Who is that guy?” Luz whispers to me, between photo and photo, pointing to the screen that loops the traditional announcement that announces that it is already spring in certain department stores, with the actress Blanca Suárez and an attractive bearded model as protagonists .
We are in the antechamber of the splendid balcony of the Royal Theater on the Plaza de Oriente in Madrid, where the photo session of this interview takes place.
Downstairs, a group of pensioners on an excursion is more interested in what's going on up here than in the guide's explanations of such an incomparable setting, and I'm not surprised.
Luz Casal, the diva of the song born in Galicia 63 years ago and raised in Asturias, obeys the photographer's instructions dressed in a rabid orange trench coat over a sober black suit.
Initially shy, she grows up and, in the end,
he celebrates the end of the session by raising his arms and standing on tiptoe in ballet foreshortening, just as he receives the last applause in his concerts.
Going back inside, this time in the no less impressive Blue Room, officially Carlos III Room, of the theater, where Luz will perform on June 20 at the Universal Music Festival, Casal looks at the ad again and asks me again about the mysterious man. .
I inform her that it is William Levy, model and actor, and we begin the conversation sitting on a richly upholstered divan on a three-finger-thick rug.
On stage, the Real's titular company rehearses the opera
from the theater, where Luz will perform on June 20 at the Universal Music Festival, Casal looks at the ad again and asks me again about the mysterious man.
I inform her that it is William Levy, model and actor, and we begin the conversation sitting on a richly upholstered divan on a three-finger-thick rug.
On stage, the Real's titular company rehearses the opera
from the theater, where Luz will perform on June 20 at the Universal Music Festival, Casal looks at the ad again and asks me again about the mysterious man.
I inform her that it is William Levy, model and actor, and we begin the conversation sitting on a richly upholstered divan on a three-finger-thick rug.
On stage, the Real's titular company rehearses the opera
Siberia.
The heavenly music sneaks into the conversation, and the interviewee cannot help but follow it with her head.
Light is to everything.
And it all makes sense in the end.
He studied singing.
Are you tempted by the opera?
I like almost everything, at the time.
For me, people who don't enjoy music are like speaking another language, it doesn't give me confidence.
For me it is natural to listen to Bach, but also to the 18-year-old chavea who is shitting on everyone's dead because it comes from his soul.
I am interested in both.
Life is that.
That is why I have defended until I am exhausted that what I do as a performer, and as a composer, is to show the different states of mind that we can have.
If on the next album I sing about my desire to recover my innocence, it will have nothing to do with another one in which I'm getting cool because I want to and because I can.
Does each feeling ask for a melody, as the cooks say that the frying pan asks for the oil?
It's a good example.
Not all songs ask for the same thing.
It is a time, a certain sonority.
It's like dressing yourself, you don't dress the same every day.
Neither on stage.
I couldn't sing
A Year of Love
without wearing a feather boa.
I need it.
I don't have an explanation, I just know that I'm sorry.
And to sing
Rufino
?
Rufino is a character who represents a certain type of man and a certain Spanish era, the eighties and nineties, which you and I know well.
He has a very defined profile for me and what I need to sing it is a really badass attitude to say to him: “Rufino, man, I have you
covered,
I know what you're up to, but you make me laugh and I'm the one who uses you”.
Where does the gift come from to make us scream with
Rufino
or
Loca
and cry with
Piensa en mi
?
I can deal with almost anything, really.
Having that possibility of moving between the coarsest and the most exquisite, transiting those two extremes, I think my imagination makes it easier for me, being able to imagine myself in one medium and in the other.
The important thing is the songs.
I go by intuition.
I have, since always, a kind of knowing where to shoot.
What song to choose, what to do and what not.
“Rebellion is in my DNA.
If she could remember, I'm sure she would protest having a crib that was too small,” says Luz Casal.
In this image she is wearing a 'blazer' and pants by 'S Max Mara, an Elena Miró shirt and Manolo Blahnik shoes.Gonzalo Machado
She's an only child.
Her parents emigrated from Galicia to Asturias when you were a baby.
Her mother lived with her biological father and another man
.
What inheritance has remained from your childhood?
Rebellion is in my DNA.
If she could remember, I'm sure she would protest having a crib that was too small.
But having lived that way in my childhood and adolescence, with my parents far from their family, interacting with adults, each one with their sorrows in tow, gave me something that is not learned in any school.
The understanding of the other.
You understand the miseries, the difficulties, the fears, the joys of others.
Something very important to dedicate myself to what I do and for life in general.
It is a very powerful base.
I have seen everything;
So, I always try to understand what is behind each person before getting angry.
When I take a dislike to someone, it's because they don't deserve my attention.
It speaks of the light of an artist.
You carry it in your name, but are you born with light or do you learn to have it?
It is true that the brand name.
