is from Honduras. They immigrated here before Garcia was born. Life hasn’t always been easy. 

Garcia rarely saw eye to eye with his father. His mother, meanwhile, worked multiple jobs to pay the bills all before being laid off amid the recent COVID-19 crisis. Luckily, she’s back to work now. 

Regardless, while his family worked, Garcia struggled. 

He wanted to go a different direction, making music and seeking a career in entertainment. 

So, to the chagrin of his community, he formed Pillbook with a friend. They played rock music in a garage and dropped an EP to limited success. 

And yet still, Garcia felt discouraged. 

“When you’re doing music [in Chelsea], it feels like you’re grinding at this thing but there’s no progress,” he said. “You just feel like you never go anywhere with your music.”

Fed up with the lack of support at home, Garcia dropped out of high school and moved to the suburbs to join the ideologically punk, Warholian collective that is Five By Two Records. 

To this day, there’s a certain lore to that transition. 

Garcia met Five By Two head Robert McCarthy on a cold email, sending a garage demo tape of his then three piece, double bass and drum rock band. 

McCarthy liked Garcia’s style and booked him for shows alongside his own children, who, by then, we’re playing in their own burgeoning post-rock bands. 

Garcia began spending nights at the McCarthy house, sleeping over as a friend of eldest son, Eoghan. Soon, he moved in full time. 

The two years since then have been a rapid-fire explosion of productivity, Garcia and McCarthy agree. This upcoming release of Garcia’s album, El Primer Paso, is but a capstone. 

In 2018, Garcia designed the cover art for Five By Two band Circus Trees’ debut EP, Sakura. 

A year later, Garcia joined hardcore outfit Reprieve, alongside Eoghan, designing their cover art and playing bass in a set of high energy, barnstorming shows throughout New England. 

When Reprieve disbanded, Garcia helped Eoghan rework old demos into an instrumental post rock project entitled The Light Inside Me is Dead. 

Around the same time, he joined pop-punk band Young Culture on a tour down the East Coast. 

While on the road, Garcia connected with punk titans Have Mercy, earning the trust of frontman Brian Swindle and landing a gig to mix Swindle’s solo debut single “Sick in the Night.”

Nevertheless, perhaps the moments most poignant in the development of this new era of musical evolution, Garcia says, were the releases of his “quarantine sessions” this summer.  

Garcia’s old Pillbook lineup had splintered, leaving him the sole creator behind the project. So, he reinvented its present and its past. 

Garcia effectively remixed Pillbook’s entire hard rock EP, Boyband, introducing a new sound inspired by dream pop, psychedelia and modern alt-pop.

“It was a great exercise for production skills,” Garcia says. “I could set out and make a new song. But something about making something familiar into a completely different thing just challenges your brain in a completely different way.”

Those sounds were new to Garcia’s fans. But as they marked an abrupt change in his outward projection, Garcia clarified that his shift had been far more gradual, enabled by the ever-growing support of his new home in Central Massachusetts. 

“That’s just the result of me finally being able to do what I’ve always wanted to do,” he said. “I have this freedom to do whatever I want to do. That’s what you’re hearing.”

By leaving the city, indeed, Garcia actually got closer to it and all that it represents. 

His new album, for one, embraces broad aspects of his childhood that Garcia says he never before allowed into his music. 

There are moments of reggaeton and bachata musical phrases. There are salsa rhythms and instrumentations evoking the feel of some Latin music. 

These are genres Garcia says he’s recently appreciated as a break from the hegemony of the sound around him.

“I rejected it as a kid,” he said. “I grew up saying ‘Screw all that, that’s dumb.’ But now I’m constantly surrounded by American music and it gets boring.”

Garcia now describes his upcoming music as “a wonderful smoothie of different styles and genres.” 

He says he composed these songs with a sort-of “screw it, why not put it in” mentality, working feverishly on self-imposed deadlines into the early morning. 

Garcia truly is working hard. And it absolutely cannot be understated how huge this release is.

He’s pushed his release date back countless times to get his mix right. He’s still pulling late nights and working on little sleep to layer in samples and dubs. 

Moving forward with his career, Garcia has ventured back into Chelsea. He was there eating at a restaurant with his mother when he learned he’d been nominated for three Boston Music Awards this year.

Then, the night of his 21st birthday, he sat in the back of a friend’s car, admittedly with his laptop open mixing his album, smiling while riding around Chelsea streets. 

Place matters for Aaron Garcia. And though he’s happy with his life now, he still has eyes for the future. He sees this release as a springboard towards that hope. 

“This feels like a temporary place,” he says of Marlborough. “It is where I will work to get to where I want to be.” 

As a child, Garcia looked out over the Mystic River and the Tobin Bridge, dreaming of the Boston skyline he saw. 

These days, his bedroom audio mixing station overlooks a quiet road, a wide, well-manicured lawn and a suburban home across the street. 

Going forward, Garcia says he wants to live in Los Angeles. 

He’s still pushing. He’s excited for his release. And he’s thinking a thousand steps ahead, both mentally and physically. 

Unprompted, he offers an unexpected goal. 

“I’d love to write a club banger one day.”

Video by Dakota Antelman, Additional footage via Twitch (Aaron Garcia), Song - Ugly End of the Room (Pillbook)

*Graphics by Dakota Antelman