Joan Manuel Serrat (Barcelona, 1943) woke up happy in Oviedo. “This thing about them waking up with the bagpipes is wonderful,” he said as soon as he greeted the press and approached the microphone, with that look of a man who was just passing by here: black jacket, sweater and that diction as if from the plain. Where do the bagpipes take you, then? «They don’t lead me to a certain image. It is a sensation that surrounds me, a sensation of joy, of open countryside, of a rooted town. And all this makes me feel good. Unlike others, I like the sound of bagpipes. I like it to the point that from time to time I give myself bagpiper concerts thanks to this internet monster. It’s something that makes my body feel good,” he continued.
The musician, who retired from the stage in December with a concert in Barcelona, spoke a lot about the body and time, perhaps because he is now a man who lives more slowly. Also because andThe Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts It pushes you to certain heights. «Posterity? I’m not going to find out anything, I feel a great liberation in that sense,” he said. And later: «I continue writing and composing, although not with the intensity with which I did before. I am in a calm stage. I have not left the stage to write more, nor to compose more, but to find myself more, to take advantage of the time I have left,” he clarified, before qualifying: “Leaving the stage does not mean ceasing to be an artist. Of course, now I write not when I feel like it, but when my body asks me to, which is not the same. I feel like craving it constantly, but my body only asks me to do it from time to time. And now I pay more attention to my body, which is very smart.”
Will there be a new Serrat album? «I would say that the records don’t even exist anymore. The record industry as I have known it throughout my life has been disappearing in recent years. It has been replaced by other things, by platforms above all. Furthermore, the type of music I make is not very present in the media.” But he dismissed nostalgia. «Any past time was previous. What happens is that for many, for me, any past time carried dreams that today we see stranded on the other bank of the river. Nothing else”.
There was a time for the Mediterranean, of course. They asked him if today’s tragedies have not tarnished the song into which he once poured out his childhood and his hedonism. «It’s still a valid song. What I wanted was to tell the playful and sensual aspect of the Mediterranean. It is not a portrait of the Mediterranean, but a dream song about the Mediterranean,” he recalled. And he returned to the present: «These days they are converting what has been a bridge of cultures into an immense sarcophagus where the dreams of thousands and thousands of people who try to find a place to put their lives are deposited. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop loving it and feeling it as the place where my childhood was made, where my dreams and my loves grew (…) It’s a territory with which I feel absolutely identified.”
Serrat confessed that the stage still calls him, but that it scares him away like flies are scared away. «When a temptation of this type occurs to me, I reflect. And I realize, as the rooster said, that what cannot be cannot be,” he concluded. He said goodbye with a smile: «If you know the pipers, congratulate them for me. “I would like it if in my house, in the morning, instead of the gardener who wakes me up blowing the leaves, this band of pipers would appear to say good morning.”
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