I still don't know why my godmother, who was the one who chose mine, named me Luz instead of Dolores, my grandmother's.
And, look, I think I was born with many of those possibilities, and what I've done is work on them.
My goal is to be more and more honest and for my voice to reach people in the most direct and emotional way.
Throw of experience and imagination.
I hate the imposture, but somehow I use it when I interpret things that I have not lived.
You can sing to sorrow without having suffered.
I can sing
I let you go
and I don't know if I've ever let someone go in my life, but at that moment I'm feeling it, and I can have a certain image in my head, like that of the handsome model we talked about [laughs, accomplice].
Not one escapes.
She looks like she has a scanner on her eyes.
I have a bad habit of looking and thinking about several things at the same time, that's why I'm not good at conversations.
I am talking to you and at the same time I am touching the texture of the upholstery of this sofa, and if I ever need it, I will pull this feeling.
All of that: the elegance of that TV model, the atmosphere of this meeting, goes to the sack and, when the time comes, it comes out.
The body, the mind and the senses keep memory.
I haven't given dance classes in years, but my muscles keep that memory and, if I needed it, I could simulate a pirouette.
For me the great vocal interpreters, or of any kind, are those who do not know what they do, but who go beyond you.
And that is what I would like to achieve.
When did you notice that you pierced others?
Precisely with
Rufino
, the most frivolous song in the world, as its author, Carmen Santonja, used to say.
She was bawled from little children at concerts to older men who you met at dawn in the bar where you stopped with the van to drink coffee.
That's when I realized that it crossed generations.
“On stage I am free.
The applause is addictive.
But you also feel vulnerable.
It is a very beastly mixture”, says Casal.
In this image, with a 'trench' by Max Mara and a bodysuit by Wolford.Gonzalo Machado
In the eighties she was the only woman, a soloist as well, in a world of men.
Did she notice sexism around?
For years, three quarters of the reviews of my concerts were dedicated to commenting on how I was dressed.
Didn't that piss you off?
Yes, but I thought the storm would pass.
Instead of sinking me, they strengthened me.
I was sure of what I wanted to do and that I was going to work my ass off trying.
One of his first models was called
La Guapa.
Did he believe it that much?
Absolutely.
There she was not even 18 years old.
It's a single whose title I was embarrassed for a while because it wasn't understood.
Since I was a teenager I have had that thing of always raising my head, as you have seen when we took the photos, and she seemed, more than the pretty one, the most arrogant in the neighborhood.
There I laughed a little about it.
Then it happened to me that sarcasm is not understood.
In each album I try to put a song that is kind of stupid to lower the intensity of others.
I am both.
She always wears rabid red lipstick.
Flirty or rebellion?
Both.
I like that rage of red very much.
I have a rock soul, no matter how much I do other styles, because I have one thing that nothing and no one, not even myself, of course, has broken, which is my rebellion.
My desire to make things better, not only in what concerns me, but around me.
I am ambitious, or perhaps unaware, of thinking that I, through a song, can change the world.
But I know that, through a song, a phrase, a certain attitude, I am going to remove someone.
So, red lips are for that and because that's how I look good.
In the hospital I had the bar on the bedside table and it was the first thing I did when I woke up.
And during the pandemic I have worn red lips under the mask.
“It is inadmissible that you waste 90% of your life to develop and be better and, when you do, it turns out that you are useless”, says Luz Casal.
She wears a Wolford bodysuit.
Gonzalo Machado
I suspect that, despite this self-affirmation, the flattery makes him uncomfortable.
I don't like kitsch, or being cheesy, or seeming so.
Nor pedantic.
Sometimes they tell me: oh, how simple.
Look, no.
Neither that.
I am a complex person who flees from pedantry, but, although I try to keep my ego muzzled, I am as arrogant and vain as anyone else.
Well, she will levitate above the waters: she has been called the great lady of song, living classical, goddess...
And everything you want.
I leave and I appreciate it.
The same as the prize of a neighborhood association or that they make me Commander of the French Arts.
How good.
It is like taking advantage of life in all its manifestations.
Have fried eggs with potatoes and a very delicate dish that takes five hours to prepare and will last 30 seconds on your palate.
That's what we wear.
How do you feel when you hear your music on the radio in a taxi or at the dentist's office?
Modesty.
And especially if the taxi driver, or whoever is in the waiting room, looks in the rearview mirror and looks at me complicitly, as if to say: I know it's you.
Shame at this point?
Still, but because in that situation I feel naked.
It's like that person sees me inside.
Well, on stage she looks like the queen of the mambo.
It has nothing to do one thing with another.
In the street I am the woman I am, with my fears and servitudes, including modesty.
On stage I am absolutely free.
How powerful does one feel up there?
It is that there are wad of reactions.
You do have a sense of power and reward.
The applause, in addition, is addictive.
But you also feel very vulnerable.
