He is not one of those who wait. At half past nine in the morning he is the one waiting, sitting and ready to talk, in an office of his production company. He is wearing a sweater, jeans and a rosary around his neck. He speaks slowly. Nothing in his forms radiates the stardom of his numbers: 15 albums, 18 Gardel awards including 3 Gold (an achievement he only shares with Charly García), 31 Ópera theaters, two Vélez, two River, a Estadio Único de La Plata and 34 Luna Park with Luciano Pereyra, an absolute record for national music.
These days he celebrates a round anniversary with the tour “Abel 30 years old”which will travel through several provinces and on December 6 will arrive in the University City of Buenos Aires. While they wait, their fans sell out in pre-sales (ABEL.ART) a collection book with the milestones of his career, published by Perfil.
NEWS: Thirty years of career and 41 years of age. Do you remember what life was like before?
Abel Pintos: Yes. I have good memories of my childhood; from many cities because my parents moved a lot due to their jobs and I remember growing up in different places until we settled in Ingeniero White, near Bahía Blanca. And that’s when my connection with music began. At 9 years old I started singing in a choir as an extracurricular activity because my parents and my brothers, 8 and 11 years older than me, were busy all day. It was a free choir in the center of Bahía Blanca. I went twice a week, four hours of rehearsal. And while playing a little I learned the responsibility of singing and collaboration. I experienced traveling for music, not for moving, and I fell in love with all of that little by little until one particular concert where they gave me a solo role and I had to go to the front. That day, when I sang with my colleagues behind me and met the audience in front of me, I knew I wanted that. So at 11 years old I started thinking about how to do my own concerts. I didn’t have a musical group, I didn’t have songs, I didn’t know how to play the guitar. I just sang. When I told my parents that I wanted to be a singer, they told me that they were going to support me and take care of me as much as they could, but that they couldn’t give me anything in terms of resources and time. I quickly understood that I was going to have to manage myself. And since they taught me that school is our second home, then I said: if at home they can’t give me this support, maybe at school they can. I spoke with the director and told her that I proposed to be the representative of my class at patriotic events and that the only thing I asked in return was that in addition to singing the national song on duty, she would let me sing some of my songs. My brother Ariel accompanied me on the guitar and that’s how word of mouth began. Radios, festivals. I never stopped again.
The singing boy These were not times for social media to reach the ears of producers, but a visit to Raúl Lavié’s Ingeniero White paved the way for his first album. The tango singer left with a demo by Abel who, at the age of thirteen, would record “Para Cantar He Nacer”, produced by León Gieco.
NEWS: Do you go back to your first recordings as a child? What do you feel when you listen to that first album now?
Pintos: Yes I hear it. And I also listen to my first cassette. Because they are albums that I like. Although it’s a little hard for me to find myself in that singer. Musically, I don’t know if I like the singing boy that much.
NEWS: What dreams did that boy have? Did you want to be famous?
Pintos: I wanted to be famous because I saw that they could sing all day long. Like the kids who like soccer and want to play all day. I wanted to sing the whole day. And he literally did. What I set out to do when I was eleven years old was to live to sing. And if he could also make a living from singing, fantastic. But I didn’t make a living singing until 2005. Many years passed. It was when “Sentidos” was released, my first album as a singer and composer. Before I lived on other things and did concerts. I was only able to start making a living from music ten years after I started singing.
NEWS: That turning point in your career occurred when you brought out what was most intimate and began to write. Before that, was it difficult for you to expose yourself?
Pintos: No, because it was unexpected. And I didn’t look for it. I base my career on my admiration for Mercedes Sosa, who made a career as a performer, and I thought she was going to do the same. I never thought about writing songs. I wasn’t interested in learning how it was done. But one day it came to me as information and I started writing lyrics while I was singing the music and a few minutes later I had my first song, which was “Sueño dorado”. And when I became aware of what had happened, it seems that a chip fell, something opened in me and in a month I wrote a number of songs. I was just preparing an album that was going to be from other authors’ repertoire, but it ended up being my album. From writing my first song to my first full album it took two months. And four months later he was singing them on stage.
NEWS: What is your songwriting process like now? Does the letter come first?
