On the album cover you can see him opening a window with views to his inner world.
I wouldn’t like people to think that the record is about an intimate, heavy thing. “There is someone again telling their misery and their sorrows & rdquor ;. No, what happens is that, having been very focused on the lyrics, a more intimate album has come out.
It is the album with the most songs of his in his entire career, both lyrics and music. Does she feel more confident as an author than she did in the past?
Could be. I suppose that by adding, over time, songs of mine that people have been liking, that has given me confidence and a little more knowledge of what it is to write lyrics, and to express yourself with a certain character. I talk about things like innocence, but with rhythmic and sonorous forcefulness. It is not the little guitar and the lament.
The theme ‘Hello, how are you’ comes from when, in the 2020 confinement, he dedicated himself to making calls to people he did not know, at the suggestion of friends or family, and talking about how they felt. Nothing less than 2,000 calls. Not bad.
It’s not bad, no. The song reflects what I lived and experienced, but with a sieve, as if it had put a veil on it. In the end, what remains is that predisposition to listen. “I’m calling just to see how you are. I’m here for whatever you need.” For me it was important to be able to do that and without intermediaries.
For some time there has been a lot of talk about the toxic things that surround us, and this record seems to be looking for the opposite extreme, a purity of spirit, even though it may sound a bit naive.
It is that the position of thinking that people are not good is a bit old. Here we are all in the same shed. We are going to lend a hand, we are going to try to be something more than each other. That interests me: friendship, things of value.
There’s ‘La inocencia’, where she sings that “the weight of rancor is a disease& rdquor ;.
They are those kinds of phrases that at another point in my life I don’t think I would have dared to write. Well, the time has come to say that it’s all right, that I don’t want to lose those aspects of my personality that seem great to me. Because you are adding layers of makeup and there comes a time when the makeup cracks and something appears that you don’t like. I don’t want to be stupid innocent, but intelligent innocent.
And in the song that closes the album, ‘A little more love’, he talks about the “shipwreck of humanity”. But it is not a song motivated by the current convulsions, since it was shaped many years ago with the late Carmen Santonja.
The song is 30 years old and is from the time of ‘A contraluz’. The word ‘love’ is very forceful, and can refer to “I love you, you love me, I will love you…”, but there is the other love, the more universal one. The images of the song reflect our present. In the first days of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict I saw it clearly. The original version, which was recorded and mixed, was devastating, but then I felt a lot of anger and now, a lot of boredom. Tired of observing the conflicts, over and over again, as if history were entrenched.
Although just before it is ‘A perfect place’, a piece with music by Étienne Daho, whose years ago he adapted ‘A new day will shine’.
It may seem like a huge contradiction! It reflects when you realize that when you feel a certain harmony, you know that you don’t need anything. Étienne Daho is one of my best colleagues and here he offered me original music. I was confined and I saw a sea that was like a mirror, and I felt that I was in the right place, where regrets did not reach. There are the two sides of the coin: the hard reality and the grace of living as if saying that you cannot be better.
Recently, when he received the Ondas, he slipped a complaint, or criticism, about the situation of music in the audiovisual media. Does even Luz Casal have problems getting her new album to play?
In many radios it will not sound. It is so. In one place you don’t play because you’re over 40, in another because they only play one type of music and you don’t enter. I meant to say it in a sarcastic way, which is something I’m very good at. I shit on everything, but I don’t give a fuck. But I feel like a privileged person, who makes albums going from one record to another without having to explain. And I feel like a lot in the middle of my career. Maybe it’s a little arrogant to say it, but that’s what I feel.
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How do you live the requirement of the indicators of success, the number of ‘streamings’, the ‘sold outs’? Today it seems that the world ends with each release and with each compulsory attendance concert.
It’s like a race in which you never see the finish line, because there is always someone with more followers than you, and more ‘likes’, and who performs with larger crowds. It is very pressing and gives me a lot of anxiety. Each one is each one, and I don’t want to fall into judgments or comparisons. These days we are all shocked by the stage waste of Taylor Swift’s tour. But I offer what I offer, and I show what I am, giving the most that I can, and so I go to bed with a certain amount of peace of mind.