The softness and fragility of her voice contrasts with the strength of her lyrics. The songs of Andrea Santiago (Pamplona, ??1993) float in the air, but they cut deep. They are born from a powerful intimacy that she brings out with compositions that are a lever to find her place in the world. For her, dissociated from her body and always in her head, she says, music is therapy.
After her first debut album, Set Fire to Everything (2022), the singer and songwriter embraces a new work in Éxodo (2024): the geography of an inner journey with which to shake off everything annoying thanks to movement and, in formally, leave a record that you are living this moment. A conceptual album, with a double essence, in which alternative style, electronic music or progressive rock coexist, for the first time, in the same world. On this occasion, the artist is accompanied by Juanma Latorre (Vetusta Morla) as a music producer and Virgin as a record giant. “I feel like I have to live up to it,” she confesses.
This new album is born from a reflection that is generated with the previous one. You couldn’t free yourself as you intended with Setting Everything on Fire and that’s why with Exodus you embark on a journey forward. Where do you want to go?
I talked about this a lot with Juanma [Latorre], who is the producer, before making the album, because, since I hadn’t finished writing it yet, I didn’t know if it was going to go anywhere. But while I was writing it I realized that the answer is nowhere, that just with the intention of movement I already felt much better, calmer. That freed me much more than being still, more than, metaphorically, setting everything on fire. It was more about moving my body, connecting with the world, walking…
Is inhabiting that movement the best way to live?
I have a habit, I don’t know if good or bad, and it is that I get out of my body a lot and I see everything from the outside and, suddenly, I feel like I automate everything. For me, it was much more important to have found a gear or a button or something that was encouraging me to move and be connected to my own body and the world than anything else. I think that, in my stage of life, it was what I needed: to reconnect. But stillness, separating yourself, being calm and seeing yourself from within is also absolutely essential.
If you were going to stay in one place, where would you stay?
In one that was near the sea. Donosti drives me crazy. Or Zarautz. I live an hour from the sea, in Pamplona, ??so I can take a bus, of which there are plenty, and be there at any time.
You say that to free yourself is to accept the darkness that the path entails. Is there much darkness in your head?
Yes and I think there were many more before. I intended that this movement would help me accept parts of myself that were dark or that I had been told at the time, in the context in which I had grown up, that were dark and that, deep down, perhaps they were not so dark… Each song is a little about one thing and, for example, Fly in the Dark did have something more to do with a trait of my personality, something that is part of me and that I had been told couldn’t be. I also don’t want to go into too much detail…
In that letting go that are the ten songs that make up the album, what has been the most difficult on an emotional level?
For me writing songs is, apart from freeing up space, a way to translate what happens to me. I think the most important part is that, by understanding what is happening to me, I have to make decisions about where I want to go or what I want to do or what I want to abandon, something that has not been easy at all, because, in fact, there have been very specifics that I have left behind.
Is music, in your case, therapy?
Absolutely! I am always going to write songs, because they help me a lot to locate myself in the world and understand what is happening inside me, but precisely with this album, in addition to that therapeutic and natural part, I also had a more artificial intention. I wanted to remember that I was living this process, because, since I get out of my body a lot, I forget what happens to me, and I wanted this album to be like a document, something that always happens with songs, but, on this occasion, I wanted to was intentionally. And that it also materialized in the production, at the sound level, that there were electronic elements that we had not worked on before that reflected that part so as to never forget that I was living this process through the songs and that I was creating like a spider web of stories of abandonment and that I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t forget it!
You have left your comfort zone…
With the more electronic part I wanted to explore more, above all, with the elements that we have worked on in the studio on a musical level. Those extremes have come out very naturally. I have listened to a lot of progressive rock and also a lot of singer-songwriter music, so, wanting to capture that double side that the album was going to have, it came out spontaneously. And I think that, furthermore, it is also reflected in the narrative. With the song Una, which is like the almost final part of the journey, when you are at the limit, when you can’t take it anymore, it was evident that something dark and hardcore was going to come out. It’s one of my favorite songs. I see it as a part of the journey in which old wounds are reviewed and there is a lot of anger, but when you let go of it, there is also a lot of liberation.
Both your previous album and this one have a narrative thread. Does that desire to construct an almost cinematographic story come from your training in Audiovisual Communication?
Well, look, maybe yes, but I would say that maybe more about literature. I studied Audiovisual Communication, but I focused my entire career on literature. In fact, long before writing songs, she wrote fiction. I won a short story award, they gave me a scholarship from the Antonio Gala Foundation to write a book… Above all, I always think that in my work there is a lot of James Salter’s imagery in the way he, for example, describes the river, the sky… in light years.
So, did the singer and songwriter win the battle against the potential writer?
I’m learning to get them together! It is true that, when I have been very immersed in writing songs, it has been very difficult for me to enter the world of narrative. Writing, like composition, comes to me on impulse. The most I have stopped writing songs, which has been in recent months, is when I have finished a novel. I want to try to make both worlds come together.
Did composing start as a hobby or was it within you the desire to make a living from music?
Well, actually it all comes from a tantrum I had with my teacher [laughs], but, of course, there was a basis of absolute love for music. I loved playing the guitar, but I had a teacher who told my mother that she had never seen a girl play it so badly. She missed it and then I started watching YouTube and learned from videos of singer-songwriters. To this day, and this is horrible to say, I don’t really know what I’m playing, I play by ear.
Do Juanma Latorre and Virgin give more security or more vertigo?
Maybe more vertigo! In my house we have listened to Vetusta Morla a lot and, when we started working with Juanma, I was totally dissociated. I remember that I went to have coffee with him and I thought: “this man who has written those songs that have accompanied so many people, that have accompanied me, that have moved me so much… I am not able to understand anything.” It was a feeling of security, because I knew that I was going to get along with him, that he was going to understand me, because he is sensitive, intelligent and extremely talented. I knew that he was going to have a good feeling and a good chemistry to write and to explain, above all, what he wanted to do, but at the same time I felt “this man is a giant.” And with Virgin, well the same. It was very unexpected for me, but also a support that is essential for an artist as small as me.
The search for beauty is a constant in everything you do…
In my mother’s family they are all aesthetes, artists. There are nine brothers and almost all of them dedicate themselves to art in some way. I have several uncles who are painters, an aunt who makes tapestries or restores things… And, on my father’s side, too. I think they have always placed a lot of emphasis on beauty, but, above all, alternative beauty. Recently my aunt showed me some dolls that she had knitted by hand, super strange, that, if I see them with outside eyes, they scare me, but, at the same time, they are beautiful, pretty.
Is sensitivity your greatest quality?
Being in touch with intimacy and vulnerability is a capacity that I greatly admire and that I hope to always have.
Have you found your place in the industry?
I’m not sure… I think that, right now, the music I make is not what is being listened to the most. I am calm with what I have done. I feel like I’ve reached a place I wanted to get to and that on the album, and this always happens to us, there are songs where you say “I’m over you, I don’t want to know anything.” I left exactly what I wanted in it. If I have found my place…? There we are holding on!