Pintos: When I write alone, it’s usually lyrics and music pretty much at the same time. Immediately what usually happens is that the song goes to my brother Ariel, who has a great talent for smoothing the edges of music. And since 2014 I began to experiment with composing with other authors. They are called compositional camps. But the most usual thing is that it is with Ariel.
NEWS: Are you one of those who believe in waiting for inspiration or for it to surprise you at work?
Pintos: When I go to sit down to write with other composers, it is more professional and usually happens in preparation for putting together an album. But overall, it looks like an emotional outbreak. It’s not that when I have free time at home I start writing a song. It happens to me that I am doing something everyday and suddenly I start to have a series of mental and emotional sensations and they end up becoming something physical. Like I know I’m going to start crying or laughing out loud. And when I notice that, I stop what I’m doing and walk away. And I start to sing. And there are lyrics and music.
NEWS: Is it true that the composition flows more from pain than from joy?
Pintos: That has a certain logic because when one is in a very joyous passage in life one does not take the time to go see why it happens; Don’t wonder, enjoy. On the other hand, in a more complex, sadder or painful moment he does want to go see where the issue is to try to dissolve it. Maybe it’s not my case, I question myself in both situations. I like to know where everything comes from. And also in times of great joy I write about painful passages. Because from the peace it provokes I can address issues that I left for when I was stronger. I think that from pain one can explain more things. We tend to subject happiness to the inexplicable, to the miracle, to God, to luck; and the pains to us are our fault or that of others.
NEWS: The work with which you celebrate these 30 years, “Thanks to life”, is only seven songs that are not yours. How did you choose them?
Pintos: I didn’t want to make an album of reviews, because I’m not here for reviews, but just to start again. And I thought about going back to the origins of my career, which was as a performer. The public lets me know in different ways how my songs accompanied them in very personal circumstances. And it never fails to draw my attention to how far a song reaches and works on us. So this time I chose a repertoire to tell the audience which were the songs that gave me strength or made me especially happy in the last twenty years.
NEWS: You were born in folklore, but you are pure fusion: urban, pop, symphonic. Is the industry permeable to that?
Pintos: 25 years ago there was a bit of resistance, you still had to be from Los redonditos or Soda Stereo. But what you mention is the amplification of how Mercedes Sosa, who was a pioneer in mixing genres and generations, educated me musically, without knowing it; because he went to look for the young people of rock.
NEWS: And which of the fusions you made was the most provocative to you?
Pintos: In 2001 I recorded “Hymno a mi corazón”, by the Abuelos de la Nada. And I invited Mercedes and the Animal singer, Andrés Giménez, who were my two idols. At the time, genre-wise, it was pretty politically incorrect. But the truth is that I never thought about breaking models. I do it because that is natural to me.
NEWS: You talk about your idols, what is it like to feel like the idol of many people?
Pintos: It’s hard for me to think of myself as an idol. When they greet me on the street or wait for me at a hotel and I have contact off stage, I feel that they are people who find something of their own in me. That also happens to me with other beings.
NEWS: Your career is closely associated with solidarity actions. How do you channel them?
Pintos: When I created my production company Plan Divino, my partners and I thought about developing my musical career along with my other universes, the things I believe in. La Matera, a field where we produce pecan nuts, has a public training agenda open to the community and aims to generate jobs and jobs. “Alta en el cielo” (N. de la R: his album of patriotic songs) will have its royalties ad eternum for the Clínicas, Roffo and Lanari hospitals, because those anthems belong to all Argentines. We generated a strategic alliance: Sony Music and Sadaic helped us direct the process, the AFA helped us by playing the anthem at all its events, and the UBA helped us direct that money to the hospitals that depend on the Faculty of Medicine. Also two years ago we began collaborating with the Gutiérrez hospital. We donated three shows from last year’s Luna Park; This year, we will collect the proceeds from the Guido Kaczka program and we will have a gala at the Palacio de la Libertad, also for the Gutiérrez. And the same with other institutions. But we have a very long way to go. We do not collect money to deliver it so that it goes well for you. The attention of the public must be generated so that they can get involved and it is sustainable.
NEWS: What is the most exciting thing that music has given you in these thirty years?
Pintos: Probably the ability to build myself, because the adult I am has nothing to do with the child I was. Therefore, nothing that constitutes me today and what I experience daily could not be glimpsed then. I am excited to know that I have in my hands a very powerful tool for searching for what one wants to build from their square meter of human being.
