He is calm, serene and smiling.
Warm, he hugs from the side, avoiding the covid but wanting to show the joy of receiving again, of returning to a stage.
Just turned 41, Manuel Carrasco (Isla Cristina, Huelva) seems to be in a moment of balance, wanting to continue telling stories in the form of songs but also with a clear view of himself, very personal and increasingly defined.
Telling his story, his experiences, his path to here, he even looks zen.
“I'm not Zen at all!” he laughs.
“I have some self-knowledge.
Even so, I am not an example of anything.
It's easy for me because I'm talking about myself, it's my story, but I don't want to be a prescriber”.
The talk with Carrasco comes for several reasons.
First, because it releases a new theme,
It was
, the beginning of a future album, a song of heartbreak, almost heartbreak.
He, father of two children, happily married, praising sadness?
“There are episodes, life is that.
I'm also not going to write what I'm supposed to.
It is a strong truth and it seemed to me something sincere and visceral, ”he replies, without further justifications.
In addition, this past weekend Carrasco has resumed his tour in style and after the pandemic break: selling everything at the WiZink Center in Madrid Friday and Saturday —after filling the Wanda stadium with 55,000 throats in June 2019— in two concerts , powerful and emotional, where he wanted to sing and thank family, friends and also, in a couple of pretty couplets, his beloved adopted Madrid.
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“At some moments I considered leaving music”
With a 20-year career behind him, the man from Huelva continues to compose all his songs.
It is inconceivable for him to write with four, eight or ten hands, he seeks "that way of doing prevail, neither better nor worse", but his, his seal.
"Writing is sometimes distressing, because outside you have the pressure of having to write something that is good, that you like, that you may like but you feel proud... And that spark of a good song flourishing is complicated", he acknowledges, explaining that his best songs are the ones that come out fast.
Even so, he is a hyper-perfectionist man, to the limit, with his work.
“I don't settle for it, nor do I think 'oh, how beautiful,'” he says of the pleasure it gives to have a song ready.
“The joy can last me 10 minutes”, he acknowledges.
His team, who surrounds him in this talk in a Madrid hotel, laughs when he says that this perfectionism bordering on obsession splashes all of them, but that ends up being a plus of quality.
He feels comfortable with what he does and more and more loved by his audience.
So much so that he does not hesitate to say that yes, he reads social networks and everything they say about him.
"But I don't post to read what they say about me, I don't have that need, because they usually say nice things, I feel well treated," he says, telling that with this last topic they have said "so strong" things that have moved him .
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That peace that he has and emanates is the fruit of many years of effort, and for that he thanks life for what it has given him.
In fact, he has renamed his tour: from
La cruz del mapa
—also the title of his previous album— to
Hay que vive el momento
.
The pandemic has taught him a lot.
“When they cut off your freedom, you are not well.
I have emotion to make songs but also for the other...”, he tells about his sensitivity.
“I have learned a lot and I want to continue learning.
These days I have thought that I had to enjoy it much more, because you have to live it.
I want to be more aware of everything that happens to me.”
In times of covid, he has taken the opportunity to be with his wife, the journalist Almudena Navalón, and his two children, four and two years old — whom he does not hide but does not expose either, always away from the show business: “The world never caught me of the lights, I haven't fallen in love”—, to be at home, “take them to school and all those things that weren't before”.
He has also composed, of course.
"But I really missed that other part, that adrenaline that you don't find anywhere else," he reflects on getting on stage.
“This profession gives you a lot but it also takes away from you.
It requires sacrifice, because in the end you don't know how to separate the personal from the professional.
You don't finish at seven in the evening and close, this is 24 hours, especially when it's something you're passionate about and when what you're teaching people is you and your life.
I have a lot of respect for that and I try to convey to my team that this is not a quick thing.
I know the sacrifice and I try to give back to the people in the best way I know what they give me.
The singer Manuel Carrasco, at the Hotel de Las Letras in Madrid on February 14, 2022. JUAN BARBOSA
Carrasco's career is about to celebrate 20 years since, among 80,000 applicants, he managed to enter the second edition of
Operación Triunfo
and came in second place in the contest.
He assures that he does not renounce those beginnings at all, but he puts all that in its right place and knows that in fact, precisely because of that, it has cost him more to get where he was looking for.
“It was the starting point that had to be, I have no qualms about that, what's up.
What I think when I see young people going through the same thing is that it's normal, if you're 20 years old, that you go a little crazy, that you don't trust... There are people who can handle everything at first and people who need their time," he says.
He was among the seconds.
“And time has proven me right, because I respected myself for a while, I had to learn certain things.
He had a flame but he had to tame it.”
Has all that brought you to this point in your career?
“I have no doubt.
I started losing a lot.
When I was very young my feeling was not that of being a winner, I usually felt like a loser in many things.
I think I learned a lot from there and that strength came from there, ”she reflects now, recalling anecdotes from his youth in a less profound tone.
“I had carnival groups when I was young and I was always last, don't ask me why.
I signed up for a program, many people loved me, knew me... That not-so-good starting point that I had made an important fighting spirit forge in me”.
In fact, he assures that "the most beautiful" of his entire career and that he carries with great pride is that everything has happened "after many other episodes that have not been so easy."
“My career hasn't been like that [snaps fingers],
all at once, not a stroke of luck, but rather I have been creating it little by little, slowly, conquering the public in a very beautiful way.
I wear that with pride.
I go to WiZink thinking: what a beautiful gift”, she affirms.
But the WiZink thing, he assures, like all the achievements he has had and the sacrifices he has made, is not "for success or praise, but for an artistic or personal ambition."
The artist speaks without fear of all that did not let him grow: "Call it insecurities, complexes... I have always had a strong base of self-criticism".
And for that, nothing like therapy.
“I have always needed and I think it is quite necessary, it has served me a lot.
Knowing how to organize cables is very liberating.
In general, for life it is good, but in a world like this it is necessary, because there is a part facing the public that can confuse you.
How you center the shot on the other... wrong.
It happened to me.
And the important thing is to strengthen from one”.