The artist presents “Dios los cría”, his new album with which he returns to the music scene. On this occasion, he focused on calm sounds with harmonic nuances, which dispensed with electric guitars and drums.
As a “rested tequila” Andrés Calamaro appears in his record reappearance, “Dios los cría” , in which he meets Latin American music icons such as Julio Iglesias, Raphael, Juanes, Carlos Vives or Alejandro Sanz and reinterprets his songs with a different cadence.
“I don’t give a damn if someone tells me they don’t like this version of ‘Flaca’. It’s inevitable and maybe he didn’t listen to it enough ”, he tells Efe about the result, in a soft tone, with the pleasure of the pause in which this new album has also been developed.
Calamaro (Buenos Aires, 1961), who spent his quarantine playing twelve times a day “At Fillmore East” (1971) by The Allman Brothers, “the right way” to listen to records, claims to return to those insistent listening to “appreciate” music “for real” and abandon the “current urge to express what you don’t like about something.”
(We recommend: Juanes: a nostalgic trip to his musical “Origin”).
The genesis of “God Raises You” (Warner Music), which sees the light this Friday, occurred in an atypical climate in 2016, “in the middle of a tour that was also calm both on a personal and musical level” called “License to sing” in which he dispensed with electric guitars and drums.
“I was curious to sing surrounded by silence,” he argues, a process in which the songs of this old rocker required “to rest the tempo a bit.”
It was possible to materialize those ideas because Calamaro had just made a solo album with piano, “an essay” that he recorded in a studio in Buenos Aires and that he planned to sell in person at the Rastro in Madrid, but which Warner Music officially published in 2016 as “Romaphonic Sessions with Germán Wiedemer”, volume 3 of his “Found Recordings”.
He warns that this is not a simple job, both because of harmonic nuances and because of its organization, since it recruited numerous colleagues, but “without recording maneuvers”, united only “by respect, trade and friendship.”
In that sense, it is surprising both those that appear and those that do not. ” If this record exists, it is because I first thought of Joaquín Sabina, Willie Nelson and Diego El Cigala , but each one for their reasons is not finally there,” he acknowledges.
Artists such as Manolo García and Vicente Amigo (“To not forget”), León Gieco (“My Flag”), Carlos Vives (“Somewhere I’ll find”), Milton Nascimento (“In a thousand-star hotel” do appear in the repertoire. ), Juanes (“Hook with me”), Mon Laferte (“So many times”) or Lila Downs (“Azteca Stadium”).
Follow the news of El Espectador on Google News“Yes, and not so much”, he answers when asked if he was looking for an exercise in Latin American musical and generational representation. “The singers chose themselves,” he says, after explaining that many combinations were shuffled out of the 30 recorded songs, often with up to three possible singers for each of them.
Sometimes there were no doubts, as in the case of “Playing with fire” for Raphael or a song “a bit rocky and porteño” like “Bohemio” for Julio Iglesias. “You can’t give them just any text and I have a lot of satanic lyrics and inconveniences in my repertoire,” he jokes about two cases of unexpected alliances.
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“It is the album in which I have sung the most decent. It is my most bullfighting recording, I can be heard tempered and that they are very difficult to trace hand in hand, because singing with Raphael, Lila Downs, Milton Nascimento or Julio Iglesias … ”, he says, after highlighting the work of producer Carlos Narea and the engineer Ángel Martos so that his voice “imbues” with these “extraordinary singers”.
As a presentation single, he chose “Flaca” with Alejandro Sanz, of whom he underlines how he “caresses what he sings” in an arrangement that “is not as simple as it seems”.
“It is not the formidable recording made in the United States for the album ‘Alta Dirt’, but there are many details, a lot of harmonic richness and it is a delight to hear the color that Alejandro has, the way of interpreting that he has so particular, with a beautiful charisma ”, He appreciates.
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The icing on the album is a no less curious combination: “Paloma”, a very personal Calamaro song , never covered by others, together with the young Colombian idol Sebastián Yatra and the Spanish Iván Ferreiro and Leiva, “friends and neighbors” in Madrid.
“I had not planned to include it because it is a lot of handwriting and that in one hand to hand can be thick for the other. It was Yatra who 5 years ago proposed to sing it in a very sweet and humble way. Of course I said yes and then I asked him for permission to add more musketeers “, he tells about how this” bullfighting alimón de un miura “was forged among his songs.
In 2022 he will resume the European tour that the pandemic has forced him to postpone several times . It will start on May 20 in Milan and will have three stops in Spain: Jardins de Pedralbes in Barcelona on June 15, Wizink Center in Madrid on June 28 and the Concert Music Festival in Chiclana (Cádiz) on July 29.
“ With places like Casa Patas and other businesses closed, perhaps the least important thing is this tour, but it is my commitment and there is an audience waiting for us with anxiety ; that doubles the substance of the commitment, “he says, before forecasting a return to the stage with more enthusiasm and” more fit “than ever.
