Pablo López wanted to be a journalist, he comments on a visit to the La Vanguardia newsroom, a complicated job in these times that he replaced in time with music, where he has built a solid career as a singer and composer that has led him to publish four albums, but above all to act, his great passion. His is the record of having performed 82 live concerts during the hardest part of the pandemic, the last one in a Palau Sant Jordi to which he will return this May 12 with the usual songs and a couple of singles (Quasi and El abrazo más of all time) drawn in the air by a hummingbird like the one he has tattooed on his arm. A preview of his next album that, he promises, will be out in the fall. “I really wanted to go on tour, I couldn’t take it anymore”, he explains, to emphasize that he can’t help but “live up to what people expect and what I need too, I’m a man of records”.

What do records have going for them?

Making an analogy with the written press, records allow you to establish an order about how you want to tell your news, your story, an opportunity that those of us who like records cannot miss. You can’t ignore streaming, but every time I hear that word I get goosebumps. The important thing is not how many listens a song has, but what is in front of you when you go on stage. I am hopeful that albums can still be made and make sense, with a story to tell.

He performs at Sant Jordi the same as two years ago, when there were still restrictions due to the pandemic

Last year I did not tour, when it was the concert boom, but between 2020 and 2021 we did 82 concerts that culminated in Sant Jordi, where we are now starting. It gives a lot of vertigo, on top of that with the feeling of people crowded together and without a mask, it seems like a fantasy to me. When I rehearse at the venue I try to imagine how people will react to each song, although in the end everything that happens is unpredictable when you go on stage with the energy of Sant Jordi.

The Quasi single is illustrated by a hummingbird

Although it seems mystical, it comes from a trip to Mexico where I don’t know if it was a matter of mezcal or tequila but I dreamed of a hummingbird, my own hummingbird. I have never seen one in person and I imagined it bigger. I got it tattooed before I wrote the song, and the same day I got the tattoo I finished recording Quasi. The hummingbird is a tribute to that day, to that swing of emotions that is working in America, where they have another language, even if it is the same, and another intense way of living things. In honor of all this I wanted to start a series of hummingbirds, this one is blue, the next one is red. Hummingbirds could be an example of songs, almost impossible to sing and see, they bring a message, they have many readings, mystical, biological. The songs have all the ingredients to resemble this bird.

The tour starts in Mexico. What is your connection with that country?

I have gone many times, little by little, weaving a path similar to the one I started ten years ago in Spain when I played for 40, 60, 100, 150 pushing for the songs to go before me. Mexico gives me the same feeling, it lets me be me, they respect the will of the artist, and that gives me the impression that it’s like a girl I want to see many more times, like I’ve had a coffee that I want to end in a honeymoon

He is already an established musician, but he talks as if he had just started

I still have the same fears, the same illusions, desires and needs as when I started. I don’t need a slave fanning me in the dressing room on a red velvet sofa, I need to play, to be left a happy and serene space to be able to sing. It still seems amazing to me to go on tour, and that the lights move to the rhythm of my songs. And it’s not a matter of false modesty, people say wonderful things to me on the street, I’m feeding and stealing from almost everyone I know, but the fear of waking up one day and having dreamed it all haunts me. It’s a bit uncomfortable but it also keeps me very alert.

You already played as a child, but when did you start composing?

I’ve been writing since I was 14 or 15 years old, I started flirting with the expression for reasons of need, the need to be heard by a girl, or to describe a moment of frustration that I had. It is curious how as a teenager one tries to find words, rhetoric, the perfect rhyme, and all of this has gradually degenerated into a wilder but at the same time more coherent and concrete way of working. I come from a neatness, even from some text that now I see and it seemed Espronceda, right now almost nothing rhymes to me what I do. It’s curious how writing and music have evolved, how the two have come together, that paste, that pottage with which today I define myself deeply in my songs.

He has a solid style

I’m very long term, I’m going on tour now, I start with a song that just came out and the next one I play is from the first album from ten years ago, and I promise you that at that moment I wouldn’t know which one is the new one. That gives me having abandoned myself to music, as Alejandro [Sanz] said. It has become a way of life, writing and expressing myself above all, but thanks to that slow fire of having written, of having tried and experienced.

Where do you find the inspiration to compose?

In your own life, there is nothing more surreal sometimes than sitting with a beer in a bar and watching them go by. Or if you focus on a personal relationship, almost everything that happens goes unnoticed, I have never written in reverie or deep defeat. I have written to the defeat at the bar, to the clumsy fight of stumbling, of having done badly one night, of having laughed a lot or having done what is classified as politically incorrect. Life gives you a lot of reasons and stories to write.

Does music also find it there?

Music belongs to a field that I couldn’t describe. I play first and then I think, and the music belongs to a different bandwidth, I couldn’t describe a situation musically, but it would probably lead me to play something. It is very mystical.

The past year has been dedicated to composing Victoria for Raphael

A whole album (laughs) thanks to him and myself for being so constant. Thanks to all the afternoons and all the brain teasing, I had that wonderful escape route that is to write for a guy whose one step is a story.

Did Raphael give you instructions?

That he wanted me to write to him, “I’m not going to tell you anything at all,” he said, because he blindly believed in me. I only had one chance to ask him and he jumped at me ‘no! I don’t write songs or produce, you’ll do it all’. What I did was trick him into coming to my house every Wednesday afternoon and we would talk. He told me stories about him that are overwhelming, that don’t fit in a book, and he tells them to you as if they had happened yesterday and they were nothing, it’s nothing romantic telling you, with details that surprise you.

Do you feel satisfied?

From all those conversations, from becoming a friend with whom I go to eat from time to time, with whom I can even share my vicissitudes, a record came out that I am proud of and that I will be able to listen to in a while, because when I finish do something like that I try to let it rest. I take a lot of things with me and I maintain a tremendous pedagogical inertia, in addition to the pleasure of writing for another person, which makes you a little more free. Also from there songs come out for me for the future.

He maintains contact with numerous artists

I have very good friends who have been and continue to be my idols. With Antonio Orozco I have a practically family relationship, literally, but I also have a lot of friendship with Alejandro [Sanz], with Pablo [Alborán], with Fonsi, with Laura [Pausini], people who you can sleep on their sofa.

Does this microcosm enhance creativity?

Absolutely, I have a superpower that is to steal everything, I steal their souls because I really like listening to them. I am still the little one of all, the last one to arrive, and that gives me the advantage that I listen a lot and play to continue imagining and dreaming about them.