See original article here: https://www.mustardmagchi.com/features/guitar-virtuoso-charlie-baran-blends-his-love-of-chicago-and-central-america-with-radio-free-honduras
A HUGE THANKS TO MUSTARD MAG CHI!
Editor’s note: Because the current writers of Mustard Magazine are not fluent in Spanish, the interview for this article was conducted with Radio Free Honduras guitarist and co-founder Dan Abu-Absi, who handles press for Radio Free Honduras in English. Mustard Magazine reached out to Charlie Baran separately and translated his responses from Spanish.
We are always looking for Spanish-speaking writers to join our team and expand our community coverage. To learn about joining our team, email mustardmagazinechi@gmail.com.

Ever since he moved to the United States, Charlie Baran has called Chicago home.
Originally from the Central American country of Honduras, the guitarist and songwriter fled his home in the 1980s and established roots in Chicago where he's lived for nearly four decades.
Known for their worldwide hit “Sopa de Caracol,” Baran co-founded the Honduran rock group Banda Blanca in 1971 but had already moved to the States by the time the band found success in the early ‘90s.
Baran made a quiet life with his family in the northern neighborhood of Rogers Park, playing music at local restaurants, in his community church and in the now-defunct band, Casolando.
Radio Free Honduras guitarist and co-founder Dan Abu-Absi remembers the exact moment he saw Baran play—back in the early 2000s when Baran was still playing in Casolando.

"Dan Abu-Absi, far left, and Charlie Baran, second from left, are the co-founders of Radio Free Honduras. Photo courtesy of NGM Pix."
“I was mesmerized by his guitar playing,” Abu-Absi says.
“That was enough to keep me going to see their shows and trying to talk to him … He’d be doing guitar tricks like the old rock ‘n’ roll guys used to do, playing behind his back and with his teeth.”
The two musicians eventually played together in Casolando, with Abu-Absi occasionally sitting in on mandolin. But when the group disbanded, Baran and Abu-Absi lost touch.
“I knew he was somebody that I wanted to be playing with, so I’d call him every once in a while,” Abu-Absi says. Neither one of the musicians spoke each other’s language, but Abu-Absi was persistent nonetheless. Finally, in 2012, Baran invited Abu-Absi to his home to jam.
“We sat in his living room and just played for a few hours,” Abu-Absi says. “When I say we’re playing music, it was basically just him playing song after song and me trying to absorb them and play along. After every song I was like, ‘Who’s song is that?’ And after almost every tune, he was like, ‘That’s my song.’ I was blown away.”
The two musicians formed a partnership and co-founded the Honduran rock group Radio Free Honduras in 2014.

Radio Free Honduras playing live at the Green Mill in Chicago. Photo courtesy of Radio Free Honduras.
They’ve been playing together ever since.
RFH is a collaboration between Baran, Abu-Absi and a rotating cast of Chicago-based musicians that play Baran’s songs. The collective’s mission is to support and highlight the original music of Baran and his native Honduras. RFH combines elements of traditional Honduran punta—the country’s popular genre with indigenous Afro-Caribbean roots stemming from the Garifuna people—as well as Spanish flamenco, jazz and rock ‘n’ roll.
“[Honduran music,] it’s a part of him,” Abu-Absi says of Baran and his signature instrumental style. “But he loves rock ‘n’ roll as well as Latin music, so he’s got a really wide range of influences. He never was a stickler for anything specific—he’s really easy going.”
Despite his relaxed demeanor, Baran has lived a life that some only witness in the movies.

