A Start From Scratch

The hangovers continued, the insomnia nights, the days of dreaming, the combination of Vitamin C and E for a better immune system, the hours stuck in front of a laptop trying to write and only getting to be a big virtual voyeuristic, the LBSII pills for a lazy bowel.

Stories in my head pounding randomly during the day, stories that find their way out in the most imprudent moments, my attempt to trust in my memory and that my ADD doesn't get in the way when I get the chance to vomit on the keyboard everything I need to, seven years of an uninterrupted love relationship, its formalization, the support and stimuli necessary, the muses.

The honor of having people by my side who ignorant people call crazy but are geniuses, the drunk gatherings with my blood siblings, the drunk gatherings with my chosen brothers, the mediocre movies, the trash movies, the movies with soul, the soulless movies, the movies that tear your soul apart, a new country, a new city, new people, re-encounters.

And the drinking gatherings continue, and the hangovers, and here I am again, in front of a laptop with nervous and hesitant fingers, and everything starts over again from scratch.

The Man Who Hasn't Met Nacho Vegas

After much thinking, I dared. I had to vomit about this. I dare to talk about music, even though I don´t know much about it but what I get from my ears, brain (or whatever my skull is protecting in there), the heart and the guts. Aphex, whenever you feel it convenient, correct me in your blog. Tambor, Esquer, Karnal... I'm sorry if I fail you.

I think there are very few times in life when one comes front to front with revelations of any kind. In this case, the revelation happened some time ago... and it was musical. Especially in a generation like ours which, even if tried hard, cannot be classified or named, simply because there's no identity at all. In this generational crisis that steals, borrows, or simply recycles past cultural manifestations, sometimes the singer-songwriter (for me a necessary combo), comes out with a style frankensteinely unique.

That singer-songwriter, who emerged from the underworld of our generation, is not a Mexican and much less a gringo... he's from Sabina's land and his name is Nacho Vegas.

I first heard him in a gathering with my three brothers. The song: Gang Bang; the album: Enrique Bunbury's Freak Show. Really?! Accordion, waltz, the burlesque, the neon, the night. The song was a duet with Enrique Bunbury, who I also consider a totally underestimated monster.

And that contrast in their voices and the perfect match in the stanzas was gripping. It was a feeling similar to the first time I heard Esa Noche by café Tacvba, but also the fist time I heard Regan speak with her possessed voice in The Exorcist. It was my inner self of a character many times seen in big movies. Keeping on with the comparison with movies... Gang Bang is Music Noir.

Nacho Vegas is like Chavela Vargas' lost child. While she cries and suffers without hiding, with exposed flesh in a Mexican folk subtly deep, Vegas represses the yell and his voice comes out like a mild cry... like an spectral lament at night, in the distance, that is there for the simple reason of the inevitable... to see who listens.

Nacho Vegas is folk. Is returning to music for urgency. It's not ornamental music. He is a troubadour as much as Sabina is a rocker. His album shared with Enrique Bunbury, El Tiempo de las Cerezas, is a masterpiece of the bohemian, the cabaret, the sorrow, the alcohol... the night. A brother said, pretty drunk by then, that this album is so special and unique that if you put it against Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, you will not know which one to choose. At that moment, I suggested him to be more careful with his words... but drunk people and kids always say the truth, and my brother is both.

Vegas is so special and fucking crude that he resonates in different human fibers, making him shine with own light and never be eclipsed by anyone.

One of the things that calls my attention about Nacho Vegas is that his songs, like Sabina's, Cohen's, Dylan's, and Pink Floyd's, are movies by themselves. They tell stories, and in three to five minutes, they take you in a roller coaster of emotions that very few artists achieve nowadays. And the strongest thing about this is the amount of people that could identify with these monsters half song, half movie.

Nacho Vegas gets to the overwhelmed human passions like Cronenberg and Arnofsky in Gang Bang and Canción de Isabel; he gets to sexually and spiritually raped worlds like Almodóvar in the great Historia de un Perdedor and the hallucinating Mi Marilyn Particular; he gets to very deep human textures, covered by an exterior layer easily confused with banality, the same as Billy Wilder, in songs like El Cazador and El Hombre que Casi Conoció a Michi Panero.

I knew Vegas because of Bunbury, and when they did the album together, that album that will stay in my top 10 forever, I immediately fell in love for his creations. He's immediate, he's urgent, and he's weird, classic, and genuinely talented

"¿No veis que yo le rezo a un dios, que me prometió,
que cuando esto acabe
no habrá nada más?
¡fue bastante ya!"

-Nacho Vegas, El Hombre Que Casi Conoció A Michi Panero