Ricardo Lezón (Zaragoza, 53 years old) has worked in a gas station, sold houses, served drinks, given tennis lessons, set up a bar and a rural house. He has done almost everything to make a living. He has not lived from music, but thanks to it. 21 years ago he set up a group with some friends in Getxo (Bizkaia), McEnroe. A band that does not fill football stadiums but whose followers share a faithful devotion. Lezón’s lyrics achieve something extraordinarily difficult: creating their own recognizable universe after the first verse. Love, heartbreak, pain, melancholy, joy and sadness flow through songs, throughout six albums with McEnroe and another four with other projects, which seem like sung verses. That excite and tear apart. After three books of poems and stories, he has now published slow and wildan autobiography that, with the most brutal honesty, explains how to live for more than two decades within a music group as unlikely as yours.
Q. What is McEnroe?
R. It’s like a house, the luck of the four members of the group having met and still being together 20 years later. It’s like that hamlet that remains standing although no one knows why. And it’s better not to ask about it in case it falls apart.
Q. He has spent half his life making lyrics and music, and writing poems. But he says that he is neither a musician nor a writer.
R. I have never studied music. I picked up a guitar and started making songs. And that’s what I continue to do: songs. I have also written and published poems. And now, this book. That’s all.
Q. He says that he has never liked the world as it is, that he has never felt comfortable in it and that to survive he has built a smaller one. Are those his songs?
R. When you make a small world for yourself, you confuse it with the real one. You surround yourself with the things you like and tell them how you would like them to be. You imagine them and you stay there. And when someone comes and tells you that they identify with what you have written, it is as if they are telling you that they have entered your world.
Q. Anxiety appears in the book as something that has gone through her life. She talks openly about therapies, about anxiolytics. What has she supposed?
R. There are two very different parts. The one I experienced until they told me I had anxiety, which is what you live alone and without understanding. Imagining the worst. Feeling very different and distant from everything around you and limiting yourself a lot. I deprived myself of many things that I should have experienced more naturally. And then there is another part: when they already tell you that you have anxiety. Then you miss half.
Q. How old was he?
R. I think 17. I was lucky enough to talk to my father, who was a doctor, and a psychiatrist. The first thing he asked me was to write my life on a piece of paper, and the next day he made me read it aloud. From there I started therapy, and I already knew what I had. Anxiety overwhelmed me many times, it flooded a lot of time in my life, but less and less. And over time I saw it coming. When you fight something specific, everything changes.
Q. That’s why it’s important to talk about it openly, right?
R. I think almost everyone passes by there. And of course it is essential to talk about it. I told it to everyone. I did quite strong therapies with people who were much worse than me, and they helped me put everything in its place and lose my fear of telling it.
Q. To what extent has it determined your life and relationship with music?
R. It is something that is always there, like a shadow. And you know that in some way it will always be there. Listening to music helped me a lot. It was a place where I felt better, where everything calmed down a little. It had healing power. Then I started playing with friends. He played the bass, very badly. Then I started making songs and I felt a kind of calm. I found a way to express things that I wouldn’t have known how to say otherwise.
Q. He says in the book that he has always been afraid of leaving his anxiety exposed. However, in the book she strips completely naked.
R. There is something that has always surprised me about myself. I am very fearful, but when certain really important moments come, I calm down. Like when I go on stage, everything goes away. And the same has happened when writing the book.
Q. He also talks about the contradiction between the many fears he has had throughout his life and, at the same time, the difficulty of not following his impulses.
R. It has always been like this. Anxiety can greatly undermine your self-confidence. But there is always a part where you unconsciously continue to trust your impulses. The title of the book comes a little from there, in trusting the wildest part of us, in instinct. There are many things we cannot control, but there is always a part where you can choose. And you have to use it to find what you like and what you want.
Q. Many fans find in McEnroe’s music and lyrics an antidote to their own anxiety. Ángeles González Sinde says that your music served as a refuge for him during his mourning for the death of his brother. That your songs were the medicine he needed at that moment.
R. Maybe because making and listening to songs has also been therapy for me. Many times when my friends went to party I would go to the beach to walk and listen to music. I felt accompanied even with lyrics in English that I didn’t understand. If we have achieved that with our songs, to provide company and offer a certain comfort, for me there is no greater success.
