Jorge Drexler can't put the book down.
She has just prepared a "strong and very rich" Chilean coffee and, as she went to sit on the sofa in his study, she bumped into him on the table.
His son Pablo, who also comes in and out of the studio as he pleases, must have left it there and Drexler grabs it, and we agree that it's a great rehearsal.
This is
Songwriters on Songwriting,
by Paul Zollo, a work that includes a multitude of in-depth interviews with top-level musicians about the art of songwriting.
“You know when you start underlining and you're underlining everything and it doesn't have any value anymore?
Well, this happens with this book,” she says with a laugh.
The bookmark is in the interview with Graham Nash.
“My son must have stayed in Nash.
Let's see what's around here…”, he says as he begins to flip through it and review underlined sentences from interviews.
Drexler read it a long time ago and now turns pages.
Graham Nash, Neil Young, Elvis Costello… He stops at David Byrne's.
"Just connect," he says in English.
"Just connect," translates Drexler.
That phrase, underlined in pencil and rounded with a circle, could be one of many that in this literary "oracle" allows us to understand the mystery of musical composition,
It's midday on a sunny Thursday and Drexler has released a new album,
Tinta y tiempo
(Sony), a work that once again reflects the particular universe of a creator who handles himself with admirable ease in very sentimental and apparently simple songs, compositions with the scent of a fairy tale or a mischievous whisper that travel through various styles with joy and determination, halfway between traditional Latin song and the roundest pop.
So much so that in
ink and time
He is accompanied by Latinos like Martín Buscaglia and the salsa giant Rubén Blades, as well as other younger, current and urban voices like C. Tangana and the Israeli Noga Erez.
Trying and trying is a constant in his career.
“The title of the album refers to impatience.
That is why the blank page that appears on the cover is so important.
I try to say that, even at this point in the career, you have to take the iron out of everything.
What is written is not always carved in granite.
I'm talking about letting the blank page, the ink and time do their work and, if you have to paint, you paint.
It can be with a song or with any aspect of life.”
Under this premise, Drexler has just
painted
a new album that excites and that, he admits, he doesn't really know where it came from.
Just a few minutes earlier, when she was flipping through the book, she stopped at the chapter on Leonard Cohen.
She read in English and translated: 'If I knew where good songs come from, I'd head there every day.'
This guy's sentence is tremendous!"
And Cohen's reflection is recovered again to refer to his new album.
"No one knows where the songs come from... Relax!" He recalls, and acknowledges that with this album he had special pressure because he had signed a major contract with Sony and was "scared" because he also "accumulated gray hairs."
“I don't want people to treat me with respect and like a teacher.
I want to try new things and that's why I work with C. Tangana and Nora Erez.
There's a song on this record that talks about this.
Drexler publishes his new album with the Sony company.
He says that he was "scared" because he "accumulates gray hair" Ángela Suárez
The meeting takes place in his studio with high ceilings in the heart of the Madrid neighborhood of Chueca.
The room is dominated by a huge wooden table.
The cases of several guitars rest on shelves full of books and vinyl records and, in one corner, barely attracting attention, there is an old showcase in which some of the most important awards that his songs have given him are kept: an Oscar, a Goya, a couple of Grammys... Anyone would say that, with so many awards, Drexler is very serious when he says he wants to release a blank page.
However, it is so.
He claims that he always had to do it this way because he never belonged anywhere.
And, once again, the Uruguayan musician recovers a phrase from Cohen seen in the book and quotes it:
He already sang it in his first songs in Montevideo, long before he flew to Spain for the first time.
In fact, sitting in his study, he begins to interpret the verse of
Of love and by chance
: "In this world that is so separated, you don't have to hide where you're from, but we're all from everywhere."
He felt from everywhere, and also outside any generation and scene.
“I couldn't marry the spirit of my generation because he was too inexperienced for that.
I don't have a weight that ties me to eighty or ninety.
I started living from music when I was 30 years old.
I missed the spirit of my generation.
And, since I couldn't marry him, I was able to be a lover of all generations”, he reflects.
He begins to look back and remember those days in Uruguay where "the contamination of the dictatorship" led him, according to him, to listen to music that above all affected him politically.
“I was much more focused on political openness than music.
And that led me to be a fan of the Uruguayan identity.
Totalitarian processes always work in a mirror: they respond in a totalitarian way.
That rhetoric and dynamic is very difficult.
I was focused on a fight that depended on totalitarianism.”
Drexler's emotional map before arriving in Madrid cannot be understood without his homeland, but neither without Israel.
His parents were "very burned out" by the dictatorship and went to live there.
It was only a year, but today the musician remembers him fondly because in Jerusalem he attended his first demonstration and gave him his first kiss.
“It was to an American girl, older than me.
She gave it to me in the back of the school.
I don't remember her name, but I do remember her makeup, ”he recalls.
Drexler's emotional map before arriving in Madrid cannot be understood without his homeland, but neither without Israel.
His parents were "very burned out" by the dictatorship and went to live there.
