The Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler (Montevideo, 1964) begins his tour of Spain in 2023 in the Galician city of Ferrol (northwest) and, at this first stop, he already found success: an audience with almost no tickets available to savor his first songs and those of his recent “Ink and Time”.
That audience response “It is a great joy”, He affirms in an interview with EFE, in which he points out that since he began his “relationship with music and to live professionally” from it, “at the age of 30”, “things that I didn’t even dream of” have happened to him, while acknowledging that urban music has taken “our language to all corners of the world”.
The singer alludes to a “very slow process” because in his “first ten years in Spain” things “went very slowly.” They did not “go well” commercially, but he could not “be happier” with the balance of a decade, from 1995 to 2005, in which he released “four albums that went unnoticed” in sales and that, instead, he marked him.
“I started living from music at 30, relatively well at 40 and a little better at 50”, recognizes Drexler, who maintains that his journey started “late”, but that his enthusiasm has lasted “a lot” and he feels that he is “still discovering himself” before the public.
He states that with “the passage of time” he has been learning “to polish the sound and audiovisual tools of the concert”.
It is, in fact, “the first time” that he goes on stage with a large presence of women in his band, three out of six members, 50%, and that leaves him with a “very new feeling”, that the ” The gender demographics of the stage are similar to those of the audience.
Jorge Drexler admits that there are consequences, such as that the “type of musicality is different” from when “the majority were men”, and appreciates how “Tinta y tiempo” manages the balance between collaborations with consolidated voices, in the case of the Panamanian Rubén Blades, or the emergence of phenomena such as that of the Spanish C. Tangana.
“I always liked having the disco and open ears; I don’t believe in nostalgia, in that good music was made before and now it’s shit, I haven’t believed it in the 70s, nor in the 80s nor now”, he adds the uruguayan
There are “always talented people and people who don’t interest me, a majority,” he says, and proclaims that it is necessary to “recognize and thank what urban music has done to take our language to all corners of the world.”
Time of change in the music that sounds and how it is listened to, something that Drexler exemplifies in his own family: “I have a 25-year-old son and a 14-year-old son, there is more technological difference between them than between my 25-year-old son and me; it goes everything changing so fast.”
At 58, he believes that one should “be attentive and try to take advantage of the good things that the amount of information has” to which one has access, although he acknowledges that “dispersion is the norm and you have to learn to concentrate.”
He is no stranger to it, he confesses that he reads “less” and listens to music “in a more dispersed way than 30 years ago, but it’s my responsibility”, apostille, unlike the support that their proposals find in the market.
Jorge Drexler maintains that at times he was “a bad ticket seller and a bad record seller”. “There is no relationship between capacity and joy,” adds the musician, who released “Ink and Time” after practically five years without a new album. “The records have been spaced out for the simple reason that as I do better in my career I am more requested to do concerts; while I am on tour, I cannot compose and I cannot record”, he says.
If when uncovering “Vaivén” (2001) his record company already asked him for songs for another album “in a few weeks”, due to having little repercussion “on the radio”, in Ferrol he disembarked with “a full year of touring” ahead of him and a 2024 that is already “closing” with dozens of dates marked in red on your calendar.
Source-news.google.com