María José Llergo is the ideal person to cross paths with when you’re having a bad day, the one who talks to you positively, the one who draws lessons before you hold grudges, the one who starts singing in the middle of the conversation and you don’t know where the music starts and where the words “I live in love with the world around me”, she explains during her visit to Barcelona, ??the city where she studied for 6 years, for the promotion of her new album, Ultrabelleza (Sony). “I was already in love with it when I came here and discovered that society was incredibly diverse and large”, which is why she wanted to dedicate the new album “to all the different ways of inhabiting the body, of loving, of skins, to that multicultural solidarity that allows us to learn from our origins and walk the streets together”. This Wednesday it will be shown in Barcelona in front of the audience of the Paral·lel 62 room during the Voll-Damm Jazz Festival.
After debuting with Sanación and winning the Goya for best song with Te espera el mar, the Córdoba artist has created a song about life and plurality, about love for oneself and for others of all kinds possible forms Musically, he takes another step in his exploration of new sounds, with the doors open to electronica from the flamenco house where his heart lies: “It makes my roots be wings, and that my wings are rooted”.
“Puedo ser torero, espada y toro a la vez”, says Llergo in Superpoder, another superlative term for an autobiographical song in which he claims the strength, the power, that gives him to express his feelings, no matter what they are. “Being sensitive is a superpower, it allows me to turn what is ugly into beauty, pain into beauty.”
“My origin gives me a lot of home”, he says when he remembers Pozoblanco, the Córdoba town where he was born and where his family lives. “Many times they think that being from the rural area is bad, that there are retrograde environments, but for me it’s the opposite”. His first songs had his grandfather’s voice, “his boleros, his fandangos, his serranas, which is the stick that sings best”. That’s why he considers him his life and singing teacher, also because there was no money for records at home. “Until the age of nine, I only listened to my grandfather, learned his songs, sang them and played them. Then, sometimes, on TV, I was in awe watching people sing.”
From there he went to the conservatory, learned the violin for ten years before heading to Barcelona, ??where he studied at Esmuc and the Liceu Conservatory, but he has never forgotten his own learning. “The way to learn the violin is very different from how I had to learn to sing with my grandfather in the middle of the countryside. The compass was his aixadell opening the furrows, I learned to sing by playing to dodge the water, because he opened the furrow, the water ran and he had to water, and meanwhile he was singing”. He dedicates Aprendiendo a volar to him, a song that he turns into a ritual to exorcise the fear that causes him to be far from his side, “when the sky claims you”.
Even then, little María José was playing with her voice to decorate the melodies, “so that they sounded different each time, to create, because my grandfather created. Every time I had a conflict with the neighbor I made a fandango, and I couldn’t read or write, but I created and taught myself to compose, to sing in the here and now, to reflect what I felt at the moment”.
That is why María José Llergo now goes to recording studios without anything prepared, “but sure of myself; all the songs on the album were written, composed and recorded at the time”, in a conscientious work in which he discarded more than 20 tracks, songs that travel through the urban to return to the roots. “The link with flamenco is in me, in my voice, in my way of writing, in the reminiscence I make of Lola and Manuel or Valdelomar in Visión y reflejo, in the boleros in Tanto tiempo, it is in the same, in the fact of maintaining that purity”.
