His name is the history of pop music and his second surname, Mecano, the soundtrack to the lives of millions of people, a trio that with its mythical Descanso dominicale won the Guinness as the Spanish group with the most sales beyond our borders. Twenty years later and with eight solo albums, Ana Torroja (Madrid, 1959) can now boast of being a prophet in her land, as the Latin Recording Academy crosses the Atlantic for the first time to award its coveted Latin Grammys and Ana has been distinguished in the Musical Excellence category: from November 9 to 16 Seville will be the nerve center of Latin music throughout the world and our protagonist will touch the sky on the 12th at the Lope de Vega theater.

“It’s something so exciting that I still can’t believe it. I don’t know what will happen the day I hold it in my hand, if I will be able to pronounce words, but it makes me especially excited when it arrives after so many years of career, with more or less success, something that doesn’t matter as much to me as having been able to keep doing what I like. This recognition for me is a reaffirmation that my way of making music continues to be liked”.

The Ana who lived between the ground and the sky when Mecano measured his success by full stadiums, is basically the same as today. Along the way, since those wonderful years – the 80s, always the 80s – she has, however, learned a couple of important things: “I am very demanding of myself, sometimes too much. I allow myself few failures and few errors; I have always tried to be my best version of myself at all times. You never stop learning, you evolve, you find yourself more comfortable in your body, in your mind, in your way of seeing life and your profession… I think I have improved in confidence and in stopping demanding myself, in not thinking so much about what is going to say the others. Do what really comes from within, regardless of whether you like it or not.

The Pride celebration deserves applause so recently, who claimed homosexual love between two girls on stage for the first time with Mujer contra mujer: “It’s a song that every time I perform it live, people sing it with their soul as if to say ‘ We are going to continue singing loud and strong’ to normalize what is absolutely normal for me”. All in all, a wake-up call for that generation Z that handles terms such as gender fluid, non-binary, queer, polyamory and other neologisms with ease but whose arrogance criticizes a colloquialism like “faggot” in a prime-time program is not too much. lyrical license of a Mecano song. It happened not so long ago in Operación Triunfo:

“I have a hard time connecting with those guys on some things. In fact, it is difficult for me to communicate through networks: I know they are very useful, but if I could, I would do without them. I am as old as I am and I like to meet for a drink and if I can, I call you on the phone. I understand that there are things that sound strange to them when at that time they were absolutely well received, but it would be nice if they understood that we are from different generations and different times. That that youth was more tolerant. We all should be; too much radicality”.

The occasion paints her bald to ask her to value the most polarized Spain of the last 30 years. If her former partner Nacho Cano shows himself as an “assistant” without ambiguity, she moves to the other side. She says that she has never been tempted from anywhere: “What I do is play for town halls, her color doesn’t matter, and my political opinion is worth the same as yours or anyone else’s. I am from the center left and I think that there are things that have been done well; others not so much. I like Spain, Spain united. The Spain that we have always known, with which we have grown up”.