Rather than a nostalgia-driven tribute, Portland-based Chicano rocker Joshua Josué’s Broadcast to the Surf Ballroom (due out January 30th) is imagined as a transmission sent back to that final stage — completing songs Holly and Valens never lived to finish while asking what their music might have become had their lives not been cut short. Drawing from Buddy Holly’s Greenwich Village apartment demos and Ritchie Valens’ last recordings with Bob Keane, Josué approaches the material with a songwriter’s empathy and a craftsman’s restraint, never impersonating the legends, but meeting their ideas where they stopped.
Recorded nearly live with minimal overdubs at Roseleaf Studio, the album carries the urgency and raw energy of early rock ‘n’ roll. Tracks like “Let’s Rock n Roll,” “What to Do,” and “Now That You’re Gone” expand skeletal demos into fully realized songs, guided by emotional clues rather than historical guesswork. Josué also includes a reverent performance of “La Bamba,” grounding the record in the Chicano rock lineage Valens helped create.
Josué’s connection to Holly and Valens is lifelong and personal — they were the artists who inspired him to pick up a guitar and begin writing songs. His acclaimed debut Beneath the Sand introduced a bilingual, border-crossing songwriter rooted in Americana and Chicano soul; Broadcast to the Surf Ballroom extends that voice into historical imagination, cultural gratitude, and rock ‘n’ roll stewardship.
The result is an album that lives somewhere between classic rock ‘n’ roll, CBGB-era urgency, and modern Americana, honoring the past without freezing it in time. It’s not just a tribute record — it’s a work of historical empathy, asking listeners to imagine what might have been, while celebrating why this music still matters.
Today, Glide is offering an exclusive premiere of the standout track “Oh, Selena,” which hits you right out of the gate with a surf-ready wave of bright and jangly guitar. The uptempo number hums along as Josué sings in Spanish with plenty of emotional gravitas while paying tribute to both Valens and the song’s namesake, the late pop icon Selena. Coming in at a cool two minutes, the song is a buoyant throwback to rock and roll’s earliest era.
Josué describes the inspiration behind the album and the song:
“This album is essentially my letter—my broadcast, if you will—to The Surf Ballroom, the final stage where Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly, and The Big Bopper performed that last night before that fateful plane crash. It’s my message to them and to their legacy. This song is my ode to both Ritchie Valens and Selena. Like myself, both were Mexican American artists who felt they spoke Spanish imperfectly. They helped me find my voice and gave me the ganas to sing in Spanish.”
LISTEN:
