Come as You Are

Carlos Escanilla met his first true love as a preschooler while bouncing around in the back of his father’s car. The object of his affection? The sounds coming out of the radio—Motown soul, Donna Summers, Michael Jackson, the Bee Gees.

“I’ve been practicing my falsetto since I was five years old,” he tells AQUA Miami with a laugh. And as anyone who has seen his ecstatic, extraordinarily versatile, life-affirming performances—either solo or with his bands Tremora and Sunset Dreams—can attest, that is no idle boast: Now in his late forties, Escanilla carries himself with the ease and assuredness of a frontman who shepherded many a glowing bar and club crowd to closing time.

But unlike Kiss—the arena glam rockers who a half century ago paired “I wanna rock n’ roll all night” with “and party every day”—Escanilla follows a very different ethos, rising early to go to his office at Coral Gables Counseling Center, where he is a licensed therapist working with young adults and couples.

The two callings, Escanilla insists, are not as separate as one might presume.

“When we have a great show, something shifts in the air,” Escanilla says. “It feels almost as if everyone is ready to unite on a different, more transcendent level.”

Opening Chords

For Escanilla, moving between worlds is nothing new. He was born in Chile, moved to Miami when he was one year-old, and then headed back to Chile at age ten. It was there, during these formative years, Escanilla found himself standing around a bonfire, watching people pass a guitar around, sharing songs.

“I need to learn to play guitar,” Escanilla said to himself—and, truth be told, he took to it quickly. He followed his own eclectic tastes and ear, wearing out cassettes by everyone from Hendrix to D.C. punk stalwarts Fugazi, dropping the needle about one million times on his burgeoning collection of Motown vinyl.

At 13, Escanilla returned to Miami. A cousin five years his senior took him to see Pearl Jam at the Cameo Theater. It proved to be a watershed moment. “It blew my mind,” he says. And though Escanilla’s love affair with grunge was not a particularly long one, what stuck with him was the fact that the old rules no longer applied. Authenticity, regardless of subgenre, was its own powerful currency.

“That scene, which kind of famously buried hair metal, just felt very organic and real,” he recalls. “People weren’t trying to impress anyone. They weren’t trying to be something they’re not. It inspired me. I wanted to give people that experience.”

Escanilla did his best to do just that, dabbling in high school bands, playing talent shows, hitting the stage solo. But like many children of immigrants, only child Escanilla felt the need to “put childish things away” when his high school years came to an end. At Florida International University, Escanilla thought he might pursue a fledgling interest in psychology. Ultimately, though, he chose to—at least temporarily—serve others’ hopes and dreams rather than his own.

“For my parents’ generation, saying you were going to study psychology was tantamount to declaring you were going to major in witchcraft,” Escanilla says with a chuckle. “You know, just the typical immigrant story. ‘We didn’t bring you to play music or talk to people about their problems; we brought you to this country to become a doctor or a lawyer.’ Everything was scarcity-based. Everything was fear-based.

“My parents always supported my talent,” he adds, “but were—understandably—afraid to support it to the point where I might go all-in.”

Music Saves the Day

Escanilla majored in business. Graduated in 2003. Got married. Worked a bunch of sales jobs. He bought his first house right in the middle of the housing crisis. Had a kid. Then, in 2007, his then-wife was pregnant with their second son. Money was uncomfortably tight. Hail Mary time upon him, Escanilla considered his options. “I was like, ‘Well, I know one thing I can do,’” he says. “And I picked the guitar up again. It was one of those things where desperation forces you to be creative—and music was where my creative voice lay.”

Escanilla went to Bougainvillea’s Old Florida Tavern in South Miami—aka Bougies—and badgered the skeptical manager into letting him play a few songs on a Sunday night. By the time the last chord of the third song rang out, a crowd had gathered. “You got the crowd,” the manager said. “Keep going.” At the end of the night, the manager gave him a hundred bucks—a life preserver in the form of cash, essentially. “Can you come back next Sunday?”

Soon, Escanilla put together Miller Road with some old friends, the band that would become the popular local cover institution Sunset Dreams. Returning to music did more than provide a much-needed side hustle. It convinced Escanilla of the power of actualizing your true dreams. Just before the birth of his second son, he went back to school, earning a Master’s in Mental Health Counseling from Nova Southeastern University. The final year of the program was an unpaid practicum. Once again, music filled the financial breach.

