Spotlight On: REYNA TROPICAL

ABOUT this week’s podcast guest + radio hour featured interview:

Fabi Reyna has been a SHERO of mine for a long time now. She is a Mexican-born, Texas-raised, guitar virtuoso. She is a singer, songwriter and producer, who took her experiences of sexism in music and channeled it into activism and entrepreneurship, founding and becoming editor-in-chief of the world's first and only print publication dedicated to women and gender-nonconforming guitarists and bassists, She Shreds magazine in 2012, which has now evolved into She Shreds Media. But running a business can take a toll, and as you’ll hear Fabi tell us in today’s conversation, the price was a steep one for her: she set the guitar down, the very instrument that had inspired She Shreds. We’ll hear how Fabi found her way back to the guitar, and in 2016 met her future bandmate Sumo Diaz, and eventually formed Reyna Tropical, which would start slowly and organically at first, then quickly gain momentum with an invitation to tour with Bomba Estéreo. The first Reyna Tropical tracks featured Ableton-made beats produced by Sumo featuring Afro Indigenous drum patterns and environmental samples mixed with dreamy guitar riffs and vocals by Fabi. As a duo, Reyna Tropical released a series of singles and two EP’s - 2018’s self titled EP and 2019’s EP Sol y Lluvia. And then, in 2022, Sumo suddenly died in an accident. Rather than letting that stop her, Fabi Reyna once again transmuted difficult times into positive movement and creative growth. She continued and evolved Reyna Tropical into a solo project, and earlier this year, released an amazing full length debut, with the appropriate title Malegría - which can be loosely translated as bittersweet.