With Cinco de Mayo having been celebrated this week, what better way to kick off Planet Mars Music’s new monthly feature — 5 Songs — than by highlighting music that weaves Mexico into its own story. Five songs not about Mexico, but songs that carry us across the border to a place that is sometimes a promise, sometimes a last resort, sometimes a place a man can’t quite reach.
Desperado — The Cactus Blossoms
Brothers Jack Torrey and Page Burkum from Minneapolis make the kind of country that sounds like it was recorded in a years ago — unhurried, close-harmonied, and completely at ease with itself. On Desperado, from their 2019 album Easy Way, Mexico is one word in a three word phrase — “down by Mexico” — but they carry the weight of a man who has been everywhere, alone and escaping a place called home.
Pancho and Lefty — Townes Van Zandt
If you only know this song from the Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard version, go back to Townes. The original, from The Late Great Townes Van Zandt (1972), is quieter and more personal — a man alone with a guitar telling a story where nobody wins. Pancho meets his match on the desert in Mexico. The Federales let him go so long out of some kind of kindness before they end Pancho’s story. Lefty ends up in Cleveland. Mexico here is where the myth lives and where it dies. There is no other songwriter who could have written it. Watch Townes perform it live in an intimate setting on YouTube if you want the real experience.
The Outsider — Corky Laing, Ian Hunter, Mick Ronson, Felix Pappalardi
In 1978, Mountain drummer Corky Laing pulled together a supergroup — Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople, Mick Ronson of the Spiders from Mars, and Felix Pappalardi of Mountain — and recorded an album that sat unreleased for thirty years. The centerpiece is Hunter’s own The Outsider, a seven-minute cinematic fugitive song where Mexico is the destination the narrator never reaches: it seems like I never reach Mexico / they’re heading me off every place that I go. Ronson’s guitar on this track is as good as anything he ever played. That the secret was almost never heard would have been a genuine loss.
Veracruz — Warren Zevon
From Excitable Boy (1978), co-written with Jorge Calderon, Veracruz is the most historically serious song on this list and one of the most underrated in Zevon’s catalogue. It reconstructs the 1914 American military intervention in Veracruz — Woodrow Wilson’s gunboats in the harbor, Zapata in the jungle, a family fleeing west with a child held close. The Spanish chorus, sung by Calderon, is not decoration: it is a voice from inside the story. On an album full of dark wit, this song is the one that plays it completely straight, and it’s the one that lingers longest.
Clandestino — Lila Downs
Lila Downs is half-Mixtec, born in Oaxaca, and has spent her career making music that carries the full weight of that inheritance. Her version of Manu Chao’s Clandestino, from her 2019 album Al Chile, transforms the original border-crossing lament into something larger — a roll call of nationalities, Mexicana, clandestina, shouted like both a charge and a lament. Where every other song on this list looks at Mexico from the outside, Downs sings from within it, from a place where the border is not romantic but real.