After touring Chile, where he completed an extensive concert tour in different regions, Ismael Serrano will inaugurate his tour of Argentina in San Juan. It will be tonight at the Juan Victoria Auditorium, where he will offer an acoustic concert with his classics and the songs from his most recent work, La canción de nuestra vida – successor to Seremos, published in 2021; and Aún, in 2018 -, in which he returns to his essence with songs that speak of love, without leaving aside the social aspects of Latin America, which he has always focused on.
As part of his international tour, which bears the same name as his studio album, 27 years after the release of his first album – Atrapados en azul, from 1997 – the troubadour spoke with DIARIO DE CUYO about his family living in Spain, the 3-month tour that began in the Andean country – and which will continue through different Argentine provinces and continue through the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica -, everything he must leave behind to face this journey and the situations that he goes through to turn them into compositions.
– How do you prepare for such extensive tours?
– You have to prepare yourself, especially when you are already the father of a 10-year-old daughter and a 2-year-old little boy. I have a beautiful family with my wife, Jimena Ruiz Echazú, who was born in Buenos Aires and whom I met 13 years ago. . She is an actress and literary translator, and we fell in love working on the script for a film there. The truth is that I miss them a lot! They all live in Madrid now, and when you are a parent everything looks more different because the distances are felt more.
– Has it been a long time since you planned something like this?
– It is normal for us to embark on these tours, but I try to stay only for a month or a month and a half before returning home, this time it will be longer.
– On this occasion he comes to present The Song of Our Life, which includes a classic by Fito Páez…
– I make a version of this classic because I like it a lot. Fito is an artist who I had the opportunity to see in concerts and on the anniversary tour of Love After Love, which took him to Spain. The truth is that he is someone I admire.
– Does this topic move you?
– It is part of my sentimental memory. I have fun making songs from other artists and taking them to my territory. I have sung this song a lot, it is beautiful.
– And what inspires you to write?
– I sing to everything that excites me. Sometimes it is the sentimental encounters and disagreements that become love songs. Also seeing such an unequal world commits me socially when the occasion warrants it.
– Where does your passion come from to give each letter both a loving and social content?
– I suppose it comes from the environment in which I grew up with my father Rodolfo Serrano, a journalist and poet who continues to write verses today. And having listened to references such as Serrat, Aute, Joaquín Sabina and Silvio Rodríguez, authors who marked my path and my way of doing my job. Even my brothers also have their relationship with literature, the oldest is a novelist, for example. Furthermore, in my family there was always a lot of debate at the after-dinner table, which cultivated a critical, efficient view and being attentive to social reality.
– How did your look towards Latin America, in particular, arise?
– My first contact with Latin America came through my literary and musical references. I grew up listening to the music of Víctor Jara, Silvio Rodríguez, Mercedes Sosa and reading writers like García Márquez, Pablo Neruda and Mario Benedetti, who made me very close. Later, in college I collaborated a lot with NGOs in Latin America. I always had a very Latin American outlook. And starting in 1997, when I started traveling, I didn’t stop visiting it with every project and every album. And so we continue.
– While you were studying Physics, did you start making music?
– I was a university student with musical interests that came from my adolescence. At that time I formed a group in my neighborhood of Vallecas. When I started college I started giving concerts in bars, in the middle of the musical effervescence of Madrid, very authentic, very real, where a new movement of singer-songwriters emerged and Pedro Guerra, Rosana sounded…
– What movement are you referring to?
– To a generation of young people who had listened to different singer-songwriters on their parents’ record players and wanted to give their vision of the world. I was looking for my own identity and trying to understand the world we had to live in, in a context where paradigms had changed. In my parents’ time the political dogmas were clear and we had several questions about our place.
– Did you leave your studies with that in mind?
– I was already on my tours, with my music and I couldn’t sustain my studies.
– Did your parents support you?
– My parents supported me, yes, but my mother always asked me why I didn’t finish college, since I was in my penultimate year, but well there were no dramas. Of course she always reminded me that perhaps she would have lived a calmer life, with a more secure future, if she had graduated, with the feeling that music is always precarious.
– What theme do you think brought you success?
– “Dad tell me again”, had an unexpected success even for the record company. Above all, it was a surprise to me that a song that I considered to be about my small internal universe and my childhood, found an echo on the other side of the ocean in people who felt it was their own, with that mixture of disenchantment and recognition of the fight of some people for a better world. It was a quick but arduous climb. That’s how I started touring around Latin America but my music wasn’t an explosion, it wasn’t something that happened overnight.
– How do you see your career going?
– I think I am privileged to have had the opportunity to make a living from music for 27 years and to be able to sing with idols like Serrat, Sabina and Silvio thanks to this, in addition to getting to know extraordinary places. But the musical profession requires that one commit to one’s work.
– What reflection do you deserve?
– In these 27 years I have always tried to make songs that talk about the world in which I live, giving them a poetic flight. I try to ensure that each song not only has form but also content. I guess that’s how I understand music and I’ve tried to do it that way throughout all this time.
Fact
The show will be tonight at 9:30 p.m. at the Juan Victoria Auditorium. Tickets from $20,000 at the theater box office and online at vivaticket.com.ar