It was only a year, but today the musician remembers him fondly because in Jerusalem he attended his first demonstration and gave him his first kiss.
“It was to an American girl, older than me.
She gave it to me in the back of the school.
I don't remember her name, but I do remember her makeup, ”he recalls.
Drexler's emotional map before arriving in Madrid cannot be understood without his homeland, but neither without Israel.
His parents were "very burned out" by the dictatorship and went to live there.
It was only a year, but today the musician remembers him fondly because in Jerusalem he attended his first demonstration and gave him his first kiss.
“It was to an American girl, older than me.
She gave it to me in the back of the school.
I don't remember her name, but I do remember her makeup, ”he recalls.
He gave it to me in the back of the school.
I don't remember his name, but I do remember his makeup, ”she recalls.
He gave it to me in the back of the school.
I don't remember his name, but I do remember his makeup, ”she recalls.
The musician, in Chueca.
"I try to say that you have to take iron away from everything," she says. Ángela Suárez
He arrived in Madrid in 1995 driven by the words of "a messiah".
“The only thing that got me out of Uruguay was Joaquín Sabina.
Perhaps I recognize that he was thinking that the messiah would come from Brazil, but he came from Spain”, he says with a laugh.
He had his life already consolidated in Uruguay when he made the decision.
He had a partner, a house and a job in a clinic of which he was a partner, and he left everything to pursue a musical career in Spain.
Upon landing in Madrid, he shared a flat with seven other Uruguayans on Calle de Bretón de los Herreros.
"We called the house Bretoña," he recalls.
“The first impression of Madrid was one of enormous freedom.
You had wonderful anonymity.
Nobody knew you and you didn't know anybody.
But I soon discovered another virtue of this city.
A week after being here, walking up and down the subway, you felt very much at home.
You saw the possibility of being from here.
Everyone came from Soria, Bilbao, Valencia, Extremadura… It was fantastic.
As Joaquín Sabina says: 'My wife was born in Lima, therefore, she is from Madrid'.
The Madrilenian born in Montevideo who is Jorge Drexler now walks through Chueca, which is his home.
He says that Madrid “loves with all its heart, but it is very scattered”.
“From the first day, it seemed to me a completely irresponsible, immature, narcissistic city… People talked at concerts and I went crazy.
In a Caetano Veloso performance the first year, I said: 'What are you doing going to the bar?'
There was a noise in La Riviera to see Caetano absolutely contraindicated.
What was everyone doing at the bar?
The first days in the capital he moved around looking for Sabina.
She had a telephone number and an address that she had given him on a piece of paper of hers when they met in Montevideo, and just as she sings in the song
Pongamos que hablo de Martínez
.
She had an address, but no one ever answered the door.
They didn't pick up the phone either.
She came to believe that both were made up.
One day, someone answered the phone and went to Sabina's house, who called two guys she wanted Drexler to meet that day: Pedro Guerra and Luis Pastor.
“Joaquín must have been terrified when he saw me.
Whenever I tell him about it, he laughs to death.
I'm crazier than I think with that decision."
Pedro Guerra invited him to his concert at Libertad 8. “I was deeply moved by what I saw that night at Libertad 8. I come from a very small city, Montevideo, where music follows a very different track.
In Uruguay, Jaime Roos had planted the seed of group music, with many instruments, all very focused on identity and instrumental deployment.
I didn't quite fit that pattern because I came from João Gilberto's school in Brazil.
Nor did I fit into another movement led by Fernando Cabrera, another of my idols, very guitar-oriented, but he was a marginal phenomenon.
So, I see what happens in Libertad 8: a guy alone with his guitar, letting others up to sing, the whole small room knowing the lyrics and singing with the musician… The guy was totally focused on communication”.
Just connect,
simply connect, as David Byrne said.
Communication.
Drexler affirms that he learned in Libertad 8 to “sing from the eyes”.
“It was my school.
I learned to read the public, to get out of the inbreeding that he came from and to look for the universal in the incredibly provincial codes that he had.
It was very provincial in the good and bad sense.
It was very good for me to know the world to tell about my village”.
Drexler, in the Madrid neighborhood of Chueca.
In 1995 she changed Montevideo for Madrid on the advice of Joaquín Sabina.Ángela Suárez
Camino de Libertad 8, the venue where he gave his first concert in Madrid, says he also quickly learned how the music business worked.
Recommended by Sabina, he went with his album recently released in Uruguay to BMG-Ariola.
“In that first interview, the guy who attended me at the time listened to ten seconds of each song.
In that short time, he told me that he had nothing to do in Spain.
He told me that he had to try this album in Argentina, but not in Spain.
Deep down, it was good advice, but I took it as an insult.
I thought he didn't like what he was doing, but it was really the codes, which were very provincial and Uruguayan.
I went to the studio and did the same songs with guitar and vocals, in Freedom 8 mode. I stripped the songs.
That helped me and he hooked pretty quickly.”
That disc had a life of 14 minutes,
marketing
was that the disc was accepted by the 40 Principales.
At that time there was the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys.
