After 15 years of Manel, a year and a half after having put the group on stand by, having announced a tour and sold out tickets for some concerts and with five tracks published on platforms as a sequential advance to whet the appetite, Guillem Gisbert (Barcelona, ??1981) publishes his solo debut, Balla la mazurca (Ceràmiques Guzmán), eleven songs that are not a break with the past, but a step forward, where Dylanan narratives coexist such as Les aventures del general Lluna – more than seven minutes of folk rock with the basis of La Ludwig Band – with trap songs like Hauries hauda venir, between pop and original song, marking the passage of time and its own change of era, like the the title track of the album or Miracle a les Plaines, where he remembers his student days with lyrics based on Gabriel Ferrater’s style. We talk about it at the foot of the Mapfre tower, which opens the album by talking to the Arts hotel.
Dance the mazurca, as in the title of the album?
To talk about emotions that interest me, I like to put a shell, a costume, which gives more play and is a universe that gives many references. Interestingly, where the mazurka is danced a lot is in the Philippines.
Dancing the mazurka and making it dance is the life of the show…
The fate of the character is very bitter, it is a way of observing the fact of getting on stage in the most negative way possible. The key word in this song is to please, because the drive that makes you do such a thing has many facets, but to please, to seek the applause or the opinion of others is part of the life of the show in a way that is often exhausting.
There is also the step of growing up.
Anything that is making a record about growing older makes me very panicked, but it’s there, and at thirty years old I wouldn’t have been able to play it the same way, as it somehow happens in Miracle a les Plaines.
The album begins by making the Mapfre tower speak, as if it were the bell towers of Verdaguer…
And what a wonder! It was the first thought, that it would be nice to have a conversation between two modern buildings, and of course, it was almost inevitable to end up here. There is also a generational thing. In Manel’s last EP, in Tipus suite, the death of Mary Santpere, in September 1992, appears, and the group’s second album refers directly to the Barcelona Games, there is a fascination with the period, because you feel legitimized to write about the world of when you’re ten years old, in a way, and it’s that feeling legitimated to talk about one thing or another is a very strange thing, you don’t know exactly what belongs to you and what doesn’t. But there is something about the look around the Olympics that I notice a lot, and as a Barcelona native too, obviously.
It’s the first album since Manel’s indefinite hiatus, which you never quite know what it means.
No, we don’t know either. Since we are quite aware, and it is very likely, and I believe it right now to the bone, that we will make a record again and we will do concerts again, speaking in other terms would be strange.
Did it feel very different during the process of making the album?
For the last 15 years, my job has been to write songs, with Roger, Arnau and Martí. With that part of the equation removed, I had to see how it’s done. There is a whole part that has to do with the steps of a song that in Manel’s world are not part of my negotiation, because there are many talents needed to make a song that I don’t have. In addition, there is a part of validating the idea, of finding security when working on a song, which I had to find myself, and at the age of 42 it is good to do that. But basically it was the first time, so far my experience was to write a line or have an idea or maybe a stanza and then three other people would come in to comment here or there and get back to it with a renewed security, sometimes nuanced, towards one side or the other.
This is already over.
Well, it was throwing miles around a bit blindly. With a producer you have a relationship in which you also exchange ideas and sometimes you disagree, but from another side. It’s not the same as with the group.
The record is very eclectic, very varied, compared to the group.
Maybe so, but with Manel we had the feeling that the records were quite eclectic, especially the last ones, with many genres and many different sounds, he has lived together a classic formation of guitar, bass and drums with electronics and a part of hip- oops. Just because of working with different producers I already wanted to follow this line a little, to accept that you’ve been working with the same people for 15 years and it’s good to get some fresh air and meet and work with other people. A second job to keep the tap of songs open, relearn many things and find different alliances.
It’s different from Manel, but not that much… although maybe there’s some more digressive issue…
It’s that for the artistic part, I don’t have a need to break with what we were doing. Many of the songs on the album, in the end, or at least the first drafts, are thought up by a person who is in a band. It is an impossible exercise to imagine what this album would be like if I had made it with the three of them. Would the songs be longer or shorter? Would there be fewer digressions? I do not know. The first person you have to distract and please is the partner, and in this sense, you get out of your infatuation bubble a little and make a more shareable product. A song like The Adventures of General Luna could have been done by Manel, but one like Total Empathy possibly not, because of the darkness, because of the climate there.
It’s not a breakup, no.
It also has to do with the personality of the producers. Waltzing Matilda and Balla la mazurca, for example, have been produced by Anxo Ferreira. I worked on the songs with him in Madrid and they have all these very digital textures that already give them a very specific personality. On the other hand, Estudiantina is made with a formation that is Rondalla Puiggraciós. I like that these types of different aesthetics coexist, it makes me more distracted and for some reason I have never had the sensitivity to do one thing, to practice one genre and be the best at it. I will never be the best at anything, but in a specific musical genre, at least, I don’t have the talent to be either.
Who is not a singer-songwriter?
For some reason, the concept of songwriter seems more comfortable to me, but in the end it’s the same. It is true that here the singer-songwriter is associated with an austere production, perhaps simply because of the imagination of cheap production, and I do not intend this sonority.
He will not stand alone on stage with his guitar or ukulele!
I don’t have the talent to do it either. Albert Pla, for example, has a great ability to fill the stage alone with the guitar. If the band doesn’t end up being there, I would never have stood on a stage, I wouldn’t have had the drive to do it alone, I would have devoted myself to something else.
