The debate is over: Vetusta Morla’s lyricists clarify what 12 of their classics are about | Culture

Title of a forum on a popular internet page: Do any of you understand Vetusta Morla’s lyrics? The answers are mostly negative. Some dare to offer explanations for this or that song. But they fail. Juanma Latorre (Madrid, 46 years old) and Guille Galván (Madrid, 43) smile when they are informed of the digital debate. They are the guitarists and composers of most of Vetusta Morla’s songs. An unusual situation: writing for a third person, the singer. Since they released their first album in 2008, the group has been known for putting the listener to work. Both consider themselves “storytellers” and do not agree with the theory that says their texts are complicated to understand. “They propose to the listener to complete them, to add something of their own. They are not texts that close. They are open to the outside,” they point out.

The Madrid group has just released their seventh album, Extras, and continue on tour until the end of the year (next concert: June 8 at Alma Festival, Madrid). Afterwards, they will take a year off to return in 2026. We met with Latorre and Galván to reveal the message of 12 of the songs most appreciated by fans. From now on there will be no debate: this is what these sextet classics are about.

– ‘The strange days’ (2011): “The godforsaken generation”

Guille Galván: “A song that took us a long time to finish. It is made in layers, like a gift that is opened, from less to more, and then in the end there is nothing, only echo. I wanted to convey that feeling. We were the most prepared generation, with the most studies, who had grown up in democracy and had not had the misfortune of living through a dictatorship… But when we finished our studies and had to face life, there was a emptiness that was dizzying. The sensation of generation left by the hand of God. “The deception of that world in which we lived until the 2008 crisis arrived and everything blew up.”

– ‘Masterstroke’ (2014): “What happened with 15-M”

Juanma Latorre: “The origin is what happened with 15-M. There was a political awakening and a positive rage that was very enraging. It was an exciting time politically. I felt the awakening, the awareness. Many of us abandon that harmful idea of ​​identifying politics with the affairs of political parties and think of politics as that common agora that interests and affects us all. Suddenly an important sector of society was interested in these issues and placed emphasis on injustices that had occurred and were treated in a normal way, such as unfair economic operations. And it was assumed that they could not be changed. In those days it seemed possible to change it. The song arises in that context and portrays that positive rage. It is true that that optimism has worn off quite a bit, but at that time it seemed like a possibility.”

– ‘Oh, Madrid’ (2024): “I don’t like my city, but I’m staying”

Guillermo Galván: “It is a song of resistance. When something you love hurts you, but you feel a need to stay. In the case of Madrid, the people who have spent our childhood, adolescence and adulthood here have felt very close at times, and very far away at other times. There is always that question: I would leave tomorrow because I do not agree with the fact that a city is emptied by real estate speculation, that people from there no longer live in the center, that houses are worth five times more than they were recently… That city hurts me, because it’s mine. And I say to myself: why do I have to leave my city that is as much mine as it belongs to those who are doing this. It is a song of pride and the need for identity. It’s like saying: well yes, I’m going to stay here, in this Madrid that I don’t like.”

– Copenhagen (2008): “The courage to leave what you have”

Guille Galván: “I remember that the first name we gave him was Temon [risas], because we already saw its possibilities. It describes a trip, a landscape, a kind of film script. It was a trip I took through Europe. It talks about the courage to leave what you have, to go somewhere else. Many people have told us that they identify it with people who have had to go abroad to work, with exile. And that is very nice. It’s that moment at the airport where you have to say goodbye and let yourself go. I made the trip when I was 25, as a couple, although things were already normal. When we arrived in Copenhagen we had the feeling of seeing a city almost from a David Lynch movie. Everything was perfect, the people were tall, beautiful, everyone knew what they had to do, there were no houses with curtains or blinds. It was like a calm before a storm. I haven’t been back there and in fact it is one of the few capitals in Europe where we haven’t played. It would be nice to be able to do it.”

– Backstab (2021): “A personal experience, a generational patricide”

Juanma Latorre: “Both on a semantic level and in the construction of the sentences, it tries to be a couplet. The lyrics deal with a specific event in which I felt completely outdated from a generational point of view. It portrays the first moment in a person’s life when they realize that they are generationally older. I had an experience with a young musician that left me very confused. He led me to an acceptance that generations necessarily have to follow one another, but also that they have to hold hands. That experience made me feel that something had been cut, that lately we are cutting those lines of union between some generations and others. It is a call to recover that union, as the final verse says: ‘We are replacement meat.’ The stab in the back is the generational patricide that I felt at that moment…”

– ‘When you breathe’ (2008): “Rebeling against the bubble I grew up in”

Guille Galván: “I wrote it 20 years ago, and now I see a certain naive and existentialist air. At that time we all lived in Tres Cantos [municipio del norte de la Comunidad de Madrid] and it was time to take the leap and move to Madrid. Try to ensure that you must be the one who has the ability to put the air you breathe. The air they have given you is not worth it, I want to be the one who proposes the things that I am going to nourish myself with and that are going to be useful to me. The need to rebel against the bubble in which I grew up.”

