The artist Vicente Navarro, photographed for ICON in Madrid.Daniel de Jorge
In a corner of the living room of Vicente Navarro's house, a shared apartment in Madrid de los Austrias, there is an armchair.
It is his workplace, the place where he writes down the lyrics or records the melodies of the songs that he then develops on an electric piano located right in front of him.
But the important thing is not so much that as the views: the chair is next to the balcony from which you can see one of the arteries of the La Latina neighborhood.
Navarro says that it was here, in this window to the world, where he composed most of the songs from
Las Manos,
his second studio album, released in November 2022, during the pandemic. The song that closes it,
Los mayos
, is fortunate of a confined love story, the story of an idyll from balcony to balcony, “an evolution of the story of Romeo and Juliet,” he says.
However, in that seat, Navarro often sees or imagines a very specific river, the Guadiana as it passes through the Hoces Strait, near Fontanarejo, the town of Ciudad Real where Navarro has spent summers since his childhood.
It was there where he took the singer Rocío Márquez to finish composing
Although the lights go out,
the song they released together in February.
“The river does not have any negative connotation for me,” he explains when we ask him about the persistence of that symbol, which was already present in
Casi tierra,
his first album.
”I have always associated it with freedom.
In the sickles, the river is very beautiful and it has never scared me.
I visualize many of my songs there.”
Since he burst into music in 2019 with the help of the independent label El Tragaluz, with a delicate first album that did not resemble practically anything that the
indie
scene offered , it is almost impossible to talk about Navarro without alluding to the rural, to the countryside, to that emptied Spain but which for decades has welcomed the experiences of many Spaniards born in the seventies, eighties and nineties: the town as a point of contact with an unpaved Spain for better and worse, a space of freedom and constriction.
“From folklore, from the countryside, what interests me most is the people,” he says, alluding to certain gestures or customs that urban life has eradicated.
“It is a feeling of closeness, a way of relating.
The lady who crosses the street and enters without knocking to ask you how you are, or the way someone passing by with a horse greets you.
“That's where I connect.”
Now that the debate on rural matters returns with force, from the arguments to the satirical visions of the subject, Navarro assures that he approaches this field with honesty.
“I don't idealize the countryside at all because I have known it and lived it.
I know what it's like to go out on the street and have kids insult you, or for my pastor uncle to get up at four in the morning,” he explains, and lists his own memories.
“In my house in the town there was no bathroom, only a urinal.
I hid when my grandmother wrung the chickens' necks.
One Sunday I woke up and found seven wild boars lying at the door of the house, because it was hunting day.
My level of idealization is zero.
And my vision is also marked by that cruelty.
Spain is very Spain!
For me it is something that has a lot of violence.
For example, when I was little I remember that they hung the lambs to weigh them to know if they were the exact weight for the best meat.
I think now I wouldn't just stand there looking at him, I would let him go and open the door for him.”
Vicente Navarro has published two albums, 'Casi Tierra' (2019) and 'Las Manos' (2022).Daniel de Jorge
In Navarro's songs there are stanzas that are reminiscent of the jota or the tonada, harmonic scales borrowed from Arabic music - which arise when he composes on the piano, he says - and a minimalist and almost naked production that makes a virtue of necessity.
Most of the songs on
Las Manos
are resolved with a rhythmic base that comes from his passion for hip hop and guitar arrangements based on arpeggiated chords and certain flamenco gestures.
There are
loops
from Joaquín Rodrigo's
Aranjuez Concert
, choruses where the instrument doubles the melodic line of the voice, as in r&b, and almost recited fragments.
“My vision of composition is similar to dramaturgy,” he points out, alluding to his beginnings as an actor.
“My method is to write a lot, and then delete until I am left with the essentials.”
Hence his lyrics are sometimes fragmentary, or they twist the grammar into linguistic findings that are reminiscent, again, of folklore, lullabies or popular songs.
“I am getting closer to a certain magical realism that interests me a lot, and the influence of folklore leads me to skip Spanish, to use adverbs that at first don't fit, but then work,” he develops.
But he also acknowledges that, since his first album, he has learned to refine the lyrics to make them more authentic and natural.
The first time we interviewed him at ICON, weeks before the outbreak of the pandemic, Vicente Navarro had not yet premiered his live show.
When he finally did it, he was polishing a show where the songs give rise to improvisation and certain cathartic moments.
The live performance that he will present today at the Teatros del Canal in Madrid is part of the FIAS, a sacred art festival that brings together many of the most interesting and minority proposals, sacred and profane, in current music.
For this concert, Navarro has resorted to audiovisual funds to rescue images of the war and the post-war, of the generation of '27 or of the landscapes that inspire him.
Debates about purity and authenticity may not suit him, but Navarro is interested in memory.
His emergence into music, invariably dressed in a white shirt, three-day beard and eyes darkened with eyeliner, had something of a Lorca tragic hero;
Not in vain
The Teeth,
one of the most striking themes of his first work, was the first-person account of a shot.
Navarro says that he has approached historical memory and the legacy of folklore from curiosity and a lack of prejudice.
“In the nineties and two thousand he took the Anglo-Saxon thing and forgot everything that had to do with tradition.
But I had not lived through the dictatorship, and my arrival at flamenco or copla was the result of a personal search, without seeing anything pejorative in them.
I learned that when I studied drama: you don't decide what excites you and what doesn't.
And for me it is a pride to be part of a generation that is recovering folklore from a personal point of view.”
It is in this collision between acquired culture and lived experience that his language emerges, which is nourished by his surrealist readings and his memories of adolescence.
For example, about the summer he spent in his town at age 17, “two magical months.”
Navarro grew up in Madrid but, he says, it took him a long time to understand the extent to which his experiences in his family's town had defined him.
At the end of the day, although no one chooses the experiences that leave their mark, highlighting what they have experienced firsthand is a trait as generational as having an Instagram account or composing with the iPad.
From Rocío Márquez to Rodrigo Cuevas, from Casapalma to Palomo Spain, the emotional relationship with the past and the memory of previous generations finds ways to overlap contradictions.
In Navarro's themes, the rural is intertwined with the confessional, mental health, gender dissidence, spirituality or political disenchantment.
“I carry that land as my flag, because they are the images that obsess me and that come to me when creating my music.
For example,
I don't imagine
La casa de Bernarda Alba in Andalusia, but in Ciudad Real,” he says.
“I love sharing my town, showing it to everyone, because it is really very beautiful.
I like to learn roads to go with the jeep, swim in the river and be with people.
Although there are certain elements that still shock me a lot, age and intelligence help you overcome them.
For example, it is very difficult for me to go into a bar and order a bottle, but I still do it.”
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