They maintain Manel’s record label, Ceràmiques Guzmán, and now they are not alone, there is also La Ludwig Band…
You don’t have to imagine a building with four floors… There are four of us, but the one who really takes care of it is Martí, the bass player, who also acts as my project manager. At the time of the specializations of the roles naturally, he was more interested in the whole part of the industry. We made it to manage Manel’s records and The Ludwig Band proposed to us to do the experiment of co-publishing their record with Indian Runners, their label, and for the moment we have done this, but it is very complicated to grow as a label since ‘where we’re doing it. It’s a lot of work and then, obviously, no records are sold.
It was not born as a side business.
It is that to be a business it should be other things, because selling records is not a business, it should be management, or a series of things that are not… which is a lot of work and which are not… La Ludwig’s we went because we really liked the group, because we were excited and then to try. And of course, now there is my disc, yes.
Thus, with the other Manels the relationship continues…
Yes, with Martí, of course, for the album, but I have recorded the vocals for some songs in Arnau’s studio (the drummer), because recording vocals is a very psychological thing and I am very used to working with he And I spoke with Roger this morning, we talk almost every day.
Has he had to put up barriers with them, to avoid the routines of the years?
Clear, because otherwise it would be cheating. In creative teams there is one thing that is very curious, which in the end is a convention. They are people whose opinion counts when shaping a project. But you can’t ask someone outside the project for an opinion, because everyone has one, everyone thinks differently, and you can’t be permeable to other opinions because it gets messed up. Boundaries are supposed to be solid and impermeable, but when you’ve worked with them for so long, they’re opinions that can be destabilizing, powerful to say the least. Sometimes I thought how one or the other would handle it. There has been a noticeable increase in common learning, but everyone already brings different things. I didn’t have to slow down much, because it was very clear to me. When you miss your colleagues the most, it’s in the invisible day-to-day things of the band, the thousand and one decisions you have to make, which are the complicated, the absurd decisions. Making an album is an infinite succession of decisions, and here I did notice it, because the discussion is more intense, but these small day-to-day decisions are the ones that surprised me.
Did you work song by song or with the whole project in mind?
The difficulty was that with a new producer, who you may have just met, you have to generate a common language that I have had for many years, I had built in a very natural way. And I have complicated my life, because I have worked with five different production teams and I have had to do the establishment of a common space many times, but I also liked the role change, the group has a part very necessarily closed, and this on the other hand was just the opposite and required me to be a social animal, which is something I can activate in my personality, but which I can also with great pleasure deactivate for years and years. There was a part that had to do with taking that step of being a little more outgoing. If I had worked with only one producer I would have had to do it only once, and instead it has been months and months of doing it. This has produced very different ways of working and it has been very enriching, a year of my life very different from the last fifteen, which is what it was all about.
Are you worried about what critics will say about the album, if it’s very continuous, a breakup…?
A critique is like a conversation with someone with whom you share interests in a discipline, and when you’re 20 years old, critique is important because it legitimizes your role, your attempt to belong to a world that fascinates you and to which you want to belong, but right now it is rather to be part of a dialogue and a really very opinionated field. I haven’t done something that is invulnerable to criticism, but I see it more from a conversation than someone who can separate right from wrong.
Nor is it a leap into the void.
I have a career behind me, but putting out any artistic product is an act of vulnerability. And as a good music lover, I have dedicated myself to cruelly commenting on the solo albums of groups that have split up, a genre in itself. But life is strange, and suddenly you are that person. Life must go on, and now you understand the reasons why these records came out.
You won’t be able to turn down Paul McCartney records anymore…
Right, but I’ll keep doing it. I recently read a somewhat cruel analysis: the group is not a personality plus another and another, but rather a kind of protective sheet in which you see the silhouettes and a lump, and that is the group. When you see human beings, personalities appear with all their edges, all their flaws and their virtues. Human beings are never as fascinating as that lump in the sheet. It was McCartney’s turn to be a little more cheesy than the account, Lennon when he started talking about politics was a bit heavy and pamphleteer, the other was an impossible sarcasm and Ringo, well, was Ringo. I now notice that in the interviews, my character, this character whose name is Guillem Gisbert and who makes records, is different from the character who is part of the group, in which you are not just yourself.
Were you surprised to sell out the tickets for the first concerts without presenting anything, just the name?
I was starting from scratch, I didn’t even have social networks, and in order to try to do the tour that I will do in the summer I had to start communicating that this existed, and the way was with these first concerts, the Apolo one in Barcelona (3 of May) and the two of the Strenes festival in Girona (May 4). I was surprised that tickets sold out, and relieved, too. Now, then I sent a message to the other three, because these tickets in the end were sold by Manel, not by me. Now it will be interesting to see to what extent a project with my name is more or less able to keep selling tickets. It has to be seen.
How will you approach the live show?
There will be three people on stage, Jordi Casadessús -former member of La Iaia-, who has produced some of the songs and we understand each other very well. There is also Arnau Grabulosa, very young and very good, and Glòria Maurel, also very good, on drums. And there will also be programming, synthesizers, a little bit of everything.
Will there be Manel songs?
It’s complex, but I have an idea. I’m not particularly a fan of retrieving, but it’s funny because I’ve been writing songs for years, but I’ve only got eleven, right now. I’ll have to peck at something, but I’ll try to do it judiciously and make sense.
So no ukulele?
I won’t go with a ukulele or play Manel’s greatest hits, that would be absurd. In addition, I really want to try to make the two projects coexist, in a well-articulated way. But you will have to think about it and see it. Everything has its what, those of us in the group have come to understand it over the years, and a career as a solo artist has other different things that I have to discover little by little.
