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There are a lot of walls. Unfortunately, the concrete seems to be expanding. But sometimes, there are walls in the heads of both, obstructing other aspirations. The single Love at the time of the walls, which preceded the release this Friday of the album Spiritual, the eighth of Pedro Abrunhosa, already announced what was going on: a series of songs, or ballads, that drag us into everyday situations, love stories, for example, involving allusions to our current collective in socio-political terms.
Arlindo Camacho
It is also an album marked by the important vocal collaborations of the Mexican Lila Downs, the American Lucinda Williams, the French Carla Bruni, the Brazilian Ney Matogrosso and the Portuguese Elisa Rodrigues and Ana Moura. At first, there was only one blank page. Abrunhosa tells us that when you leave for a new album, there is never a closed idea. It's an open process. "There is no archetype, and there may be a broader conceptual attitude, even if you know where you're going and what you're building. A closed attitude towards music.It is a dynamic process.You are in constant dialogue with yourself and especially when you are the author of the music and that the process is self-directed, but you tidy of course. "
Next steps: songs or ballads of everyday life, love stories and allusions to our present socio-political
Arlindo Camacho
As a book says, an album is an artistic object that must be coherent. "For me, this literary or poetic aspect is fundamental and at the same time, the aesthetics of the disc is something that is necessary, but that you dictate.In this sense, there are songs that have been left out because that they have ceased to happen in this set, and there are others that transmit you its essence.But the line can not be closed.I know more or less what I want. come from a very classical school where things had a very precise grid, but it's a league where I do not want to be, and for the rest, jazz in my life was very important, introducing an interesting derivative component. Here is the universe that crosses these two paths, but who will write the songs as a literary act. "
The album is called Spiritual, referring to this nuclear idea of the interrogating individual, but it is also a suggestion about the present moment of the world. "We live in a period of profound spiritual agony, the word spirit in its genesis means life force, a word associated with the beginning of non-mythological thought, which creates a cleavage between reflexive and non-reflexive thought. the mind is not just a religious thing, for me it's attitude towards depth, the difference between being and opinion. "So many questions:" What is it? defines the most human being: having two cars in the garage or not having books at home? It's there. "
In thematic terms, this reflects, it is work that does not differ from what his approaches have been in recent albums, picking up everyday problems that, intrinsically, also end up carrying a political burden. "Any subject is political, the sexual act itself is not only political, but also because it can entail bringing another person into the world and, therefore, you assume a political responsibility. " And give another example. "When I wrote about Lord of Goodbye, a very poetic person from the city of Lisbon whom I met for 40 years because he came to teach at the Hot Club, he said goodbye, it was fascinating. never spoke to him, but when he disappeared, I missed him, he wore an aura of urban poetry of the banal, a sort of poetry present in rock songs, and it is also a political reality as was the [transsexual] Gisberta, about whom I also wrote. Pop moves between entertainment and entertainment. But writing songs, which interests me, plunges into reality, is not an ethereal or aesthetic affirmation. It's something older and more structural. "
Pedro Abrunhosa has never hidden in years that he did not consider himself a singer in the most classic sense of the term. The curious thing is that he has never been exempted from inviting great performers to sing by his side. "I know there are things I can not give and that's why I'm looking for voices that can add something more," he says, thinking it's up to from the awareness of the limits that we can overcome.
In the case of this record, the costume of the guests impresses. And this has resulted in easy and fruitful collaborations. With Ana Moura and Elisa Rodrigues, the recordings took place in Portugal, with the remaining votes being travel and exchanges. "It was only with Ney Matogrosso that we lost many hours between Brazil and Brazil, but we ended up emptying where we wanted to, in the case of Carla Bruni, I went to Paris and she went off without a hitch as she also has voice limitations but works great in some register that she adopts as her .I had a tremendous pleasure working with her, just like Lila Downs, who immediately understood and understood the song, or Ana Moura and Elisa Rodrigues. "
Despite the excellence of the rest, there is a voice and an intense dramatic presence that stands out, the American Lucinda Williams If you have to leave, do not tell me., with her drawing all her vocal expressiveness. "She is a hero of many years.At the end of these years, her dedication to writing, the maturity that she has acquired and this immense voice are incredible." I adore this voice and her Ten years ago, she was unable to get Lucinda Williams, even for her inability to write in. Not now.He caught the song at a time.And then we had the presence of Karl Van Den Bosche, an amazing percussionist, who gives an unshakable consistency to the whole thing.There is very little editing in all of this.What you hear over there is what has been touched. "
Now the concerts will be followed and, of course, with so many guests, the question arises as to whether, on stage, you will not lose something. "If we start thinking about the album because of the concerts, we have a lot of mortgages," he said. "The process ceases to be genuine, you repress in letters, in extension or in form, and that makes no sense, the songs already existed before Carla Bruni or Lucinda Williams, and now they are dealing with this reality, by repeating every day. "
Before the collective process with the musicians, there is retirement, research, pregnancy without a network. "The composition work is very isolated.It is the poet João Cabral de Melo Neto who said something that is a transversal truth, comparing the act of creating to that of defecating, in the sense of Being too intimate and ugly, because in the beginning it's a formless mass, it ends up being a process of fighting with yourself, and then when the musicians see, then there is the collective and there is a certain idea that corresponds to the direction I want where it's going. "
This memory of himself, says Abrunhosa, also turns out to be a reaction to excessive communication. The title Spiritual it also comes from the need for contemplation at a moment of overflowing and communicative voracity. The art itself has become communication when it's the opposite. There is more noise in the more general sense of expression. I've always been obsessed with silence. This comes from childhood. A certain solitude in the literature. But it was not a refuge, it was a world, it was an experience, a journey, just like music. Music has that too. This transcendence. "
The excess of which he speaks is also felt today in music. It is everywhere, in the public and private space, playing at any time, which can contribute to the trivialization of the experience. It's as if the music had become the main enemy of the music. "Without silence there is nothing, today I am less and less surprised and it is not fair with the music, with the books and the movies, it is happening the same thing.In shopping malls, it's covered with colorful book covers.And with pop music, it's the same.In restaurants, hotels.All around And then I come back to Mahler and things with whom I have always had a great identification. "
Classical music is always there. The contemporary too. And jazz. "I was a student of [compositor e maestro] Jorge Peixinho, who was perhaps the person with whom I learned the most about concepts. But over the years, I lost my skin like a snake – from classical to contemporary, from jazz to funk, and now to this thing, I do not know him well. But it is okay. I have my studio and my publisher – Universal distributes – and the mark of what I do is in the territorial implantation in the country and in the concerts that I give to people. It's the real matrix of my work. "
The new formats, the new platforms, as a concept of the future, do not move, end up thinking, playing the role of music lover. "I'm still obsessed with classical music, that 's all – and then fantastic things happen." The other day, I was listening to the Spanish Rosalia, then the Pedro Mafama, and I'm shivering, they're the kind of things that make you feel alive, and that's it.At the end of the day, a lot has been done, but there is still a lot to be done. "And so it's true After finishing another album of a career started in the 1990s, he finally blurted out: "I already have an idea of what I will do next."
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