Thee Sinseers’ Joey Quiñones on songwriting: 'When you make anything, you put honesty in it'

Joey Quiñones grew up in East Los Angeles, , where cumbia, punk and oldies soul could all be heard within two blocks. That mix shaped the sound he's built with his band, Thee Sinseers, and on his own. This year, he's out with two very different albums — the band's Love Stories and his solo album, Inna Soul Steady Situation. And most recently, he brought it all back with hometown shows at The Wiltern this past Saturday and Pacific Electric on Sunday.

Quiñones says the sounds of East L.A. are baked into his music.

"You wake up in the morning, and your mom would be cleaning to cumbia, and you'd hear it blasting from the other yards," Quiñones says. "You'd hear the local neighborhood band practicing their punk rock songs. Then you get to the street, and you hear all the oldies with the lowriders on Whittier Boulevard. It's everywhere. We can't sit down and not write a song that doesn't incorporate stuff like that, whether it be the singing or the horn section or the guitar playing. It's always gonna be subliminally in there." 

Quiñones says  Thee Sinseers came together almost by accident, when he accepted a dare to sing. But he knew the band had potential when they started getting paid.

"When we made $100. There was a time when that's really what it was," Quiñones says. "The community of musicians that we have has always supported each other in anything. So to be able to kind of do something where we were able to support our families and support each other was the key thing to really take it seriously. When you don't owe money, then you're doing something.”

The band's new album includes a song called "Let's Fall in Love Again," in which Quiñones admits past mistakes. He says that kind of honesty is the key to his songwriting.

“Life has been the teacher in all this,” Quiñones says. “Sitting down and honestly writing honesty, that's the key to, I don't wanna say soul music, but just good music and just music in general. When you make anything, you put honesty in it, because people know when you're kinda full of it. That's the biggest thing: being able to sit down and reflect and admit faults and admit to the life-changing and getting used to it and adjusting to it.”

Ahead of this past weekend's homecoming, Quiñones admitted that it was a little nerve-racking after touring the world.

"I was really excited about it months ago," he said. "But now it's getting closer and I just want things to be perfect. We're all so excited to play for our families and our friends, so coming home and being able to do that properly is the focus right now for all of us."