• Story alerts   • Letter to Editor   • Pin it  Ray Brandes: A
man by the name of Angel Carrasco contacted me via e-mail in
1998 and asked if I would be interested in releasing something
on a small label he ran. I'd been working on a solo album and
had close to 20 songs recorded; I was thinking of shopping them
to a number of different record labels. But after a few e-mail
exchanges with Angel I decided to go with him and released
Continental Drifter on the Snap label, which is based in Madrid.
That's how the whole thing started. I'm Mexican-American. My
mother's last name is Montijo, and we're direct descendants of
Eugénie de Montijo, who was married to Napoleon the Second and
was the empress of France and Spain in the mid-1800s. So I have
a genetic link to Spain, and I'd always been interested in
Spanish art. But this was the first time I ever had any real
connection with Spain.  Paul Williams: How did you end up
touring there?  Ray Brandes: Bart also had a single out on Snap,
so we decided to go over toge