Real events are Arjona's muse - The newspaper: The Miami Herald

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«Real events are Arjona's muse - article published in the newspaper The Miami Herald»

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Ricardo Arjona - Guatemalan Singer-Songwriter

The newspaper The Miami Herald published on Sunday, 11.16.08 the following article about Guatemalan-born singer-songwriter Ricardo Arjona - written by Jordan Levin [jlevin@MiamiHerald.com]. It reads ::

Ricardo Arjona has done many things: taught elementary school, played on his native Guatemala's national basketball team, waited tables, driven taxis, delivered telegrams. He tried architecture and computing. But, as it turned out, what he does best is write songs and sing them.

''After all that, I could tell that what I'm best at'' is composing, says the lanky, 6-foot-4 (hence the basketball career) songwriter. ``So I said, well, I'll make songs.

``I love having a blank page and fabricating a world the way I want. Because in this world, if I want I can change the president; I can be with whatever woman I like best. I can do a thousand things in my world.

``I would do this whatever else I did. If I worked as an insurance salesman, I would still come home at night and write songs.''

Luckily for Arjona, selling insurance has not been necessary. He is one of the biggest stars in Latin music, selling 16 million records in his 20-year recording career, able to fill major venues throughout Latin America.

Although attractiveness is part of his appeal, it's that of a mature man, not a boyish heartthrob or romantic seducer. He is a unique figure: an erudite, intelligent songwriter whose compositions feature elaborately poetic lyrics and often complex themes, who shies away from promotion and media glitz but is still a popular success.

''He's a really fine songwriter, and he has really vast commercial appeal,'' says Leila Cobo, executive director of Latin content and programming at Billboard.

``For him it's important to be entertaining, to write stuff that's not only well crafted but will also reach a majority of people. He happens to be very commercially successful, but he also happens to really be an artist.''

Arjona, 44, recently moved from SonyBMG Latin, his label of 15 years, to Warner Latino. For his latest album, 5to Piso (Fifth Floor), which comes out Tuesday, Warner staged the kind of press junket last month that's rare in the financially strapped music industry these days, with journalists moved through several stations at a luxurious South Beach hotel before being ushered, one by one, into a suite to receive Arjona.

Wearing a flowing shirt and pants, long hair loose, long body draped across a sofa, Arjona talked voluminously about his music, even if he would rather have been doing something else.

'People say, `So you've got your record, what are your objectives now?' '' he says. ``I don't have any objectives. The objectives I had I put on the record. So now I give the record a little push, I do interviews, talk about it so people know it's there. But after that the record has to learn to fight by itself. It's like a kid who already knows how to walk and goes off into life to find its own way.''

The secret to Arjona's success lies in his ability to turn his varied experiences -- he grew up in Guatemala, started his career as a protest singer in Mexico City and Argentina, and has lived in Mexico City for some 15 years -- and a perpetual curiosity into musical tales that take on a life of their own. Although he has written many songs with social themes -- such as 2006's Mojado (Wetback) a piercing indictment of the treatment of Latino immigrants -- he's not generally interested in pushing a cause. He's a storyteller. That those stories often reveal something about the nature of love or loneliness or injustice is a product of the songs. He is compelled not by a message but by events.

A CHRONICLER

''I chronicle what happens around me,'' he says. ``I'm not someone who exorcises his fantasies in a song. It's not like a woman leaves me, and I take my guitar and write and feel better. No, no, no. I do songs when they're born. There are months when I don't write anything. And there are days when I write two songs.''

Nadie Sabe Adonde Va (No One Knows Where They're Going), from 5to Piso, may be about the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, but it was also inspired by the mass of humanity in a New York subway. The song is mostly a meditation on isolated urban life, following vividly described characters, a businessman, a slacker, a rich woman, as they head toward the train and their destiny.

''When I first started this song, I didn't know where it was going either,'' Arjona says. We don't discover the full meaning until the end, when we meet Mohammed, ''weighing 15 kilos more than the day before -- murmuring a prayer on his way'' as if Arjona had discovered him walking down the street.

Like some of his other recordings, 5to Piso has a conceptual framework: Arjona, observing life from a fifth-floor apartment, looking out and looking inward. The view is largely dark and isolated. In Sin Ti . . . Sin Mi (Without You, Without Me), he mourns a separation from a loved one that's as senseless as ''a doubt in a guru,'' while in Como Duele (How it Hurts), the woman in bed next to him seems 100 kilometers away. A man beaten down by alienation and deadening routine is the center of El del Espejo (He of the Mirror). Even the humor is black: La Vida Esta de Luto (Life Is in Mourning) describes a world in which geniuses go bankrupt, and deaf men run record companies.

''Imagine -- a deaf man in a record company!'' Arjona chortles.

It is the singer's first collection of new songs since 2005's Adentro (there was a greatest-hits collection, Quien Dijo Ayer, in 2007) and the first since his divorce last year from the mother of their two teenage children, all of whom live in Miami. But Arjona says 5to Piso is no more personally revealing than any of his other recordings.

SEEING THE MOMENT

''What has happened around me in the last three years of life affects me,'' he says. ``It has the same dose of myself as most of my records. All the songs are made as a peepshow of how I see the moment.''

One personal composition is La bailarina vecina (The dancer neighbor), inspired by a flamenco dancer who lived in the apartment above Arjona during a brief sojourn years ago in Madrid, whose clattering heels and regal presence had an indelible effect on him. ''I practically fell in love with her, but I could never talk to her,'' he says. ``I don't know why. Because I'm an idiot. Sometimes you let these opportunities go, because of stupidity or shyness.''

Despite his fame, Arjona is reputed to be reclusive offstage. ''He's always been very shy and to himself,'' says Jorge Naranjo, who recently became Arjona's manager and has worked with the singer for 13 years. ``In a lot of his songs he talks about being alone, having his own space, having time to himself. That's something he cherishes a lot.

'He's very secure about himself in his music. But he doesn't consider himself a heartthrob or a showman at all. He says, `I can't even dance, I have two left feet.' ''

Arjona says he dislikes the glare and hubbub of music awards and similar events. Although he has played at enormous venues all over Latin America, he's uncomfortable as a celebrity.

''I don't have the kind of personality to walk the red carpet,'' he says. ``These kinds of things really embarrass me. I even hate it when I sing Happy Birthday in front of a cake -- I don't know what to do.''

He'd prefer to be happily living and writing on his own -- though not too happily.

''That's the problem with happiness,'' he says. ``You're busy being happy, and you're not going to sit down and write songs.

``Happiness is boring for art. It's like if you go to a lovely virgin beach where there's no noise, there's the sea, white sand, a beautiful partner. But after a year I'd want to shoot myself. After a month I'd shoot myself. I'm someone who likes more action. I like New York. I like Mexico City. I like things to happen to me.''


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Esta publicacion se hizo el lunes 24 de noviembre de 2008



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