The singer Juanes wears a peasant hat and walks through the streets of a town in Colombia. He joins a group, a group of people who observe, undaunted, a scene. The rapper Mabiland, dressed in white, is dying on the ground and sings with rage, with violence. missing song, one of the new songs by the Colombian musician, stunned a group of guests at his home in Envigado. It ends and there is silence, there are some tears and also applause. The singer waits for the reaction, but he looks relaxed, calm. Then, on the screen, the Caribbean Sea appears, his wife Karen Martínez and Juan Luis Guerra sounds. He is Ceciliawhich brings another mood.
They are the two facets of Daily life, the new album by the multi-award-winning singer with whom, he later told, he freed himself from commercial hits. A melancholic and also happy album, like life itself that navigates between those states: and with the guitar at the center of everything, as he likes best.
Juanes orders a cold red wine and invites us to sit on some rattan chairs arranged one in front of the other. The atmosphere seems to be that of an open-air confessional with a ceiba tree in the background and some mosquitoes that do not bite the singer. He, long hair in the wind, looks like a picture, as if he just turned 50, nor the more than 20 Grammy awards that he has won in his life. Later he will say that he is shy, that this record arose from a deep crisis. And it’s hard for him to imagine it that way because of his closeness and darling, the word with which those who work with him most define him. It is also difficult to imagine him then “unbound” in every way, like millions of people during the covid pandemic and, even less, dissatisfied with his work. But that’s how it was.
Ask. He has said that this is his best album as a musician, performer and composer. Why does he consider it so?
Answer. I took a while to make this record, I would say a lifetime. They are accumulations of good and bad experiences, and of living. Having found these songs, which in some way made me heal, recording the videos with my family, is something I dreamed of all my life. Above all, I feel very comfortable with the music I’m making, feeling that I don’t have to say “I have to be number one” is what makes me happy.
Q. He has also talked about something missing. What she was?
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R. I made two records (My plans are to love you and more future than past) in recent years. I worked with friends from Medellín, pelaos, young producers, and with another type of sound that I also enjoyed, but that made me feel uncomfortable because I left my place. However, having done it was very positive because I think it helped me realize that I had to go back to my essence. And then the covid came.
Q. Was the pandemic the trigger?
R. In the year of the covid (2020) I was going to play on March 14 in Bogotá. had finished recording the album covers before that day and I was already thinking: “I have to go back with the band, the guitar, the rock, with my stuff, go back to the center.” But the pandemic begins, plus my personal needs, plus the marches (protests), everything that was happening in the country was like a moment when everything went haywire. The floor moved, as if we were in a stillness and then suddenly poof, everything shook.
Q. He came with the concern of making “flesh and blood” music, as he has recounted.
R. What I mean by that is that it is very easy nowadays to sit in front of the computer and make music. In fact, it is what is done the most. If you go to the Spotify list, for example, you see that only 30% will have been touched by one person. What survives the most is the guitar, but the rest is less and less.
Q. And now with artificial intelligence…
R. Yes. Of course, at this moment a phenomenon is happening with regional Mexican music, which is all played by people with their guitars present, very interesting. When I was talking about flesh and blood, I was referring to organic. But that came from before.
Q. Do you feel that with this album you managed to return to that root?
R. One is only prepared for things when the time comes. It’s like getting a tattoo, one says “I want to get a tattoo”, and postpones and postpones. Until he arrives and puts his arm in and that’s it, son of a bitch. Musically, I did feel that, because I lived there, I grew up there in music, in the band, with friends who play, who accompany me, with songs that sound live.
Q. The guitar is very present on this record…
R. I have never stopped playing the guitar, not even in my concerts, but once again having the guitar in my head, in the center, has been very exciting. If I ask young people for something, it is that they please learn to play an instrument, even if they make music with samples. They do not know the dimension it has for life.
Q. The family appears a lot on this record, a couple’s crisis. There’s a song about a father’s relationship with a teenager…
R. It was too healing, honestly. He felt that he was blocked. He thought: I don’t know what to write if it’s not about what’s happening to me. So I started with the exercise of writing what came from my soul, what I wanted and many were compromising things because they were personal, from my life, from my children, to the point of having to talk to them and tell them: “My love, do you mind if I talk about this? My daily life is my children, my house, our trips, my fears. It’s the only way I can connect with music, if it’s not like making heartless songs and how lazy. Make the hit of the moment hit, no, no. I think that for me the hits now are those songs, but they are because they make me happy.
Q. And there is the Caribbean, Juan Luis Guerra. What does he represent for you and in Latin music?
R. As I’m joking, it’s like he’s the fifth Beatle. A great teacher for me. He’s like a little boy who enjoys music, and I love that because I’m the same.
Q. How do you think people will receive this record? How would you like it to be understood or felt?
R. As Giovannotti said, music is like air, breathe it how you want, where you want. But they are very common feelings and situations, from daily life, from the relationship with my wife, with my teenage hairs and also from my personal fears, of how the country affects me in a good or bad way, and how through the music I can filter all that out and feel a little better.
Q. it is precisely May, a song about the protests that the country experienced and left dead.
R. In May I speak of only one Colombia. I feel that we stopped being a single country a while ago, the same as here in Medellín. Suddenly, we’re only united by a soccer game. I think we have reached a very difficult meeting place, where not even the common good is important. Everything is very distorted and I think it also has to do with technology, with social networks and with the way of interpreting life and history.
Q. After having sung about the scourge of antipersonnel mines, now he speaks of the disappeared with a song and a powerful video.
R. That song means a lot because for a couple of records I hadn’t written anything social. It did not get it. Not because I had lost interest, but because sometimes one also has the right to remain silent, I don’t know how to explain it. But last year and before, I started hearing a lot of disappearance stories. In a meeting with mother seekers, ex-military and ex-paramilitary, ex-guerrillas, my soul trembled. And then I connected with my family past, the case of a relative to whom that also happened. Then I connected with Juan Mosquera, a poet friend that I love very much. Rap came later and that’s where Mabiland appeared to me.
Q. A powerful presence in the song…
R. Yes. When I was making the song I told him, “Look, I don’t want to get involved in politics, but I’m not going to edit you. So say what you want, you are from Quibdó, you have lived a different reality from mine. Say what you feel how you want to say it”, and that’s what he did, a bang! A cruel thing. I loved it because the song has a sweetness in the way I sing it and in the melody, and it has an anger in the chorus and then it has Mabiland, who exploits it.
Q. The video will not go unnoticed because of how strong it is.
R. It is inspired by real events. It is the story of a girl who was walking down her sidewalk to school and saw a crowd of people, she went over to see what was happening and it was a friend of hers who had been killed because he was supposedly a guerrilla or paramilitary. She wanted to represent society. That is why the priest, the policeman, the military and the townspeople are totally indifferent, just observing, which is how we have always been. It also reminds me of a time in my childhood, in Carolina del Príncipe, when they once arrived with a headless man and put him there like in an improvised morgue. People passed by and said nothing. Now I understand that it was not indifference but fear that always paralyzed us.
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