San Jose collective Peach Tree Rascals have been on the road all June, bringing their breezy melodies to cities like Austin, New York and Denver.
The band — made up of Isaac Pech, Dominic Pizano, Joseph Barros, Jasper Barros, Tarrek Abdel-Khaliq and creative director Jorge Olazaba — has kept the momentum of their breakout hit “Mariposa” going, traveling across Europe and Asia before this year’s U.S. headlining tour.
Ticketmaster caught up with the band during their 2024 tour (which wraps on June 29 at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles) about highlights from their “nationwide road trip,” new music plans, “Mariposa” celebrating its fifth anniversary and much more.
How is the tour going so far?
Tarrek Abdel-Khaliq: Tour is amazing. It’s very tiring and exhausting being on the road, but all the energy comes back when it’s showtime. And it’s all worth it just to experience the last six years of Peach Tree Rascals music with the fans that have waited that long to see us and be with us and sing with us. And it’s more fulfilling to hear them singing our songs and us being on stage singing. So it’s a beautiful thing.
Joseph Barros: It’s also fun being in a band filled with your best friends and family. Getting to see each city and all the fans in each city, it’s a beautiful experience.
Isaac Pech: We get to do a nationwide road trip, but also perform.
Do you have any backstage rituals?
Tarrek: Before our group ritual, I like to stretch and drink some tea and get warm for the show. But right before going on, we all put our hands together, we make a little star thing with all of our fingers.
Jorge Olazaba: Touch tips.
Tarrek: We touch the tips, just the tips.
Isaac: Basically, it’s a classic pregame sports scenario where it’s all hands in, “PTR on 3, 1, 2, 3, PTR!” That’s how it goes.
Tarrek: And then we do a little speech just to center us and keep us grounded before we go on stage and remind ourselves why we’re on tour and remind ourselves that it doesn’t matter who’s out there, how many people are out there, we’re gonna give the same show every single time, which is everything that we have.
We make sure that the fans that paid to see us who have been supporting us — a lot of fans drive and fly to come see us — we want to make sure that we give them everything we can.
How do you put together a setlist?
Isaac: We just go based on the feeling, because we want to keep the energy consistent and also smooth for us. So there’s not too many lows, as far as energy, so it’s not too low of an energy. For three or four songs we like to pew pew and then fshhhh at the end. To translate that into words, you start up, bring it down a little bit, then bring it mid level again and then shoot to the stars, energywise.
Tarrek: Our favorite moments are always the higher-energy moments, because it’s when the crowd gets moving and jumping. We like to see them moving and jumping and it gives us more energy. But we also know that they came for some specific songs and might not have the energy. So we try to put it in the right spot so they don’t fall asleep on us.
Have there been any songs that turned out to be fan favorites when you play them live?
Tarrek: “Sunday.”
Joseph: “Violet,” “Plus” and “Sunday” — basically all of the early songs that we made in the shed.
Jorge: We never performed them before this tour. The first couple of shows, we kind of trimmed off some of the songs that are stretched a bit too long, and after “Sunday” would end, they would sing the chorus right after it gets cut off, and it was just really cute.
Tarrek: And then we had made a couple of cuts to the setlist after the first few shows just based off of what the crowd was singing consistently and what they’re weren’t singing
I’m glad you mentioned the shed. I was going to inquire as to the fate of the original shed. What happened to it?
Isaac: It just got torn down a few months ago.
Dominic Pizano: Dad just sent me pictures of the shed.
Right, because it was at your house, Dom.
Dom: It was completely just gone. He did it all in one day and he got a dumpster because they were moving out of the house. We were already moved out at that time, but he dumped everything into that dumpster. I came over and I was like, “Damn, it’s crazy.” But we kept the door with all our signatures.
Aw, I really didn’t think the answer was gonna be that the shed had been torn down.
Isaac: Gone forever.
Dom: I would be sad if it was still up and there was someone else living in that house.
Isaac: Yeah, it was good that it got torn down and that your dad moved out.
What is the coolest, weirdest or most unique place you’ve ever played a show at?
Dom: I liked Austin because they made us a drink specific to the song titles. That was just really cool.
Joseph: Shoutout Austin.
Isaac: Coolest for me would be Jakarta, Indonesia at We the Fest Festival. That’s our number one country streaming-wise, and also the amount of people in the crowd was ridiculous. That’s my category for cool. Who’s got weird?
Tarrek: I don’t know if this is that weird, but we did a three-song show for TikTok for the employees at their headquarters in LA. They’ve got free ice cream and stuff.
Jasper Barros: Free popsicles!
What’s your favorite song to play live right now?
Isaac: I like “Come Around,” which is an unreleased song. It’s the song we play right before “Mariposa,” and it has my favorite jump moment of the entire set. And I go, “Blah blah blah, for the last time tonight, I’m gonna need everybody to jump up and down, one, two…” and that’s my favorite moment. Besides “Mariposa,” of course.
Dom: I think for me, my favorite is “Plus.” I just love “Plus.” It’s one of our slower songs, but it doesn’t feel like a solo song because it feels good.
Joseph: All the fans love it. They always get really happy.
Tarrek: Yeah, I like “Plus,” it has my favorite harmonies.
Joseph: I like “Fumari,” because Dom made a remix to it with the song “September” by Earth Wind and Fire and it catches the crowd with a bit of surprise. So it’s a nice feeling.
If somebody hasn’t heard you before, what two songs do you think they should listen to first?
