His name is Pedro Hernández and he has too much talent to risk diluting it among such common names. A manager believed this, probably correctly, and decided to rename him as the most relevant protagonist of the saints’ list. St. Pedro – pronounced ‘saint’, a legacy of his time in Miami – has been a finalist in Benidorm Fest, the pre-Eurovision event that in our country is close to surpassing the international festival for which it was born in media interest. In the last vote, the bolero Two Strangers that was sung by St. Pedro – composed by himself – was surpassed by the Zorra played by Nebulossa and everything was fine: that’s how the public wanted it and that’s how the young man from Tenerife accepts it, happy to have been there.
The son of a teacher and a farmer and a troublemaker since he was three years old, he thanks his mother that before enrolling in Classical Percussion at the conservatory (beating the drum was his hobby) she forced him to learn piano and with it, the value of discipline. As fate would have it, these days, when she publishes her first studio album, This life I chose, the press has been able to confirm that her next boleros may not speak of a heartbreak but of the opposite: Pedro and Chanel Terreros, Spanish representative in Eurovision 2022, they are together.
This life I chose is an album composed of ten songs written by himself together with Ione de la Cruz and Nelson Hernández that explore the influence of Latin music in the Canary Islands. The album has merengue, bachata, salsa, guaguancó, tango and even a ranchera but there is no reggaeton. And it has to do with his experience in Miami. This is how st is explained. Pedro for La Vanguardia.
“No, there is no reggaeton. I already spent three years of my life making urban music and I appreciate it very much because I learned a lot about their work system; I am one of those who think that you can learn from everything, even what you least expect. From that time I imported working quickly, without paying too much attention to details at the beginning, but since I come from the old school I merged both ways of working a little. “I am grateful to reggaeton and I respect artists who are capable of doing something original within such an overloaded genre, but I don’t see myself going back.”
On their first album, st. Pedro speaks of love but, particularly, of lack of love. “The song Two Strangers is a good summary: a relationship that started very well but over time the paths of these two people separate and they become two strangers without realizing it and if you are not careful.” The song talks about my own experience. “It is different with a broken heart; I assure you that you have to take more breaks to wipe your tears a little so that your colleagues in the studio don’t see you, because then the jokes come and take you out of your ‘vibe’ (laughs).”
And Pedro’s emotions, at 27 years old, find better refuge in Los Panchos than in Taylor Swift: “The bolero has lyrics for all times but above all, when your soul is broken, there is nothing better than a good bolero Noche de Ronda seems like a magical work to me,” explains the young man from Tenerife, remembering Los Panchos. When asked how many times he has been in love, after thinking about it for a few moments, he concludes that only once. And he immediately adds, perhaps to avoid uncomfortable cross-questions, that he is also sorry for his mother, for his grandparents, for the people of the island.
It is obligatory to ask him about his budding relationship with Chanel Terreros once they have been captured by the paparazzi without hiding how good they are together. “It’s just that we don’t… we don’t talk about it. It is our private life and we only talk about work, our career. With all the respect in the world, I prefer not to touch on the subject,” he responds after avoiding several trick questions.
On the contrary, he is not at all bothered by the obligatory reference to Zorra, the Nebulossa song that took away the possibility of being the Spanish representative in Eurovision. In fact, he uses a quote from Kevin Costner to express his satisfaction at having come this far thanks to Benidorm Fest: “Costner said that he preferred to have a supporting role in a very good movie rather than a leading role in a somewhat average movie. I like everything about that song: at the production level it is brutal, it is very well structured and on the lyrical side I find it incredible: it tells a story like it hasn’t been told in a long time, it reminds me of the lyrics of Alaska, of the lyrics of the Madrid scene that they are, let no one forget, what has made this country musically what it is today. I hope that people stop looking for the bad so much and look back a little to see where what they are doing comes from,” he concludes, genuinely convinced.
