Guitarricadelafuente Is Writing Folk Songs for the Future
Alvaro la Fuente’s year has been a whirlwind — a product of a budding, but frenetic musical career that has taken him across the world. Prior to releasing his first LP, La Cantera, which came out in May, the Spanish singer, who records under his stage name Guitarricadelafuente, was touring with only a handful of songs under his belt. Many of those tracks were acoustic-driven melodies dressed in La Fuente’s low-hum, classical drawl. But after realizing he wanted to make a full-length album, la Fuente joined forces with Raül Refree, the producer who worked with C. Tangana and Rosalía early in their careers, and put together an LP that draws from the troves of memory while keeping its gaze fixed on the future.
An heir to Spanish musical traditions, such as jotas and bandurrias, de la Fuente has always been drawn to the past and the songs that remain untouched throughout the passage of time. La Cantera also incorporates musical traditions from both sides of the Atlantic with an experimental edge. Packed with elegant nods to tradition and laced in coquettish naïveté, La Cantera is an ode to the youth of tomorrow.
Before his debut performance in New York and the United States earlier this fall, Alvaro la Fuente sat down with Rolling Stone to discuss his new album and all the music that soundtracked his adolescence.
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What drew you to music in the first place?
I was born in Benicassim, a beach town, which is a town north of Valencia. My whole family is Aragonese, from Spain, from Zaragoza. I spent a lot of time in Zaragoza growing up, going to the caves, hanging out with my friends, and listening to music. I started playing the guitar when I was 14 and it was around that time, particularly during my visits to Zaragoza, that I started developing a deeper, more complex relationship to music. It’s almost inevitable that you end up listening to the same music as your friends, you know, whatever was popular at the time, which for me meant listening to lots of rock music. But we also spent a lot of time listening to more traditional music, well – tunes with a more sentimental flair, the kinds of songs that reminded us of our grandmothers and our grandfathers.
For starters, my grandparents’ house was full of guitars. My great-grandfather was the town’s jotero, a kind of towns’ musician who took the guitar and bandurria to people. So these were among the places in which my curiosity for the past and my own origins really developed. Ultimately, music became this way to relay this spirit of the past, perpetuating it and transferring it to the next generations.
Your music seems to pull from a wide ranging set of influences – lots of places in time and geographies. What were you listening to when you began recording your first songs?
My friends and I listened to a lot of rock music, mostly rock in Spanish. Bands like Extremoduro and Loquillo. I also listened to a lot of rumba, Catalan gypsy rumba and bands like Manu Chao. And when I started to play the guitar, that’s when I started to get to know artists like Chavela Vargas and like Simón Díaz. I found a lot of inspiration from sounds that came from the other side of the pond. I also became really interested in older music, things I hadn’t heard before. But I found the old stuff fascinating, simply because it withstood the test of time— people continued to play it and know it, which gave it an added value in my eyes— the idea that any one particular song could survive oblivion.
This fascination went hand -in-hand with the jota for me. It wasn’t until I moved away from Benicassim and Zaragoza that I felt so much closer to the jota. This is how I also got into Antonio Labordeta, who was a singer-songwriter from the region. During the postwar period he sang jotas, as a protest, as a defense of the Argonese land. He went on to be a TV personality, he went into politics, he wrote poetry, books. He was a very versatile character from Aragón whose work really moved me. But I also heard a lot of reggaeton. Omega, a lot of Daddy Yankee. I listened to a ton of Omara Portuondo on the Cuban side and Cigala on the Spanish side. He’s someone who left flamenco to get into something much more Latin. And then there’s Caetano Veloso, of course, who continues to reinvent himself. That’s really who I aspire to be like.
Your first recording was done on a Playstation just a few years back and now you’re working with Rosalia’s Los Angeles producer, Raül Refree. How did you make the jump from the Playstation console to La Cantera?
I think you have to take into account the speed at which everything evolved. When I first started making music, I was an architecture student, and I was at home recording with a PlayStation microphone, mixing stuff on GarageBand, and that’s it. I only had six songs at the time, which I uploaded to Spotify. Four months later, I was already touring, and did that for about a year and a half. But then, I couldn’t really find a point to what I was doing. I had these few songs people were responding to, but it only felt like a glimpse into what I really wanted to do. I suddenly felt like I had all the pieces to the puzzle but they were just lying around and not coming together. So that’s when I began to really obsess over making an album.
La Cantera feels like a bit of a departure from your earlier recordings. How much of this shift do you attribute to Refree and what was it like to work with him?
Coming into the recording process, I think people expected me to do a traditional record, super folksy. But I didn’t necessarily want that. I wanted it to be very well produced and have the feel of a Frank Ocean or Blood Orange record. [Refree] came in and reworked a lot of songs in a much more experimental, more intimate, and ethereal way, which was definitely a departure from what I had originally done, and I was a bit reserved about it at first.
I originally imagined a very traditional record, based on two central elements: the guitar and my voice. But Raul came to the studio with very different ideas. We spent a lot of time thinking about all the songs and figuring out how to dress them. Some were songs that were already fully formed and others that emerged from the process. I think we’ve gotten to a point now where we have made a super good team and I completely trust his vision.
La Cantera draws from lots of sounds, themes, and moods. What is the broader story you were trying to tell through this album?
To me, each song is its own little universe. Each one belongs to a specific place and is influenced by specific geographies. But I do believe that they all exist under the tornaviaje, a type of sonic journey that spans both sides of the Atlantic, from the Iberian peninsula to the coasts of Latin America. For example, “La Filipina,” sounds a bit like a jota but also a bit like a ranchera. In “Mil y una noches” I have a line that goes “si pudiera vestir tu rebozo de flores… parrandera de noches,” which is a reference to Chavela Vargas, the Mexican singer.
But there is also “la cantera” as a term itself, which influenced the larger aesthetic of the album. There’s “la cantera” as it refers to the youth and then there is “la cantera” as it refers to the physical place where one extracts minerals. And I wanted to represent both of these meanings in the songs. I wanted them to sound metallic, futuristic, and almost robotic. For instance, “Caballito” is a rumba, but a kind of cyborg rumba. We also did this song with a grand piano and drumsticks to make it sound shrill. And in terms of representing the youth, I wanted to tell some of the stories that remind me of my childhood and adolescence. The result is simultaneously naive, but also mischievous.
There’s a new generation of Spanish artists that have broken into markets across the world. Why do you think this is? And what does it mean to you to be part of this generation?
I think it’s really cool that there’s this new generation of Spanish artists. I think that for a long time [in Spain] there wasn’t much interest in the past; we were always looking to the future. And I think there has been a shift, perhaps generationally, where younger people are more interested in the past. And not only that, but we have grown up with so many references. We are surrounded by so much information, we engage in aggressive consumption, and we are all victims of moving from one thing to another very quickly, spending no more than 20 seconds on a song before skipping to another.
This means we have also grown up with a wide range of musical spectrums, which is reflected in the music that we make. I like to believe that I am a part of this generation, but I am also looking to the past for influence. This doesn’t mean that the music itself will sound traditional – it will be rooted in tradition and have lyrics that allude to it, but sonically it will be closer to something more urbano. You know, I like to think that the pop of today will be the folk of the future. That’s amazing.
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