This is how Russian Red collapsed and was reborn as Lourdes Hernández: "I didn't know what I was doing with my life"

Lourdes Hernández will be moved to tears twice during the long conversation.

One of her when evoking her complex adolescence and another of her when she talks about the figure of her husband.

“He saved my life.

Angels exist ”, she sentences her with watery eyes.

He, Zach Leigh, an American musician and businessman, has gone to the appointment with her and has prudently gone for a walk with the couple's dog through the center of Madrid.

In two hours they will meet again.

During this time, the artist popularly known as Russian Red will recount the whirlwind in which she was involved at the beginning of the 21st century as a musical reference in Spain, her mysterious withdrawal in the heat of a concert and her return as the protagonist of a film that was just opened,

.

Hernández (Madrid, 37 years old) confesses as soon as he arrives that he has just smoked a joint.

"He suits me once in a while," he admits.

Even so, she is impulsive, energetic.

She chooses for the interview a cafeteria frequented at this early afternoon by older women.

“I love this ladies' environment,” she says.

To understand the story of Russian Red, its rise and its fall, you have to go back to that period that is both complicated, exciting and that is going to determine so many things that is adolescence.

Lourdes's parents divorced when she was two years old.

Her sister, three years older than her, and she stayed with her mother.

From then on they saw her father very little, once every two weeks.

“As a teenager I had a significant feeling of claustrophobia and a lot of anxiety.

The family situation made me very sad.

The decisions my mother made were not the best.

She was into her ball, really.

If at that age you don't have the protection of your mother, you have to protect yourself.

It is a very crazy thing to get out of there, because it is very possible that you do not know how to protect yourself, ”she explains.

Russian Red performing at the Matadero, Madrid, on June 19, 2011, on Music Day.

Mariano Regidor (Redferns)

When she was with her friends, she hated the atmosphere: they wanted to dance and Hernández only wanted to talk about her oppressive family situation.

She ended up crying in the bathroom of the gambling dens.

While she was in her mother's Madrid apartment, she locked herself in her room.

She always isolated.

"Between those four walls I began to build my world and compose the first songs."

At the age of 17, she left her mother's house and she lived for a while with her father.

She started Law, she left it, she worked in hospitality and then she prepared for the Translation and Interpreting entrance exam and began working as a translator.

He took refuge in the name of Russian Red to publicize his songs.

Her first album,

, was released in 2008 with a small record company.

The Spanish

lived the second wave of it.

Vetusta Morla released her first album that year, Deluxe her best work

Mr. Chinarro, Nacho Vegas, Lori Meyers… There were hardly any female voices.

The cultural supplements of the newspapers, in good shape, welcomed his delicate folk-pop proposal in English with open arms.

Stations like Radio 3 programmed and interviewed her.

It was a luxury for Spanish alternative music culture to have such a

artist .

The big record companies, in search of young people away from the commercial, opted to sign her.

She won Sony, which published her second album,

(2011).

“I always wondered why she worked what she did.

I neither have a prodigious voice nor do I make the best songs in the world.

But I think it had to do with the fact that she placed me there from a very intimate and true place.

There were zero

.

That authenticity was caused by a difficult adolescence and by wanting to do something with that thing that had been inside me for so long.

His media exposure began to

fatten.

And with success came critical voices.

It was the time of the explosion of blogs signed by writers and journalists and it was many years before the arrival of the Me movement.

Too

It became a recurring target.

“I don't feel comfortable victimizing myself, but I was discriminated against for being a woman.

I put my most intimate things out there, in my songs, and then I was very exposed to a lot of judgments that did not favor me being able to continue working.

Now that I look at it from a distance, I did feel that the character was mistreated a bit.

Another image of the actress and singer, this week in Madrid. Álvaro García

In full tour of the album

it explodes.

He shared the van with men (musicians, technicians and road

) and there came a time when the dynamics "were unacceptable".

“I was spinning with eight

and they made my life impossible.

He had been enduring many

, and for the record that they had nothing to do with sexuality.

They enjoyed a very good situation on tour, but they were complaining all day.

One day I caught them talking bad about me.

And then I said: 'No, you respect me on tour.

At home you do whatever you want, but on tour you respect me.

You can't go ripping me off.

You understand?

Because if you leave me, you leave.

And so it happened.

He gathered them together and told them: “You are fired.

This will be your last concert, so enjoy yourself”.

Remember that it was the best recital of the tour.

What remained of Russian Red's career was a decline, not in popularity, but in motivation on his part.

There was a third album, the most electric and fierce,

in 2014. He had already settled in Los Angeles.

“I left Madrid because the relationship with my mother hurt me.

She is a super affectionate person, very Almodovarian.

Also difficult and contradictory.

I cannot say that there was a lack of love, what there was was a lack of solidity.

I left because I wanted to escape my own identity.

By going to live somewhere else I have played the role of another person.

That has been very good for me, ”she says.

That same year, 2014, when he was performing two songs at a concert in Seattle, he broke down and began to cry.

“I am very sorry, but I am not able to sing tonight.

I am so excited.

I do not know what's happening to me.

Now they will return the money."

And it is over.

“I went through a depression when I was on tour.

I wasn't happy, I wasn't happy.

I finished the concerts and I was lost.

I didn't know what I was doing with my life.

I had become disconnected from myself and the ability to do that job honestly.

I could have continued doing it in an unfair way, but possibly things would have happened to my body and I would have lost my mind."

He was not yet 30 years old, he had released three albums and was carrying a scintillating promotion on his shoulders.

“It was a trauma to go from a private dimension to a public one.

And the more intimate your work is, the

it is to be exposed to so many judgments”, she reflects.

Picking up the prize for best script at the Rome Film Festival on October 22 in Rome for 'Ramona', the film that he has just released and stars in.

Mondadori Portfolio (Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Im)

Lourdes has lived permanently in Los Angeles for the past 10 years, working with her partner in different businesses (she also released an album/caprich of covers,

in 2017).

But a few months ago she reconnected with her city, Madrid.

A debuting film director, Andrea Bagney (Madrid, 36 years old), saw a YouTube video from the Russian Red from the

era and thought: "This is my protagonist."

She asked him to play

a black and white film,

that takes place in the streets of the capital that Lourdes Hernández knows so well.

A film where a girl looks for herself, both professionally and sentimentally, a demanding length with the protagonist permanently in the center of the image and with the curiosity of listening to Lourdes/Russian sing, within the plot,

by Rocío Jurado.

In addition to this film, he has just started shooting a series for Netflix and, in terms of music, he has already composed some songs in Spanish that will surely be released next year.

“Lately I'm inspired, and if I'm inspired, I'm sensitive, and if I'm sensitive, I'm soft.

That's why I'm doing a lot of therapy, ”she explains.

For a few months she has lived between Spain and Los Angeles.

She claims to have reconciled with her parents.

“I have opened up a lot in recent years and have found my family outside of my family.

The key is that I have had someone who really loves me, and that is very rare.

Hopefully it happens to everyone.

There is hope!

Finding Zack is key to being me."

The other day her mother visited her carrying a bunch of newspaper clippings from the Russian Red days. “My goodness, what a tire shop.

It's just that she hadn't seen them in 10 years.

It's almost like it didn't happen to me.

I look at it with great affection and distance and I am amazed that I was able to do it being so young and at such a soft moment in my life”.

But she did...