It's a very beastly mix.
There is nothing in the outside world at that time.
I suffer as a catharsis.
I came down from the stage like a rag.
The feeling I have is that I don't exist.
It's like I'm gone.
I need 15 or 20 minutes to come back to myself.
Do you go into a trance?
That's what other artists say
.
It's just that there are a number of physical reactions.
If I do
ummmmm
, my whole body trembles, I don't say anything when you sing the lowest and highest tones.
There is like a physical change.
That plus everything you receive from the public, which is beastly.
Look, I'm already getting sick.
There are songs that I can't sing, like some of the album
Simple Joy,
dedicated to the victims of 11-M.
You must have a certain control over your emotions, and when something causes you a lot of pain and you cry, you don't sing.
A tear is always lost in many concerts, but you can not break.
"My goal is to be more and more honest," says Luz Casal.
Gonzalo Machado
His song
Meu pai
is a beautiful love song without concessions to his deceased father.
She impresses the phrase "fire without burning" to refer to the life of a father on the part of her daughter.
My father died very young, at 64, and it took me years to be able to write that letter.
In life I told him very few times that I loved him.
Of course, when I told him, I told him to the fullest.
But he was a man with his own backpack, with some difficulty communicating, even with his only daughter.
That phrase and that tribute song come from there.
With my mother, due to her more open and free spirit, the relationship has been more open.
Actually, my songs, both my own and the ones I've been finding and choosing along the way, are like the album of my life.
If I ever lost my memory, I could rebuild it by going through my repertoire.
You seem hypersensitive.
Is that a curse or a blessing?
I am.
I don't understand how someone can dedicate himself to music if he isn't.
But for me it is nothing extraordinary.
It is part of me, of my circumstance, of the path I have traveled.
In general, it is a blessing, although in ordinary life, sometimes, it causes me some disturbance and a lot of dispersion.
Right now I am looking at this boy who has guided us in the theater, who is doing internships, I look at his youth, his desire to please, I have already taken a couple of notes that may one day appear in a song.
Maybe that's why I'm a person so excited about life, there are plenty of things that keep me entertained.
He was talking about his anger.
Against what, or against whom?
Almost since I remember, against injustice, against not respecting the different ways of being of people.
For me it is more important than anything to know who is and who can be the person in front of me.
I don't like to judge, and I rebel against being unsupportive or unfair to those who are different.
It makes me want to go out and defend him.
To take out the clipping?
Not so much, because I'm not violent.
If it were, it would be through the singing voice, not even the spoken one.
I have that spirit of defending the weak.
At 63, are you an old rocker?
Not old, old is the clothes.
I will never be old.
I will be older, I hope to be older.
Old is a word I hate, especially when it's used to demean a person.
It is pathetic that at this point we are classifying people by age, especially in essential things.
It is worth that a 16-year-old boy is less interested in being with someone of 40 than with one of her age.
But I think that marking people because of their age is almost more present today than racism.
Considering older people useless and marginalized makes me sad and angry.
Are you saying this as an observer or have you started to notice something out there?
The day I notice it I'm going to get pissed off and I'm going to defend myself like a lioness.
It is inadmissible that you waste 90% of your life to develop yourself and be better at your job and as a person and, when you are achieving it, it turns out that you are useless.
In addition, I have always been at an age, let's say indefinite.
When I was 10, because it looked like I was 15, and when I was 30 it looked like I was 15. It's like when they tell you if you're Galician or Asturian.
What a mania to classify everything.
Damn, I'm both, what's the problem?
Luz Casal photographed in Madrid this May.
She wears a 'trench' by Max Mara and a bodysuit by Wolford.Gonzalo Machado
And you, do you sing now better than ever?
It is a compromising question, because it is not up to me to judge him.
I would say yes.
At least, if I don't sing better, I'm more expressive, which is almost the same thing.
He has said that the body keeps memory of what has been lived.
She has been through two cancers.
It still hurts?
No, I have a selective memory and everything that seems like a weight that is useless to me is as if it didn't exist.
They existed, of course, but I do not incorporate it to me.
Even when I have revisions I don't go with anxiety.
I have, somehow, a feeling of certain fatalism.
What has to happen, will happen with my will for or against.
I don't waste time preparing for something I don't know what it's going to be.
I'm not interested.
And the pain, the less it is present in my life, the better.
He has described his repertoire as the album of a lifetime.
Are there any photos missing?
Have you completed the puzzle?
I hope I don't complete the puzzle until a second before I leave this world.
For that desire to always stay alert, entertained, which, at least as far as I know, is required in what I do.
You must always have that point of dissatisfaction, of discomfort.
First, to surprise myself and not accommodate.
And second, because I depend on others: my voice, music, what I write and compose, is the most natural way I have of relating to the world.
I don't want the puzzle to end.
I'm still starting.
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