Latino Voices

Featuring Chicago Sisters, The Luna Blues Machine Blends Genres and Harmonies for Unique Sound


Featuring Chicago Sisters, The Luna Blues Machine Blends Genres and Harmonies for Unique Sound

Being in a band together can be a strain on any relationship — even between siblings. But sisters Belinda and Maritza Cervantes, the frontwomen of The Luna Blues Machine, say they’ve managed to keep working together in perfect harmony.

“We complete each other in different ways, so we get along really well,” said Maritza Cervantes. “We don’t argue too much, so that makes it easy.”

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Belinda Cervantes puts it simply: “We’re best friends!”

The Cervantes sisters say they’ve sung together virtually their entire lives.

“We have an older sister, she used to love to assign us each a harmony. So I feel like that’s when we started to think about singing together,” said Maritza Cervantes, who writes most of the lyrics. “We’ve been singing in choir and choruses together since we were little.”

“We would create these music groups in grammar school and in high school with our friends,” said Belinda Cervantes, who creates their harmonies.

The sisters reunited after college and formed the first version of The Luna Blues Machine with a friend. Over the years, they’ve moved from beatbox percussion to drummers (currently Barry Bennett) and added a bassist John Germinaro.

“Johnny was just kind of hanging out listening to us come up with these songs and one day he came home and he’s like, ‘Look what I bought,’ said Maritza. “He bought a bass. So we were like OK, we have a bass player now.”

The sisters say they use something like a word salad to describe their sound — urban folk, brown soul, Latin soul, acoustic hip-hop.

The Luna Blues Machine released their song “I Can Do It” in 2020 to offer a message of hopeful resilience during a difficult time.

“We felt that those times were just very turbulent, tough on us and everybody,” said Belinda Cervantes. “So we wanted to put out a positive message and an uplifting song to our supporters to say we can get through this, we’ll get through it.”


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