Jorge Drexler: "In the music industry I was the example of a complete failure"

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There is only one thing worse than being a bad winner: being a bad loser.

he has been a winner and he has been a loser, and he does not seem to take both things very seriously.

In terms of the industry, he has had more failures than successes, despite the fact that he has already recorded

, has an Oscar, seven Latin Grammy awards, a Goya and several songs with million-dollar listeners and, his greatest achievement, he celebrates his 30-year career with a new vitalist album dedicated to love in all its variants and with an extensive tour.

«

, I sold almost all of them.

My first ten years of career, until 2005, really, were a resounding failure.

He was a lousy record seller.

I sold 4,000 copies when my friends sold a million, like my dear Pau Donés.

Everybody looked at me sadly and said, "why do you have a solo career?"

In the industry it was the example of a complete failure.

Born in Montevideo 57 years ago, this Uruguayan and Madrilenian, Jewish and Christian, singer-songwriter and pop artist, has 10 new songs on the album

, which is how the first one is titled, "a song about writing songs and about compositional crisis.

Have you suffered from writer's block? For me writing is synonymous with creative crisis.

I do not understand the composition without a crisis.

The creative act implies the passage from a blank page to something that did not exist before, from nothing to being.

It's incredibly magical, but I don't know when or why or how something valuable appears.

Many times it is very frustrating and I get impatient.

There are many more times that the blank page wins. Are you coping well or are you anguished? I have suffered crises, I have enjoyed them and I have lived through them.

There is no other way to write.

Yes, it is something that anguishes me, but I count on that anguish.

For me, writing is having the patience to cope with that anguish, the anguish of the blank page.

Why?

Because if I don't go through that process with anguish, my feeling is that I don't really do it.

That's why in one of the songs on the album I sing about doing it for the love of art.

I think it's very important;

if you don't do your job for the love of the art it's a wasted act. Musicians now more than ever seem to do their job for the love of the art, considering how they've lost purchasing power over the last few decades. I'm not sure.

I live from music, although I don't live from selling records.

I mean, I'm not doing badly, but I'm not rich either.

I have three children and I am very happy to be able to support a family together with my wife [actress and singer Leonor Watling].

I don't ask for much more.

I don't have time or desire to have more money... And I never liked the position of victim in any circumstance.

I don't think that we musicians are victims of anything.

Now we have many possibilities within our reach.

And if someone believes that they are ten times happier for having ten times more money than me, for me that is not the equation.

It really gives me enormous joy the morning I write a song or after a concert.

In 1995 I had a very comfortable life in Uruguay and I left Medicine as the son of two otorhinolaryngologists and now having my own clinic because I came here to share a flat with seven Uruguayans and went to play in Murcia, Alicante and passing through Albacete in my Fourth hand Renault Clio.

Those are the things that interest me, and it doesn't seem like an act of heroism or bravery at all. In February we interviewed Leonor Watling and she said: "I've had all the crises and I've thought about quitting a lot of times"... To leave me or to leave him?

(Laughs). No, no, quitting his job... It would be news (laughs).

Has the same thing happened to you?

And I don't mean if you've thought about leaving her a bunch of times.

(Laughs).

Her album has two love songs addressed to her... There is a very, very big difference between the relationship that Leonor has with her artistic discipline and I with mine.

She started much earlier than me.

Being in High School she already had small roles in movies and she was very well known very, very young, which is a difficult thing to fit in.

I know few people who have taken it so well.

She is very traumatic, becoming famous in her twenties.

I started making a living from music at 30 and it started to go well at 40. It gave me the time to really think about making vital decisions like leaving Medicine and getting into this.

I spent a long time making that decision.

Music still makes me very happy and I never thought of leaving it,

but I did think I wasn't going to make this record.

I thought I didn't have a record, mind you.

In the pandemic I lost perspective, I lost judgment, I lost self-esteem, as many of us lost.

I always left the songs unfinished, I didn't complete that last 20 percent which is the act of playing them in front of people and finishing them.

The song was always a means of communication for me, not only of expression, of communication.

I am a person who needs the other, needs to communicate.

not only of expression, of communication.

I am a person who needs the other, needs to communicate.

not only of expression, of communication.

I am a person who needs the other, needs to communicate.

Jorge Drexler, yesterday in Madrid. Antonio Heredia

Love is one of the main themes of the album, not only the romantic couple, but love in many ways, love of life as well.

That stimulus, was it more of a desire, an aspiration? I think it's more of a desire and an aspiration, as you say.

The first song I wrote was

, which opens the disk.

It is half written with my cousin Alejandra Melfo, who is an astrophysicist and a writer as well.

I asked her for help because I was stuck, I said, "tell me something that surprises you," and she left me a voicemail saying.

"Look, cousin, it surprises me that love has also been an invention of nature, that it has not always existed, that 1,600 million years ago in the primordial magma all organisms were unicellular, but suddenly a single cell It occurs to them to look at another and join their genetic material, because until then they had divided each one on its own, and suddenly it occurs to them to generate two individuals from one, and in that apparently simple act they invent love. sex, cooperation and that enormously successful strategy became super fashionable throughout biology".

It was the idea of ​​love as an evolutionary strategy. And from there... The rest of the songs deal with everything from love of the profession to family love, with a song for my mother that I wrote when she was still alive and that I sing with my sons.

Also the love of art, the love of writing, the love of a couple, desire, erotic love.

And all, as you said, related to longings, to things that I missed.

It is not an album that speaks of what he was living, but of what he wanted to live, of what he longed for.

on the disk is

erotic love.

