“Ojalá”, the new Juanes now available in 1:04 scale
(CNN Spanish) – Juanes has just released Vida cotidiana, his first album of unreleased material in almost 4 years. This is his most personal production, as the artist sings about his marriage, his children, the toxicity of relationships and even enforced disappearances in his native Colombia.
Also in “Vida Cotidiana” Juanes returns to his essence, to his rock based origins, giving a leading place to his electric guitar. The album is also a reflection of the music and poetry studies he has been conducting during the pandemic.
“It’s an album that I put my whole soul into and in a way I literally strip off my clothes. “I make myself vulnerable and from the bottom of my soul I tell very personal stories about my life, my marriage, my children, my country,” Juanes Zona Pop told CNN.
The album, the eleventh of his career, is the result of an introspective work, not only of his family connections, but also of an analysis of the music he has released in recent years.
“It has taken me several years to get to this point where I feel calm and confident that what I have been doing is the right path. I’ve experimented, I’ve done a lot of things, but on this album I’m going back a lot to my essence, which is guitar, rock, pop and of course also Caribbean music, those Colombian elements of percussion. , the taste that I like so much too,” says Juanes.
Reaching the “Origin” to live the “Daily Life”.
Crossed between Covid-19 and the production of this album was a personal project called “Origen”, which Juanes started in 2019 and which was released in May 2021.
It was an album and a documentary that he presented on Prime Video, in which he uses songs to tell which themes and artists marked a before and after in his life and which, melody by melody, led him on his way. as a singer-songwriter
It was precisely the tearing down of these musical origins that opened a portal for Juanes, if you will, to look inside himself.
“I think I see the importance of that album ‘Origen’ now (on a different level) because I think that album was like the perfect opener,” he explained.
According to the singer-songwriter, working on the production of “Origen” led him to realize that he felt comfortable in the music he was putting out and that he was going right there, to his origins, to pop-rock had to return, which not only fascinated every country, but the entire continent.
“Daily Life” is a pandemic album, like many others, but it differs from some productions in that Juanes speaks shamelessly about the marital crisis he had with his wife Karen Cecilia, or the moment he decided to marry his eldest Daughter Luna invisibly felt the pain he felt when he learned the story of the disappeared in his country.
“I got rid of all ghosts and started composing songs that were deep in the soul. With the sound I wanted. Without having to think about trends, fads or anything like that, but rather how to get everything out of it,” he stressed.
Juanes faces pain and grief
Although Juanes had already spoken about love and his daughter Luna in other songs. On this album he does it out of pain. “Everyday Life” is perhaps one of the most heartbreaking themes of the production.
“Your silence destroys me / so much that my heaven hurts”: this is how Juanes begins in a song dedicated to his daughter.
“The process of this song was very beautiful, beautiful and difficult,” he said.
The song tells about the singer’s difficulties in coming to terms with the fact that his daughter became a woman. “As a father, I was wrong about understanding.”
“There came a time when I felt invisible to them and that killed me. it killed me I couldn’t understand how I got there. This song is about apologizing to him and telling him “I was wrong and somehow I love you too much, you are my life,” Juanes explained.
The crisis he had with his wife was captured in two songs: “Gris” was born out of pain and sadness at the thought that his marriage was about to end, and “Cecilia” is the opposite, the song of reconciliation, of understanding .
“I composed for my wife in a crisis situation. Of discussions and disagreements. I sat down to write down what I really felt. Let’s say, let’s look into each other’s eyes, let’s forget the problems, let’s dance this life together. I love you, I never want to be separated from you. And if you want to be with me, let’s dance together,” Juanes told Zona Pop CNN.
This song is also special because it is the first time Juan Luis Guerra has collaborated on a Juanes theme.
“It is a great honor that life and music give me that I can count on Juan Luis Guerra to sing this song together. It has no name. There was a phrase that I loved and that I always said first: “I feel like I will run out of breath if you stop being my wife”, Juan Luis tells me one day: Juanes, no, your wife always has to be your girlfriend We changed that word to ‘girlfriend’,” the Colombian singer recalled, explaining that it’s those kinds of details that make him admire the Dominican maestro.
Colombia, another protagonist in his “Everyday Life”
It is not surprising that Juanes writes on issues affecting his country. He has already done this in the past with “Fíjate bien”, a song about anti-personnel mines.
On this album, the singer dedicates two songs to his homeland, “Canción desaparecidas” and “Mayo”.
Canción desaparecidad speaks about enforced disappearances in Colombia, which number more than 80,000, according to the Center for Historical Memory and the Department for Searching Reported Disappeared Persons.
The topic arose in 2021 after watching a YouTube video, Juanes said.
“I click on it and I start listening to ex-paramilitaries, ex-military, ex-guerrillas and ex-police officers talk about the atrocities they committed in front of the mothers and fathers of the disappeared. And that broke my soul. I knew this had happened in Colombian history, but I had never heard stories like this in first person. I think it was very important for me, it was very strong but important to see that,” he said.
“I put myself in their place, that of the fathers and mothers, for a moment and it broke my heart. I think that was something I had to say. A few years ago I didn’t write social songs, but in this particular case I felt the need,” added Juanes.
Polarization also has a song
The protests in Colombia in recent years also have a place in the staging.
“Mayo is a song that came about after the marches that have taken place in Colombia over the past three years. At a certain moment I saw the marches, I saw what was happening to the artists and students in the streets and there was something like hope, there was something beautiful. It was like demanding something you deserve, such as structural change in the country. But as the marches went by, I felt like everything got darker and more confusing,” the singer said.
“There were a lot of things, an immense frustration from different areas, and I think that was also something that made me write from poetry and music about what I felt about the subject. This song is about exactly that, about a moment of sadness, about how it faded away like a dream and turned into something harder. And after also thinking about it and hoping that one day I hope to find again a Colombia, a single Colombia, because I feel that today the polarization is extreme,” concluded Juanes.
“Everyday Life” includes 11 songs and is available on all streaming platforms.