Q. The songs speak of despair, but from hope. How in the darkest hour electricity can suddenly appear.
R. Even when you’re at your most screwed, there are always little glimmers you have to try to look at. Many times it is very difficult, and they have to help you, but that is also a brilliant thing, that someone wants to accompany you. In the end, that glow gets bigger and you feel new ones, and you stop wasting energy on things that don’t contribute anything.
Q. Their songs almost always talk about love: the one that begins, the one that lasts, the one that ends.
R. Now I like to talk more about affections in general. In the last album, it was important for me to address love for parents, self-love… because I had romantic love too idealized. And that has a very bad part. Idealization is the shortest path to disappointment. Maybe it was because of what I had experienced in my house. My parents divorced and had a difficult, very turbulent relationship. Faced with that, I decided that I was going to make love something very important. And maybe I overdid it.
Q. In what sense?
R. I placed it in a very high place. It shouldn’t be there. The first time I was with someone it was for love, and I wanted it to be an impressive story. That’s how I lived it. But you don’t control destiny. And when they stop loving you, many times you stop loving yourself too. Heartbreak exposes many of our own weaknesses. When someone loves you and tells you that they like the way you are, it makes you feel very good, but it covers up holes that later appear again.
Q. There is a song, La Palma, in which he makes us listen to a kiss and everything that moves inside.
R. It’s one of those songs that doesn’t need much explanation because it’s something that has happened to all of us. On La Palma street or anywhere else. Those late nights when suddenly a kiss makes everything make sense. When life gets messed up for the better.
Q. The book also raises how extreme sensitivity can lead to very dark places.
R. Sensitivity sometimes overtakes you, like anxiety. The writer Hanif Kureishi speaks in Privacy about something that interests me a lot: the importance of the correct distance in relationships with people. If you are too far away, they leave. But if you’re too close, you crush them. It’s the same with sensitivity: you have to find the exact point that helps you be happy without overwhelming you.
Q. He went to a town in Soria with 15 inhabitants “to spend the winter away from the world and its depressing noise.” She set up a rural hotel and stayed for two years. What did she learn?
R. All. I lived in Marbella. He came from a romantic breakup. I didn’t see myself in that city. And one day looking at Idealista I saw this site and I left. It was, again, instinct. There I found myself, I forgave myself and I started to like myself again.
Q. Does that anxiety you talk so much about have anything to do with staying in some way on the margins of the music industry? He says at one point in the book that it separated him from the world and locked him in his own.
R. I haven’t been on the margins of music. I have gone through record companies door to door. But when I created McEnroe with Jaime we were already 33 years old, I was a father, and we were continuing with our lives. Music was a privilege, something that we had to take care of, that had to be special. When Subterfuge signed us, it was a total success for us. Or the day we played on Radio 3. Everything that has happened to us has been incredible, and that is how I have experienced it.
Q. Would you have wanted to live on music alone?
R. Is that success? Don’t know. Not necessarily. I have always thought that there was a leap there that I did not want to take. What is the difference between filling the Vesta room or the Wizink? The money? Because success is something that cannot be touched and that is something different for each person. I don’t mean at all that those who make a living from music sell out. There are wonderful groups, much better than us, who fill huge halls, like The National, and who do whatever they want. But we are here and it’s okay. And things continue to happen to us. I could never imagine that we were going to play at the Botanical Nights and it happened this summer.
Q. How do you cure that beauty so present in your songs?
R. Silently. The concept of beauty is complicated. We each have ours. For me it is very linked to purity and goodness. Kindness impresses me and excites me a lot. People who don’t use love as barter, who simply give.
Q. Sadness also has its share of beauty, he says in one of his songs.
R. I can’t write from sadness. I have to do it from joy, or from calm. But many times I do it thinking about bad moments that I have had, and that have come after other beautiful ones. Having gone through all this makes it possible for me to write certain songs. Sadness contains those shines.
All the culture that goes with you awaits you here.
Subscribe
Babelia
The literary news analyzed by the best critics in our weekly newsletter
RECEIVE IT
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#Ricardo #Lezón #Idealizing #romantic #love #shortest #path #disappointment