And all, as you said, related to longings, to things that I missed.

It is not an album that speaks of what he was living, but of what he wanted to live, of what he longed for.

on the disk is

erotic love.

And all, as you said, related to longings, to things that I missed.

It is not an album that speaks of what he was living, but of what he wanted to live, of what he longed for.

on the disk is

, your first collaboration with C Tangana, with whom you also recorded

and

.

Have these songs connected you with a new generation of listeners? I approached

[C Tangana] at the Latin Grammys in 2018, it seemed to me that he wrote very well and that he has a great artistic vision.

He is an artist of the highest level and

It is an ode to the repertoire of the song: it is a composer trying to endure in the memory of the after-dinners of the houses.

It seems very ambitious to me in the best of ways, but if I'm honest I think it has served him more to get together with veterans than on the contrary, it has allowed him to be received by my generation.

I haven't seen that many people say, "Hey, my daughter is telling me to put out a record."

I have never believed in shortcuts.

The first time I had a red record in the Top 40, paid for by the label of course, all I got was a couple of weeks of people coming to shows for the wrong reasons and then they disappeared.

From then on I always preferred to have a few people for the right reasons than a lot for the wrong reasons. So your audience, deep down, hasn't changed.

My public in Latin America has an average age of 10 or 15 years younger than in Spain.

That is very curious, it also happens to Sabina.

Spain is more divided on that too.

It is a very divided country, which has changed a lot in the last 50 years, much more than Uruguay, for example.

It has changed so much that all generations make a great effort to establish a distance with the previous one.

And that is also noticeable with respect to the public, which makes a generational option, which seems very uninteresting to me, it is as if the public followed you for a political or stylistic option.

It is age discrimination, nothing more than that.

In addition, many times it is exercised from our own generation: we have a very great distrust, a phobia of the new, a fear of losing its hegemony.

How do you perceive it? They try to confront me all the time with the new generations of musicians, with urban music.

Well, they waste their time with me because with the shit that is going on in the world, with this awful war, completely delusional, I'm not going to waste my time criticizing another musician.

My enemies are not those who write songs that I don't like, but the manufacturers of anti-personnel mines or the authoritarians, or the thieves, or the abusers. Is the album, composed during the pandemic, also a reaction to all this time, so full of of suffering? Logically, I didn't write the album with the war in mind, but I have a lot of experience in the relationship with the war because I lived in Israel for a year and I've been there a lot and I have a relationship of belonging, which also implies a critic many times.

That is why much of what I write has to do with that, about what one misses in times of crisis.

Besides, I'm the son of a war boy.

My father was born into a Jewish family in Berlin and when he was four years old, in '39, they narrowly escaped from Nazi Germany.

So I always have in mind the possibility of human disaster, I have that trauma in the DNA.

War conflicts leave a mark for two or three generations.

What is happening in the Ukraine is going to affect the grandchildren of the children who are leaving there today.

So I always have in mind the possibility of human disaster, I have that trauma in the DNA.

War conflicts leave a mark for two or three generations.

What is happening in the Ukraine is going to affect the grandchildren of the children who are leaving there today.

So I always have in mind the possibility of human disaster, I have that trauma in the DNA.

War conflicts leave a mark for two or three generations.

What is happening in the Ukraine is going to affect the grandchildren of the children who are leaving there today.

Jorge Drexler, yesterday in Madrid. Antonio Heredia

How do crises influence you when making music? I make songs as an antidote.

All my career I refused to accept the easy way that I used to heal as a doctor and now I do it with songs.

I always refused, but it seems that there is something of that.

I have an impulse that I need something to do me good, something to cure me or help me to cope with this, and to promote the celebration, because the contact with death that someone who studies medicine has is very revealing, it generates a lot of fear, a lot of power, or a lot of euphoria.

It takes a lot of

[bullshit] in the head.

It puts you in front of evidence: that our passage through the planet is ephemeral.

What are you going to do with it? How do your songs come about, what is the creative process like? Writing for me, both the melodies and the harmonies and the lyrics, is to move the prism that we are used to seeing, to turn it a little to one side so that it receives a light that suddenly surprises.

Using a syntactic turn in a sentence, for example, those little games are what I have fun with.

Using language not simply as a string of descriptive entities to express an idea, but language as an end in itself.

People ask me what I write about, it's very difficult for me to answer because most of the time I don't really write about anything.

That is, I grab words or expressions, take them out of context...

I write with words more than with stories.

I really like to treat language not as a simple means, but as an end in itself.

That for me is very important. Latin music is experiencing one of its moments of greatest worldwide success, but it has done so with songs of a very specific type: it is music for the party, for the dance, music for the celebration.

Aren't stereotypes of what it means to be Latino perpetuated with those kinds of songs? It's a very good question.

I think so, but the industry does not know how to function without stereotypes.

There are also stereotypes for Americans.

We live in a society that simplifies things a lot to sell them.

What seems important to me is deciding if you want to play, perpetuate those stereotypes, and there it is a personal option.

I believe a lot in the freedom of each person to do what they want and what makes them happy.

It makes me happy to break stereotypes, it always happened to me, because I grew up in a house with two coexisting stereotypes, my German-Jewish father and my mother of Spanish origin from the Christian culture.

I always had to reconcile two worlds and I learned to avoid simplifications because I grew up being me too

.

As Antonio Escohotado said, whom I miss very much, reality is infinitely dense, like a series of real numbers.

The closer you get to an identity, it's not simpler, it's more complex.

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