When he began his career in therapy in 2011, working with children affected by abuse, neglect, and divorce, however, Escanilla realized music had transmogrified from a life preserver into a ship: It wasn’t just there to keep him and his family afloat—it was a vessel to move his ambitions and soul forward.

Simultaneous to this epiphany, the boys of Sunset Dreams were getting busy with their own careers and families and did not want to gig as much as Escanilla. So, he began putting together Tremora, a brass rock band that offers up a high-octane blend of rock, soul, and blues at its most combustible and mesmerizing. “I wanted to write songs that could’ve come out in 1967 but have a modern edge,” Escanilla says, describing the recent single (aptly) as something that “sounds like a car chase scene from Shaft."

During one early show at Jada Coles on Coral Way, Escanilla saw a man in a business suit on the dance floor, completely absorbed in the music, letting loose.

“It hit me all at once,” Escanilla says. “I wasn’t the only one who needed this. We all need this.”

Worlds Collide

There are layers and dimensions to the way Escanilla’s therapy practice and music career intertwine and find synergy. “First of all,” he says, “when you’re doing the things in life you want to do, you can show up more fully for yourself and the people in your life. So, the inner peace I get from performing as a musician helps me as a clinician to show up so much better for my patients.”

There are more practical benefits as well: “Singing for up to six or eight hours a week, managing the diaphragm, managing breath—I’ve gotten really good at circular breathing and can hold a note for, like, 45 seconds—is almost meditative in a way,” Escanilla says. “The nights I sing? Man, the quality of sleep I get is beautiful.”

It’s a gift, really—the transcendent nature of art. And Escanilla doesn’t want to keep it to himself. He wants everyone to have access, from patients and children in public schools to adults trying to get closer to their most authentic selves.

“The thing with art is, when you trigger the ability to create something seemingly out of nothing for someone, that is probably one of the most empowering experiences a person can have,” Escanilla says. “It is not only about creativity. It can help so much with mental and emotional health because so much of both are contingent on our empowerment.”

Creating music or art also offers lessons in how to navigate the distance between abstract thought and concrete reaction.

“Cognitive behavioral therapy is all about helping people create an internal language for reframing experiences into something that better serves them,” Escanilla says. “It’s not about tricking the brain, which is what a lot of anti-therapy people will say. There are, in fact, different ways to look at things. You could run with a negative thought that leaves you anxious, stressed, sad, or angry. Or, if you’ve trained your mind with art or therapy or both, when that negative thought is triggered, your subconscious can say, ‘Well, don’t worry, ‘cause you can create something out of nothing.’ I mean, it’s a superpower.”

Like everything, it’s also a process. As Escanilla admits, he still has moments of imposter syndrome; dark nights of the soul where he looks over at his guitar and thinks, “Should I still be doing this at 46 years old?”

But then he takes his own advice. He looks to his own kids stepping into adulthood and thinks about how he would want them to view their own dreams and potential. (One son actually gigs around Miami in his own bands—the circle of rock n’ roll life!) His parents have even come around to celebrate their son’s somewhat unorthodox path.

“I’m just enjoying it at all to the max while always making sure that I don’t lose sight of the ‘why,’” Escanilla says. “For me, that’s creating an atmosphere for connection. It’s bigger than me, or Tremora, or Sunset Dreams. Some people look at the frontman and assume it’s all about attention-seeking and personal validation. I can promise you, my goal is to be there for the person who walks into a bar because they had a bad week, or a stressful week, or are just generally overloaded and caught in a spiral of overthinking—to be there with a rhythm or melody to help them disconnect and regain some peace and perspective so that when they leave the show they can have that vulnerable conversation, cope with all the stressors in their lives in a healthy way, filter out the noise from the constant stimulation of technology.”

Imagine, Escanilla says, you are born with a blank canvas that is your life. You are painting it how you want and life or another person comes along and splatters some unwanted paint on it. “I don’t want people to think, ‘Oh, well—the whole thing is ruined now,’” he says. “I want people to realize that’s still your canvas—you can work with it, create something new and beautiful out of it. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t still be playing music, and I wouldn’t have this crazy life I love so much. Every song I write, every song I sing, I want to be an inspiration to people to paint the life they want, no matter the twists and turns it takes.”