Juanes: a journey of nostalgia to his musical "Origin"

The artist releases an album in which he takes a tour of important issues in stages such as childhood, adolescence and the moment before becoming a soloist. The record leads to an Amazon Prime Video documentary.

“Today I tell you that I believe in the past / as a point of arrival.” The verses correspond to the end of the poem El leopardo, by Raúl Gómez Jattin. Suitable for recreating, among other things, what happens at a certain moment in the professional life of an artist; of a musician, for example. It is at this point, inescapable for a creator, where a glance at the past, a glance in the rear-view mirror to see where one is coming from in many ways, turns out to be the most audacious step; going back to the origins can be, paradoxically, a process to reinvent oneself; reinvention: that concept so crushed at times in the creative field until it becomes a meaningless commonplace, turns out to be, on the other hand, valid if it starts from an honest need, if it is the result of a genuine artistic search.

Origen, the new album by Colombian singer-songwriter Juan Esteban Aristizábal, Juanes, is framed in this series of premises; it is the way the musician decided to invent himself once again. The production, made up of twelve songs by artists whom he recognizes as musical references who have made part of his journey, and where nostalgia is undoubtedly one of the essential components, is a project on which he had been working for a couple of years.

“I am a very nostalgic person, I am always remembering the past to make music; it is generally what I use: memories and memories. And in this album much more, because I tried to go until childhood, to the most intimate moments of my childhood, where I took up a guitar for the first time and began to sing with my brothers and my parents, “Juanes said in an interview with The Spectator .

Looking at the past is not necessarily to be attached to or anchored in it, it is rather, in this case, an intelligent and useful exercise, with which a musician can see with more certainty and clarity his present and, likewise, project where he wants to go in creative terms. Regarding this, the artist commented: “Definitely in this album there is a very strong element of nostalgia, although on the other hand it was artistically free, in the sense that I wanted to take all these songs from other artists and put them to my measure, seeking to bring them closer together. to my world, then he has nostalgia, but he is also present ”.

The wealth of Origin , moreover, is in the diversity of both genres (rock, pop and merengue, among others) as well as styles and periods. This makes it a diverse mosaic of sounds, with which you can travel from the 1940s to the mid-1990s. “If you put a playlist of the original (songs), there really is no connection, well It is very eclectic throughout. What we did do in the production was to unify all the songs through the percussion of the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Colombian Caribbean, plus the information from Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and that gave them a common thread and the put in one place. Also, I worked on the sound co-producing with Sebastián Krys, a great engineer and a good friend of mine from Argentina, with whom we made a good team and we dedicated ourselves to working on making the sound very special ”.

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The choice of songs, obviously, was not an easy task for him: a dozen songs among many and many of his preference did not constitute an easy matter to resolve at the time. In this regard, Juanes said this: “Yes, the selection was very hard, because in the end I think that that playlist that I made in December 2019 was more or less than 50 songs, to mention something, because it really was an endless list, so it was very complex. What we did was separate them into blocks according to age and very iconic moments in life, and I think that helped us get to these twelve songs, obviously with the sadness of saying: ‘I wanted to record this one, or I wanted to record This other’. It was somehow impossible due to the times and other aspects ”. Among those chosen are, Love after love (Fito Páez), Dancing in the dark (Bruce Springsteen), And they gave us ten (Joaquín Sabina), Without measuring distances (Diomedes Díaz), Could you be loved (Bob Marley ) and Rebellion (Joe Arroyo).

As a novelty, this album is accompanied by an audiovisual production, a documentary film of the same name. The reason is that it was a unique opportunity to capture and preserve in images an entire creative process of a production hitherto unpublished in Juanes’ career.

“There was the idea of a visual element, which is very important to get music out today, but we didn’t know how it was going to happen, until we made it concrete in mid-2020; On paper it was kind of bizarre, because it was thinking that you were going to dress like the Beatles, or like Julio Jaramillo or Gardel, and yet, exactly what we did was that: copy the stage, copy the clothes, the camera shots , the ways they edited at the time. We traveled through the 60s, 70s and 80s, and we went with all the laws: the hairstyle, the beard, the look of each one of those stages that represent very historical moments of music ”.

The music to invent yourself over and over again

It is said that posing, eventually and reflectively, your eyes in the past, while keeping your feet firmly on the present, is a good formula to cope with life. Juanes, who already has a very long trajectory and an otherwise successful career, knows it very well: he has been discovering it gradually and has made this idea a path through which to travel on an artistic level.

“This album, without a doubt, gives me the absolute certainty that I have a place that I want to go at this moment in my life; It is a very clear place that I am going to follow, beyond trends or what generates likes or views , or whatever, I want to go down a path that I feel my soul screams at me. I believe that this is the moment of origin, that is why this album is important, because it comes out at a time of great creativity; I mean it, from my heart: I am making a lot of new music, I have been composing for a year, and it helped me a lot to have made this album first, since with the sound and other elements, I am definitely now going in another direction “, concluded the artist.