The singer and musician SÃlvia Pérez Cruz breaks her recording silence with the publication tomorrow, Friday, of her new album Toda la vida, un dÃa (Sony). A long-awaited work that the referential artist from Empordà will also premiere live this Friday at the Teatre Municipal de Girona (9:00 p.m.) as part of the Strenes festival. Her first stop in Barcelona will be two nights at the Teatre Tivoli next May (24 and 25).
This is the eighth solo album by a creator who has always been characterized by giving shape to projects that are as eclectic as they are risky. You don’t have to go very far from her, since her previous record album was Farsa (impossible genre), where she grouped her own compositions written for cinema, theater and dance and to which she gave life together with a splendid team of instrumentalists.
What he now offers on his debut album with the multinational Sony is, as can be read in the promotional notes, “an album with cyclical connotations, which tries to order a lifetime through different stages that function as different ages”.
The recipient of the 2022 National Award for Current Music elaborates over 21 songs a vital glimpse with a clear sound diversity, very determined in each of those five chapters, which function as five ages, now finding herself at the beginning of the third .
Produced, arranged and composed entirely by her, the brand new work exudes an enormous stylistic and instrumental variety, where you can find brilliant collaborations such as Pepe Habichuela, Carmen Linares, Diego Carrasco, Carles Benavent, Natalia Lafourcade or Salvador Sobral. In short, a task that has taken him a year of work in places as different as Buenos Aires, Havana, Coatepec or Barcelona.
After three months of preparation, Pérez Cruz will present his new work live tomorrow, which will also appear at various festivals this summer such as the Grec or Cap Roig.
By the way, the one from Palafrugell has been these past weeks offering a European tour together with the Irishman Damien Rice.
The first songs he begins to write in confinement.
Yes, the first ones, four of which shape the first movement of the record, I composed them during confinement and they were for friends, they were like birthday gifts, designed for specific people. I kept composing and there came a time when I thought I would like to make a record, like a diary, but then a concept appeared that ordered everything. Before I personally met the Argentine singer Liliana Herrero, who is now 74 years old, I wanted to write her a song for her.
Because?
She is a powerful and committed woman. So I made for her the song Toda la vida, un dÃa, which gives the album its name, and I began to understand that the album is a whole life. I went through everything I had at the time and started composing what I was missing. I saw that for the first movement he already had the songs he wanted to record, I see that they are friendly, happy and super comfortable. The second one wanted it to be more experimental at the sound level, like that second stage of life in which you want to break with everything nice, and after some poems I begin to work a lot on the sound, which was very angular. The third would be my current age, forty, I wanted intimacy, taking everything off, with duets with Juan Quintero and Natalia Lafourcade. The fourth is this one that begins with Toda la vida, un dÃa and there I see that I have to do the songs that go towards death, but death as a step of transformation. And with the last one I wanted to make the beat, the rhythm and the voice, which is precisely the first thing in music.
What has pushed you to look for this theme?
I suppose it is an absolute awareness of life and of the precise moment… I remember that meeting Liliana, hearing her sing, was very important. I also felt at a very fertile moment in life.
When you start composing these songs, what is your mood?
Pandemic… There were important deaths. There is also the immensity, both of the landscape and of the abyss at certain moments in life, and then if you order it flower by flower it is more digestible and more possible, both the immense beauty and the immense pain. That is why the first movement is called La Flor, because when we are born we are protected by the flowers of our parents; the second is called The Immensity because when you go looking for everything you don’t have you break everything you have, and the third, which is the one I would start now, for me is The Garden, where you choose the people who do me good , the songs…
To what extent do these movements reflect the authentic SÃlvia Pérez Cruz?
Everything is roughly, but I have felt, for example, that musically while living in my town I was naturally building something that when I came to Barcelona I wanted to deconstruct. Now I am in a phase in which you remember that first part having learned from the second, that is, learning to handle all those things that you have been discovering that represent you, both your weak points and your strengths. Last year I saw that it is very difficult for me to accept the extremes, that is, both the bad things that can happen to you and the brightest parts, which I have slowed down a lot. In this regard, I remember that Liliana told me “take charge of your light”, but from a point of responsibility.
What has this new album shown you to do?
First of all, it has allowed me to see that my current level of creativity is quite incredible. I am at a very fertile level, it is a bloom. And in this sense there is also a demand for beauty of all ages, with collaborations ranging from Liliana’s seventies to a baby of a few months.
Has any collaboration been left out of the many that exist?
Well yes, in the end I couldn’t count on Residente. In fact, the song Naming is Impossible is based on the poem by Pablo [the playwright Pablo Messiez] but I made the song and the lyrics for Residente because I wanted to make recited, sung and rapped music, because it is a reflection on the word and he was going perfect. He loved it but due to dates it could not be recorded. But we will do something for sure.
Taking all this live doesn’t seem easy, right?
I’ve been preparing it for several months. There are four of us on stage, and the condition is that everyone all play strings as well as other instruments. We are Bori Albero, double bass player who was already in La Farsa; the violinist Carlos Montfort who has been with me since Vestida de nit , and the new signing is that of the cellist Marta Roma, Guillem’s sister. The first part is the most literal of the album, in the second I play the sax, there are synthesizers, while in the last one I also play percussion and drums.
When she was awarded the National Literature Award last year, one of the official reasons for it was her “unwavering commitment to beauty.”
I felt very, very emotional. How nice that they recognize this love for beauty, for the most fragile beauty! That phrase was like the hug for the work of a long time.
