Twanguero

Valencia, Segovia's grandson-in-teaching, and a lot of other people's bands

Diego García was born in Valencia on 19 October 1976 and entered the city's conservatory at six, studying with José Lázaro Villena, himself a pupil of Andrés Segovia. The classical grounding stuck, but it did not hold. At thirteen he had a rock band, Los Be-boppers; at sixteen he joined Rock'n'Bordes and spent roughly three years working around Europe with them.

At twenty he moved to Madrid and spent most of the following decade as a hired guitarist rather than a bandleader. The list of people who put him on stage or on tape is long and stylistically incoherent in a way that explains a great deal about his own records: Andrés Calamaro, Enrique Bunbury, Santiago Auserón, Diego El Cigala, Juanes, Fito Páez, Wyclef Jean, Raphael, Ana Torroja, Adriana Varela, Diego Torres. Flamenco singers, tango singers, Argentine rockers, Spanish pop institutions. He has described himself as "three guitarists in one", meaning that the nylon-string, the steel-string acoustic and the electric each demand a different player, and he has made a career out of being all three on the same bill.

Brooklyn, Buenos Aires, the border

The solo career proper starts with geography. He went to New York in 2006, formed the Diego García Trio, and the resulting record, The Brooklyn Session, appeared in 2011; the Mexican magazine Revés placed it ninth in its Spanish albums of that year. He then spent 2011 and 2012 in Buenos Aires, which produced Argentina Songbook in 2013 for Warner Music, with Bunbury and El Cigala among the guest voices.

Two pieces of recognition came from outside his own catalogue. His contribution to the 2009 film Enterrado brought a Goya nomination in 2010. More significantly, he took a Latin Grammy for best tango album in 2013 as co-producer of El Cigala's Romance de la Luna Tucumana — a producer's credit rather than a player's, and the award that still leads every billing he gets.

Mexico supplied the next record. Pachuco, in 2015, worked through pachuco culture and the music of the border zone, and it is roughly the point at which the nickname stopped being a joke about his tone and started being the name on the poster. Guitar Player has called him the King of Twang; the phrase has followed him into American press kits ever since.

Los Angeles and the secondary roads

He settled in Los Angeles, and the city's distance from both Valencia and Buenos Aires gave him the frame he has used since: Spanish technique pointed at American roads. Carreteras Secundarias Vol. 1 arrived in 2017 and won the MIN award for best world music album. Electric Sunset followed in 2018, the loudest and most straightforwardly electric record in the set.

Carreteras Secundarias Vol. 2 came in 2022, written in lockdown and reaching further south than the first volume — North American blues and ragtime at one end, South American rhythm and the sounds of the Costa Rican jungle at the other. Taken together the two volumes are the clearest statement of what he does: fingerstyle guitar used as a travelogue, with the destinations named rather than implied.

Panamerica

Panamerica, his seventh album, came out in 2024 and was cut at El Backyard Studio in Culver City across December 2023 and January 2024. Ten tracks, largely instrumental, mixed and mastered by Angie Venegas with sleeve art by Dr Alderete. Most of the writing is his, with three tracks drawing on other hands, including Rubén Fuentes and Juan Gabriel.

The record puts North American electric guitar and rock and roll against bolero, cumbia, Tejano, ranchera and rumba, with Hawaiian, surf and country turning up at the edges. García calls the effect "new nostalgia" — old-sounding materials assembled by someone working now rather than someone reconstructing a period — and describes the album as transporting, moving the mind somewhere else immediately. It is the record most of his current live programme is hung on, and it travels better than the title suggests: the Americas as a single continuous road rather than a set of national styles.

Where things stand, October 2026

Since Panamerica he has released Christmas with El Twanguero in 2025, now also out as a limited vinyl pressing, and a single, Sendero, on 10 May 2026, which he has described as a tribute to his mother. Further projects are in production without announced dates.

The year has been built around touring rather than a release. He played Boulevard Music in Culver City on 29 August 2026 under the heading Spanish Electric, pairing a Ramírez Spanish acoustic with a Collings electric; he has said the appeal of that room is how little distance there is between player and audience. On 19 September he took the Backroads of the Americas programme to the Pima Community College Center for the Arts in Tucson, at $32–$47.

Then home. A short Spanish run marked under the name 50 Cumpleaños ran through Segovia's Sala Julio Michel on 17 October, the Loco Club in Valencia on 22 October with the full band, Sala Euterpe in San Juan de Alicante solo on 23 October, Sala Villanos in Madrid with the band on his fiftieth birthday itself, 24 October, and Barcelona's Aclam Club on 25 October. The Valencia promoter billed it as one of his only Spanish concerts of 2026 and promised previews of unreleased material; tickets were €20 in advance, €25 on the door, doors at 20:30.

From there straight back across the Atlantic. Backroads of the Americas resumes on 29 October in Boulder and runs through Denver, Colorado Springs, Taos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Austin on 8 November and Claremont on 14 November, followed by three Christmas with el Twanguero dates in California on 10, 11 and 12 December — Redlands, Santa Monica and Namba Arts in Ventura. A full-band project billed as Twanguero & the Tucsonians is already on the books for 2027, opening in Gainesville, Florida on 9 January, with a Joe's Pub date in New York.

The rooms he has chosen

The American itinerary is worth reading closely, because it is unusual for a guitarist with a Latin Grammy and a Guitar Player cover line. First Congregational in Boulder, First Baptist in Denver, First Presbyterian in Taos, the Santa Fe Woman's Club, Central United Methodist in Albuquerque, Kingman Chapel in Claremont, the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin. Churches, chapels, a charter-school hall and a civic arts centre, mostly seated, mostly a few hundred capacity, booked through a single agency rather than a promoter network.

That is a deliberate scale. The solo show depends on hearing nail against string and the body of the guitar being used as a drum, which a 1,200-seat club with a bar at the back destroys. It also means the Spanish dates and the American dates are effectively two different acts — electric band in Madrid and Valencia, one man and two guitars in New Mexico — run inside the same six weeks.