– ‘Brave’ (2008): “Assume your failures and move forward”

Guille Galván: “At that time we were looking for flourishes in the lyrics and the Brave She was very direct. And being direct wasn’t cool [risas]. I noticed certain reluctance on Pucho’s part and I suggested that he do the lyrics himself. So he wrote the verses and I did the chorus verses. But the general idea is Pucho’s. It has to do with being brave to take off disguises and define who you are. Be as honest as possible with yourself: accept the good and the bad about yourself. Assume your failures and move forward.”

– ‘Finisterre’ (2021): “Love between geeks”

Juanma Latorre: “Once we were involved in that idea of ground wire To investigate the folkloric and the popular had to face a jota. It is one of the most obvious love songs we have. It is a type of relationship that I have really liked in the history of literature or cinema: love between geeks, strange loves, between people who are broken, damaged, and who support each other. One of the films that has marked me the most with this theme is The lovers of the Pont Neuf, by Leos Carax, with Juliette Binoche. I was also inspired by a documentary about the flat earth movement. He explained that there are conventions where they relate. A boy who was always at conventions appeared; They ask him and he says: ‘No, I’m not a flat earther, but I like that woman and that’s why I come.’ I thought about my marriage and I saw myself reflected. It’s about the power of crazy love that we’ve all felt and the glorious possibility of being with a person who is absolutely different from you and who has a touch of madness that fuels you. I, who am a very structured person, have found in a very crazy person a very nice place to be. In the end Finisterre talk about me”.

– ‘June 23’ (2017): “It was for Sabina, but…”

Guille Galván: “I didn’t write the music for Vetusta Morla. Pancho Varona called me asking me for a song for Joaquín Sabina. But then Pancho was not in the production of Sabina’s album, so it was not used. It was a waltz, with a Mexican air, which I modified a little when I knew it wasn’t going for Sabina. Then I already wrote the lyrics for Vetusta. It speaks of the need we have to move forward, to get rid of our backpacks.”

– Damn sweet (2011): “Pimpinela could cover it”

Juanma Latorre: “It is a romantic and autobiographical song. It portrays an encounter between two people who have a lot to say and do to each other, but never get around to it. They are very close, but at the same time very far away. It was always conceived as a duet. Years later we recorded it with the Mexican Carla Morrison. For the album we tried to get it to be with Julieta Venegas, but it didn’t work. If Julieta reads this, tell her we are still open [risas]. In the song the two people say to each other what they did not say at that moment. It is a song that Pimpinela or Camela could cover [risas]”.

– ‘The drift’ (2014): “An individual experience that becomes a collective song”

Guille Galván: “It was 2012 and we had a feeling of collective uncertainty. We took a break, and we said that when we came back the first song should be titled The drift, which described our situation well. Personally, I had just become a father (my son was born in May 2011): it was like the moment when you unfold yourself, see your face in other lives, stop playing and get your act together (“I traded the ball for gasoline “) and you confront the world with your own fists. The song connects in some way with Masterstroke. It has a political point, but told in a different way: not so much from the collective point of view, but from the individual point of view, as a starting point and seeing yourself in a situation in which you feel completely adrift, both personally and socially. But then with a point of hope, which appears in the verse ‘there is hope in the drift, we will have to invent a way out’. It is when an individual experience becomes a collective song.

The phrase ‘let destiny not take our measures’ is inspired by a song by Nacho Vegas, The angel Simon, that says ‘when passing in front of a funeral home you told us: get down, lest they take your measurements’. when we played The drift outside Spain They sang it with tremendous vitality, as if recounting their experience of having gone to live abroad. We had told the story from those who remain, and we realized that it was also valid for those who left. A story of round trip.”

– ‘Civil war’ (2017): “Trolling on social networks”

Juanma Latorre: “The song was written in 2016 and it is something that we felt was new and we didn’t know how it was going to evolve; The bad news is that it has evolved for the worse. At that time, trolling on social networks was new, there was a feeling of lack of communication in something that is designed to communicate in a simple way, and it became a trench pit, of confrontation, of not understanding each other. That broth was beginning, and we were very struck by the need for conflict instead of the search for understanding. You have the feeling of being in a state of civil war without there being one. You don’t really know where this lack of minimal empathy comes from when it comes to listening to another person who doesn’t think like you. “This song describes the first times we feel that civil war atmosphere within our close or distant relationships.”