My album lived as long as it took between the record company and Gran Vía, 32. That's where my album died on a Friday at ten in the morning, just out on the street.
The day before I was going to eat the world and the next day I was dead.
No one gives you a death certificate at a record company and it took me a while to figure it out.
Ben Sidran calls it the
slow know
.
When no one picks up the phone and they pass you by without saying anything to you”.
Drexler plays the piano in Libertad 8. He assures that it sounds better now than when he played it every Tuesday in the room, back in the nineties of the last century.
More than two decades separate him from those days when he started and every album he put out was a flop.
“I put out four records and none of them worked.
It was an example of failure in the music industry.”
Through Sabina, he met Víctor Manuel and brought him a cassette of songs.
He passed it on to Miguel Ríos.
He picked up two songs and Ana Belén another.
And Víctor Manuel commissioned another for a collaboration with Pablo Milanés.
From one day to the next, he had placed four songs at the top of Spanish music.
“Suddenly, I had my life figured out in a couple of years.
I was able to sign advances and think about the future.
And the best thing was that Sabina anticipated all these steps in Uruguay on that night in December 1994 when I met him”.
From then on, she began to write for other musicians, such as Ana Torroja, Ketama or Pablo Milanés, and she had income from copyrights, but not from the record company.
“It was a wreck.
And yet, I was happy during those almost 10 years.
It generated a root with the live audience.
She had a fourth-hand Renault Clio and paid rent in El Escorial.
It was enough for me.
I tried to capture that happiness on the Eco album.”
It generated a root with the live audience.
He had a fourth-hand Renault Clio and paid rent in El Escorial.
It was enough for me.
I tried to capture that happiness on the Eco album.”
It generated a root with the live audience.
He had a fourth-hand Renault Clio and paid rent in El Escorial.
It was enough for me.
I tried to capture that happiness on the Eco album.”
Drexler collects the Oscar in 2005. Kevin Winter (Getty Images)
On one of the walls of Libertad 8 hang photos of a very young Drexler surrounded by Javier Álvarez, Pedro Guerra, Paco Bello and Ana Laan, his first wife and mother of his son Pablo.
Also newspaper clippings from when he won the 2005 Oscar for Best Original Song (
Across the River
, from the movie The
Motorcycle Diaries
).
"Bravo, Jorge", is read written in pen on a piece of paper.
“The Oscar was a storm.
I was in a little boat, I asked for a little wind to move and a cyclone appeared.
I tried to use that big wind to move in the direction I wanted.
It was embodied in
12 seconds of darkness
, a much loved record.
It had to have been something very different."
That year was the first in which he knew true success, a huge success.
“I was asked to have made a crossover
album in Los Angeles
Latino because he had an Oscar in his suitcase.
Winning an Oscar makes you belong to a kind of social stratum that must be the closest thing to a monarchy.
It is a very stratified society and where the highest peak is the success of Hollywood.
With an Oscar under your arm, you can sit back and choose the producer you want.
Beck's, Neil Diamond's… Well, there it was.
I did the opposite.
In part, I did it because I was in a deep personal crisis.
I was in a situation as delicate as a separation and considering the distance with my son.
I always say I was in shock for a while.
People think that Leonor [Watling] appeared right after, and no.
It was a time of crisis and I made the album, which is dark, there are many songs of mourning for a relationship.
All in all, a completely inappropriate record for Los Angeles,” she says,
again laughing.
And he adds: “I earned myself a lot of respect.
I said to myself, 'Look, man, this is the right time to decide why you got into this job.'
It all came to me very late and that's why it allowed me to think about everything I had done before.
Much more powerful than meeting stars from half the world was deciding on my destiny and taking the helm.
All this led him to compose and record
Loving the plot,
an album that, according to his own words, is about “love for Madrid”.
The sun sets in Madrid and Drexler walks through Chueca.
“Madrid always gave me the chance to reintegrate and, above all, reinvent myself.
I needed the different life experience.
Not following the predicament or the expected program”, assures this musician who has been taking the helm with both hands for many years.
He has an enviable career that stands firmly on both sides of the Atlantic.
Spain and Latin America admire him equally.
And yet, he says there are still many things he needs to focus on in order to keep learning.
“There is one thing that I greatly envy about singers like Kiko Veneno and Andrés Calamaro.
It's almost cavalier freedom in song form.
I'm not interested in the success of the song, or the logistics, or the aesthetics, or anything, but what's going on inside the song.
That makes me envious.
Yesterday I was listening to Flaca and I was impressed by the degree of freedom in the song.
It does not repeat any metrical structure, the text is clearly unfinished… The same can be said of Volando voy.
Everything they teach you at Berklee in song structure blows away with them.
It is something that is very difficult for me, but because I am an older brother and I tend to think too much about being responsible.”
And, as if a lightbulb turned on, David Byrne's phrase comes to him: “Just connect”.
Simply connect.
The commandment in which Jorge Drexler believes above all things.
The philosophy by which he, after decades of composing songs and reaping hits, allows him to continue premiering the world.
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