In times of pandemic, Fito Páez feels the duty to remain a speaker of the world through his music.
It’s something he tried to do with “The Conquest of Space,” which is nominated for a Grammy for Best Latin Rock Album or Alternative Music on March 14th.
“It’s not a very happy world, but we have it and it’s my duty to name it,” Paéz told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “We are all on the ship and the ship is slowly sinking … I will be part of the Titanic band anyway; I want to play until the end, that’s my job “.
“Space Conquest” brought the Argentine rocker two Latin Grammys: best pop / rock album and best pop / rock album for “Song of the Beasts”, in which he questions how we will establish a future that is presented as a great desert .
Released in a year as gloomy as 2020, the album functions as a kind of apocalyptic (for its lyrics) and happy (for its rhythms) “sound” at the same time, with songs like “Las things que do me bien”, “Nobody belongs to anyone” and “People on the street” with Lali.
“Sure!” Paez said. “Also, if you read it now or listen to it COVID, it works very well, it looks like a record almost made by a futurologist in a certain sense.”
But, on a personal level, for the 57-year-old musician it is a redemption album in which he is faced with the possibility of being reborn as Phoenix.
“I would tell you that, in the end, it’s like the story that everything can be done again and redone,” he said. Therefore, the last phrase of the album is “after everything is forgotten”, which he interprets accompanied by an orchestra and the sound of a typewriter. The car, he explained, “writes the history of what is supposed to be forgotten.”
Twenty years after “Abre”, which brought him his first and only Anglo Grammy nomination, Páez celebrates being nominated again beyond the “rock” or “alternative music” labels.
“If you ask me, I feel that I make Argentine folk music in a certain sense, if we want to find a possible definition. Although we also know that this is a very delusional area, because the music itself does not have a specific definition “, said the eight-time winner of the Latin Grammys, whose album combines piano and folk with blues and symphonic music.
“Definitions in music are always in favor of trying to calm differences or try to mitigate supposed differences, when music is not a space where this has value in itself,” he added.
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Páez’s career, which began in the early 1980s, was consistent in his attempt at constant experimentation. If there is something that characterizes it, it never stands still.
“What is called an alternative … I am a musician, for me it is my natural state, I will always be curious about something I don’t know in the musical aspect. In general, it happens to me with anything in life, but in music I can catch it “, he said. “I feel like I’m just doing my job, see? And I’m curious that it’s good to be a musician. I’m proud to have it. “
Páez, also a writer and filmmaker, was at his peak in 2020. He finished a screenplay he was waiting for, did a virtual press tour to present “The Conquest of Space”, composed new music and, from July to In November, he focused on writing the first 30 years of his autobiography.
“That was it,” he said. “A hurricane.”
For 2021, he recommended “putting your shoulder” to face these difficult times.
“It seems to me that we all need to think of solidarity as a fact, as something real and real at the moment,” he said.