Julieta Venegas: I needed to stop the machine and find another way to go

Javier Herrero Madrid, 21 Mar Seven years after her last album, “Algo Sucede” (2015), something really happens in the life of Julieta Venegas, full and very motivated by her imminent new album, after having embarked long before the pandemic on a pause to rethink how she really wanted things to be in her career. “After that tour, which took me three years, I realized that I couldn't start writing again to go on tour again. I needed to stop the machine and find another way to continue,” recalls the artist in a talk with Efe before her tour of Spain this week. The main cause of his discontent was the dimension and routines that his career had acquired at the hands of the multinational that released his albums, since he began his solo career with the album “Aquí” (1997) to the aforementioned “Algo Sucede”, with his conversion as an international star in between with “Sí” (2003) or “Limón y sal” (2006). “I will never speak ill of my experience with Sony, but at some point I began to feel a great distance between what I wanted and what I represented,” confesses this US-born Mexican. Venegas (Long Beach, 1970) began a process of reflection and, in anticipation of what many of his colleagues would be forced to do soon after because of the pandemic, he disarmed his band, his office “and a lot of other things”. In his recently released residence in Buenos Aires, he approached the theater inspired by the play “Miedo” by Spaniard Albert Pla. “I realized that he was much clearer about what he wanted. That wasn't a musical as such, but it combined the word and the music and I thought something like that would be a father. Besides, I didn't feel like traveling anymore,” he recalls. This is how she made her acting debut with the monologue “La Enamorada” by writer Santiago Loza, an experience from which the album “La enamorada” (2019) emerged, with songs based on the script. “It helped me a lot on stage because it made me let go in a very nice way. I took it as a meditation because mentally I couldn't be anywhere else and it made me find something that gave me confidence to start working with more people,” she explains above all her process of change. Just before the start of the pandemic, she took advantage of her deepest experiences to present “Intimo”, a tour in which, carrying her instruments from one side to the other, she presented herself alone to the public, which made her decide that she wanted to develop her career “in a calmer way”. “After doing this for so long, I know what I want, focusing only on the creative, but with a structure that is more in line with my way of thinking, more small,” he emphasizes. Then he didn't contemplate the idea of making a record, but with quarantine he found “the need to write every day as an exercise against madness”. Suddenly, he had a lot of songs and started talking to his friend, the Chilean composer and producer Álex Anwandter. He claims to have learned “a lot” from him. “He is a wonderful accomplice and a teacher and we both agree that songs are the center of everything, which is something that I have looked for in all my albums”, he says after presenting the first single, “Mismo amor”, with a strong pop component. “I have always liked the pop song, with the drum machine marked, and that combination with the songs of the accordion, alternating the most programmed and artificial with the earth that pulls an acoustic instrument. I will always do that and on this album there is a lot of that, very Mexican songs and with others like 'Mismo amor'”, he anticipates about his future eighth album, still without a date or title. Some of them will be played in the concerts that, in trio format, together with a double bass player and a drummer who will also be in charge of the synthesizers, will start their tour “Vernos de nuevo” this Wednesday in Madrid. “We must continue to take up space to put art and positive things before it is filled with other news and situations. We are going to do it, even if it is by elbows”, he says with his eternal smile. CHIEF jhv/acm (video)