The Mavericks Dance the Pain Away on New Album ‘Mono’

There’s a certain romance that surrounds the Mavericks. Maybe it’s their Latin-tinged party sound. Maybe it’s Raul Malo’s enveloping tenor. Or maybe it’s just because somewhere right now, babies are no doubt being made to their music. Whatever the reason, the Miami-born, Nashville-based group is arguably the Last Great Romantic Band.

“Yes!” shouts guitarist Eddie Perez when that moniker is floated. He mimes a mariachi guitar strum.

“Resistance is futile! You too will fall,” says Malo, breaking into a warm laugh.

With chilled Patrón poured in plastic cups, the mood at the Mavericks’ “clubhouse,” an inviting space in a Nashville warehouse out of which Malo’s wife Betty operates her jewelry business, is decidedly light. The guys — Malo, Perez and drummer Paul Deakin and keys man Jerry Dale McFadden — sip their tequila, crack jokes and quote lines from the Jack Black Mexican wrestling parody Nacho Libre.

It’s a much different vibe than when Rolling Stone Country last sat down with the band. In December, they revealed that founding member Robert Reynolds had been dismissed from the Mavericks for an addiction to opiates. Since the story was published, they have not heard from him. “We’re still hoping that he finds his path to where he needs to be,” says Deakin.

With that unfortunate matter behind them, the band members have returned reenergized, releasing the vibrant, lively album Mono this week. Mixed in mono, the record has a breathing, organic sound, as full of life as the Mavericks were onstage during a recent tour preview in Nashville. Last night, they kicked off their Mono Mundo Tour in Boston with a 27-song, two-hour-plus performance, opening with the album’s debut single, “All Night Long.”

An infectious, groovy jam, the song originated from just that: an improvisation. (Watch the band’s recent performance of “All Night Long” on Late Night With Seth Meyers below.)

“We kept playing it and every time we played it, it was the same reaction. People were just going nuts. It really grabs ahold of you. At first, when I was singing it, I wasn’t even saying words, it was just gibberish,” says Malo. “And it didn’t matter, because people were singing along to the chorus chant anyway.”