At 19, Ed Maverick is about to become the youngest Mexican to reach one of the great festivals in the United States, ahead even of Carlos Santana, who stepped on Woodstock at 22. He will be presented in October, coronavirus through , in Coachella, the hipster mecca that gathers 100,000 people every year in California. Maverick is nervous: “They are many people, they are many artists. I feel like I'm going to want to go to the dick. ” Verga: a very Mexican and very polysemic expression that here means something like passing out or running out of panic, and that the musician will use more times during the interview, not always with the same meaning.
The first time Eduardo Hernández Saucedo (Chihuahua, 2001) called himself Ed Maverick and performed live, he decided to drop the covers and sing a song that he himself had written. It was March 2018 and he showed up to a gang battle in a half-empty bar in Delicias, a small town in northern Mexico, with Acurrucar, who composed at 17 for an ex-girlfriend: “What do you expect of me? I want to see what you think. You said to me yesterday, 'Wey, romantic zero.' Poor Ed was last, but ...
“The beautiful thing was that the song had only been uploaded to the Internet for 15 days and there were already people who knew the lyrics. They even asked me for a photo, my first photo as Ed Maverick! ”, He says sitting in Mexico City in the meeting room of the Universal offices, the stamp that signed him in 2019. In less than a year from that first ( and disastrous) concert, his first EP, Mix to cry in your room, reissued by the multinational, became a gold record, becoming the most listened to Mexican artist on the Spotify platform, with half a million daily listeners and bursting rooms and theaters with thousands of runaway teenagers across the country.
When Ed Maverick sings, his thick, sad voice evokes Johnny Cash. The guitar, which plucks three chords, to the first Bob Dylan. "I didn't know them when I started," he says shamelessly, and the furthest he goes in time to quote the music he really likes is the nineties, the distortion of Nirvana, the synthesizers of Damon Albarn. His influences, in fact, he says are two: the twenty-something British Jake Bugg and another Mexican, Juan Cirerol, also northerner and ranch folkie like him, although more incendiary and amphetamine.
"Knowing the independent music that is made in Mexico opened my eyes," he says, and he puts his arms on the table: "That attitude of shouting 'we are kids and we don't mind being stupid' is incredible, it generates a very intimate intimacy with the people. The cool thing is that, as time goes by, I have the same problems as the kids who listen to me, we will grow together. Obviously I'm going to have more blows, maybe it's worth it [here again the expression is negative, like 'maybe everything is going to shit'] and I'm no longer Ed Maverick. But I'm going to keep making music. "
Hernández only comes to Mexico City on the way. When his career exploded, he left town and moved to the capital. It lasted six months. "I got stuck, I met marijuana, it almost didn't come out and I was really stupid with the people around me." Now she is back in Delicias living with her mother. Delicias, he says, "it's alright cock." In other words: “Delicias is a great city”. It will be because there he fell in love with the guitar with which he sat on the street to collect coins to record in a friend's studio. There he learned to play the drums in a cumbia group and another from a church. There he toured all the downtown restaurants playing traditional pieces with his northern band and asking diners for coins before becoming Ed Maverick, a generational phenomenon; the musical meteorite of the Mexican generation Z.