Jorge: For me, “Lately I” and “Mariposa” for sure, in that order, too.
Joseph: I would go with “Violet” and “Mariposa.”
Dom: I’d say “Plus” and “Cranberry,” the slow songs.
Tarrek: “Oh Honey (I Love You).” I’ll just say that, they can figure it out from there.
Isaac: I’m gonna name three: “Plus,” “Someday” and “Mariposa.”
August 2024 will mark five years of your breakout hit “Mariposa.” How did that song change things for you?
Jorge: It put us on the map in a way. It brought a lot more ears to our music and really helped spread our music to Asia, which is really, really cool. We got to do a full Asian tour last year.
Isaac: That’s probably number one. It helped us build a really strong foundation, because it brought listeners to the rest of our songs. So instead of everyone just liking “Mariposa,” chances are they’d like three or four songs. That’s has given us the foundation to sell the amount of tickets we’re doing on this tour and have people at every city
Tarrek: It is the one song you can count on that 95% of the people will know. If people show up and it’s sold out and they don’t know the words to any song, you know that they’re gonna know the words to “Mariposa.” I think of it as one of the main reasons why we’ve been able to do what we’re doing.
It’s a beautiful moment to experience that in each city after five years, because we never got to do it [in 2020]. I always get a little sad. Kind of like FOMO, fear of missing out of that era when “Mariposa” was at its peak. But it was also COVID, so we weren’t able to experience shows like that. We had to wait until after COVID to do the first “Mariposa” [performance].
@peachtreerascal Thank you rascals 444 sticking with us through the years :,) love you 444everrrr so excited for rendevous in one weeeeeekk 🥲🥲🦋 #peachtreerascal #mariposa #newmusic
Any album or project plans for this year? Or anything else you’re working on?
Isaac: We’re going to keep releasing these singles and it’ll eventually culminate into one singular project on streaming platforms…
Jorge: Going back to how we started out when it was just us in the shed, just single by single during those shed days. If you go look through our discography all those singles are just floating, loose. There are 30 loose singles.
Tarrek: 30?!
Jorge: I mean, 15. When they’re loose like that it feels like a lot more. It’s harder to find it. For the people following us as we release, they’ll know that they’re all going to be together in a project. But for the people who are discovering us for the first time, they’ll be able to see a more organized version of it instead of trying to hunt through all the singles.
Going back to how we started, we feel like we want to build, because we didn’t release a single song in 2023. We felt like we might have lost some momentum so we tried to gain it back and hopefully we’ll get a nice project in 2025.
Back in the day, we obviously didn’t have TikTok or streaming. How did you find your favorite artists when you were younger?
Tarrek: There’re three places where I found music. One was from my parents just playing Arabic pop and whatever they were listening to. And then to the radio, just drives, whatever is on the radio. I remember hearing Bruno Mars. I would call the radio and be like, “What song was that? Please play it again. It’s so good!”
Jasper: You actually called them?
Tarrek: Yeah, I actually called because they only played it once and they didn’t play it for like a week after. So I was like, “‘I want to be a [billionaire],’ that song.” I didn’t know what it’s called, so I was saying, “I don’t know what his name is, but please play it again.”
And then I remember hearing Akon for the first time, it was the first time I heard a dirty song with dirty lyrics. But they only had the clean version on radio. It was at Barnes and Noble and they had a section with all the DVDs and they had the headphones. The CD was explicit. And then Disney Channel. Miley Cyrus.
I’m intrigued by you calling into the radio. That’s very creative.
Tarrek: Yeah. I mean, they told me they were gonna play it and then like a week later, it became the number one song in the country.
Dom: For me, it was in seventh grade or eighth grade and my friend came over and he played Section.80, Kendrick Lamar’s as album before good kid, m.A.A.d city, and he played “Hol’ Up” and that right there made me become a huge Kendrick stan.
Isaac: I was in second or third grade and my older brother was a producer in the local scene and a rapper so I started listening to local rap and him and his friends. Then I got an iPod for Christmas in third grade. Every three or four months, I would give it to my older brother and he would just stock it with like thousands of songs. That’s how my music consumption and taste came to be. All rap back then and radio. iPod and radio.
Joseph: For me, my dad had like 10,000 — maybe 5,000 CDs and vinyl, I’m not even exaggerating — and he would play it almost every day at outrageously loud volumes.
Tarrek: That’s why he’s a heavy sleeper. Now it’s impossible to wake him up. He’s built for this shit.
Joseph: Yeah, and my whole family is musically inclined, because we’re Filipino, we do karaoke. That’s how I found music.
Jasper: Our dads always would listen to music together and just play cards and go to concerts. We’d be running around the house, just listening to everything else. So that’s pretty much how our musical tastes kind of developed during that time.
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What’s something that you still want to accomplish in the future?
Jorge: [Have a] sync in really, really, really, really good movies.
Dom: To go on a world tour with a full band. Just the full experience,
Joseph: Drums, bass, guitar, strings.
Dom: Add a horn player too, dude, spice it up.
Tarrek: A Grammy, just to have it.
Joseph: To make a classic album.
Jorge: What’s that venue? Is it Red Rocks?
Isaac: The one with the red rocks?
Jorge: Yeah, [play] legendary venues. Also the venue in Vegas that has the big sphere.
Dom: The residency of the future.
Isaac: I want to build something that lasts forever.
How about a shed made of titanium?
Dom: Vibranium!
A vibranium shed.
Dom: Sounds would go crazy.