The Banda Blanca co-founder, now 73, left Honduras before he could see the success of his bandmates.
In the early ‘80s, Honduras was used as a base for anti-communist operations by the United States, specifically in the fight against the Sandinista National Liberation Front in neighboring Nicaragua.
It was a time of major political upheaval in Honduras, and, according to the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA), “many Hondurans who dissented disappeared into secret prisons, their families left to wonder at their fate.”
Baran experienced corruption in Honduras firsthand when he and his friend went out for a jog “in the wrong part of town,” Abu-Absi says, and were stopped by police. Baran was “thrown into the trunk of a car at gunpoint and driven 30-minutes outside the city,” then jailed and interrogated by Honduran military police.
This was during the same era that the US-trained Honduran army unit (known as Battalion 316) would “abduct their victims in unmarked vehicles,” interrogate them and torture them, according to CJA.
“He was sure they were going to be shot and killed,” Abu-Absi says. “He didn’t know what was going on. They were literally just pulled off the street randomly.”
Baran never knew exactly who abducted him that day, or why. Told with Baran’s permission to Mustard by Abu-Absi, Baran wasn’t involved in politics or activism, only music. After the traumatic incident, a shaken Baran tried to continue playing music and live life as normal, but eventually, he decided to flee to the United States.
“I’ve never played my music in my country,” Baran tells Mustard over text. His original songs weren’t made public until he met Abu-Absi more than 20 years later.
“He left his life and he wasn't intending to,” Abu-Absi says. “I don't want to say he lost everything, but I think we could all imagine what it would be like if we had to up and move to a new place tomorrow, without our friends and family.”

It’s stories like these from which Baran draws inspiration for his music.
Abu-Absi calls them love songs, but not in the conventional sense. Sure, there are songs about unrequited romance, but there are also ones about the reverence for his country, representing a different kind of longing.
“It’s a real talent,” Abu-Absi says of Baran. But the virtuoso’s songs aren’t all just melancholy—in fact they’re anything but. Take “Espelmado,” from 2024’s Amémonos. It’s about a guy who drinks too much. “An old woman gives him money to buy liquor but he drinks it all on the way home,” Abu-Absi says. “It’s a great story.”
The song actually appears on Banda Blanca’s 1985 album, Ay Mamita, with the writing credit attributed to Carlos Roberto Barahona—Baran’s real name.
Baran has since experienced success and notoriety here in Chicago and abroad. Before the pandemic, Radio Free Honduras played a monthly residency at the Humboldt Park cocktail bar, the California Clipper. And they just wrapped up playing the Tropic of Cancer music and arts festival in Todos Santos, Mexico for the fifth year in a row.
“Charlie is like, famous, there,” Abu-Absi says. “So there’s already this built in excitement that we don’t typically get here.”
But Baran enjoys every show he plays, no matter where he is.

Charlie Baran, third from left, and his bandmates in Honduras. Photo courtesy of Radio Free Honduras.
“It is a very beautiful city and the audience in Chicago is great,” Baran says.
For 25 years, the dynamic guitar player worked as a maintenance man at a Chicago elementary school but retired just before the pandemic—and right before he was diagnosed with cancer. “That period was tough,” Abu-Absi says. “We didn’t do anything together.”
Abu-Absi took that downtime and threw himself into learning Honduran music. “That’s when I started doing more research and realizing the influences that Charlie comes with,” he says.
“I needed to go back and figure out what they were so we could understand each other more. That’s always been the most important communication for us—the music.”
Baran is now cancer-free and has since returned to work part-time at the elementary school when he isn’t playing in Radio Free Honduras or at his local church. Together, Baran and Abu-Absi have also used their shows as a way to network within the Honduran community, giving local Hondurans an outlet to celebrate their culture and connect over music.

“I would like to see more Hondurans in terms of music here in Chicago,” Baran says. “[Here], we are the minority, but in our country there is a lot of talent.”
Baran and Abu-Absi continue to write and demo new songs, one of which debuted at Tropic of Cancer in January. For the band’s upcoming all-ages show at Evanston SPACE, Radio Free Honduras will be debuting more new songs as well as playing material from Amémonos, which was released in November at the Old Town School of Folk Music.
“For me, Honduras is my roots, where my parents taught me good lessons,” Baran says, the love for his home country woven into every guitar chord.
“My dream,” Baran says, “is that my music is heard in every corner of the world.”
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