New album by Alejandro Sanz celebrates 30 years of success: ‘I never had a plan B, because they make plan A fail’

Alejandro Sanz sings in his last album, SANZ, a celebration of 30 years of success, that he does not believe in chance, only in him “Courage to dare.” And he recalls, in a talk with Efe, that this way of thinking is what led him to try his luck in music, even against his mother’s criteria.

She had suffered the vicissitudes of the profession through the singer’s father, in an eternal and forced travel through Spain, and he wanted for his son “a fixed salary.” But despite this, the author of Broken heart did not treasure another objective: “I never had a plan B, because they make plan A fail,” he says.

He says it in his neighborhood, in the Madrid district of Moratalaz, on the other side of the bridge over the M-30 that recently bears the name of his most famous song and in a recently built music school on the site where the singer-songwriter gave his first concert before the public.

“Moratalaz made me love rock which, along with flamenco, were the two things that I liked the most”, Sanz recounts one day after the publication of the album that takes over from #ElDisco (2019) and in which, through songs that are difficult to classify, he strips all the genres and music through which he has traveled.

Produced by Alfonso Pérez and Javier Limón, there are sounds of black music, metals that refer to the other side of the Atlantic, Caribbean soniquettes, pop, sober electronic arrangements and orchestral passages, but also, going back to their origins, guitars, clapping and the rhythmic pulse of the flamenco that sucked in his second cradle, Cádiz.

“I did not want to make a record for sales lists or to enter the radio, but one that does not disappoint people in that they are a handful of songs made by a musician”, explains Sanz, who wanted to “summarize these 30 years” and show its evolution, convinced that “You cannot rest on your laurels in any profession and especially in music.”

He surprised with the first single, BIO, a sample of “sponken-word” in which he confesses and radiographs himself in the most explicit way that he has ever done: “I was always introverted / I was scared, I was gone / I liked poetry, flamenco and my bujío”.

“If I used the metaphor to protect myself, it was not consciously and never to deceive anyone. In fact, metaphors tend to generate more susceptibility, because you leave the door open to many interpretations, so it is more dangerous ”, jokes Sanz (Madrid, 1968).

Exposed the two, the musician and the person, says that with this look back “I wanted to conjure the goblins.” “And remind me who I am, do a little catharsis,” he says after revealing that he considered calling the album Alejandro Sanchez, as his real name. “But after 30 years building that brand, it would have been disrespectful to me,” he argues.

From the repertoire it is worth highlighting two happy reunions, the first spiritual, with Paco de Lucía’s guitar that shines in The Rose, a potential future simple that he built from a chorus saved on a hard disk that a friend of the Cádiz musician who lives in Playa del Carmen (Mexico) gave him.

“The only thing that worried me was if he would like it,” he confesses.

The other reunion is with Manuel Alejandro, the composer of so many hits for artists like Raphael, Rocío Jurado, Isabel Pantoja or Julio Iglesias. He was her baptism godfather, but at that time he spent a lot of time in Mexico and contact was limited to the occasional postcard.

“Then I started with the whirlwind of promotion, concerts … It has been 30 years of absolute madness in my life and we did not coincide, until I finally told myself that I had to meet my godfather ”, Sanz relates.

That reunion was, in his words, “incredible.” “Apart from being the composer and musician that he is, he is an incredible human being, and chatting with him is a constant chair”, highlights the man from Madrid, who closes this album with a song by Manuel Alejandro made for him. And I already loved you the first to sing in one of his works without being his own.

With his eyes set on 2022, he is already optimistic about a stadium tour that will recover the pre-pandemic concerts that he could not celebrate, “and some more date.”

And if the gaze puts her back, as in this album, she recognizes that she especially misses being able to pick up the phone to call her parents, sure that her mother, having overcome her initial misgivings against music, would have been proud to see him discover a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to exclaim: “Oh, son, you are an eminence!” (E)