Today, Friday, Towards Another Part (Calaverita Records/Música Global) sees the light, the long-awaited new album by La Pegatina, where they open their proposal with numerous international collaborations.
The Montcada i Reixac group, which has become a very popular reference in national pop with its festive and positive music, premiered the album before its release, at the Viña Rock festival a couple of weeks ago. In Catalonia they can be heard, among others, at the Canet Rock festival. The singer and composer Adrià Salas, explains the details of the brand new album.
With almost 20 years of career, what does La Pegatina lack and what has it already shown?
Every year we are getting things and learning. We started three kids who had no idea about music and we have become a classic for many people. The other day we were playing at Viña Rock, now the tenth edition in a row that we’ve done it, and I thought that there would probably be a lot of 17 or 18-year-olds there and that they were born with us already existing. There is a moment after the pandemic when we have realized that for many people we are someone who has always been there, and that, apart from attracting attention, is nice. People who can’t conceive their life without you, and that’s very heavy.
Has the pandemic helped you measure this?
Yes, of course, to get away a bit from what you’re doing, to ask why I was so focused on something that I didn’t need, in short, to relativize everything a bit. And one realizes, going back over everything, how people needed you.
In the brief performance that they offered at the Sant Jordi Musical, on a Sunday at noon in the Old Damm Factory, there was a large audience of children who enjoyed and knew their songs very well.
Yes. But look, the problem we have in this country is precisely this: that there are no concerts at times when the whole family can go. It is also true that the concerts that we do for our type of music are for later hours, and at seven or eight in the evening is the time that many children go to dinner. Instead you go to other countries, like Holland, where the festivals start at eleven in the morning and end at eleven at night, and the whole family goes. There they have a conception of culture that is different; culture here is often to entertain and that is nightlife. The people who started listening to us were more or less our age, between 18 and 20 years old. They are still our age now, which means 37-39 years old, and they probably have children. And many ask us that our concerts be at family hours.
Does your type of music favor this priority in entertainment in any way?
I don’t think it’s our music, but it’s something general. I remember going with colleagues to see concerts and many were looking for the bar; For me, on the other hand, what gets me drunk is watching live music. That’s what gets my adrenaline pumping.
On an individual level, what have these twenty years meant to you?
I started without knowing anything; I obviously loved to sing in the shower and things that were played at home. I studied Journalism, I was playing basketball at Barça, and as soon as I started my degree I met these guys, and we got involved. Without ever having sung, Rubén left his first guitar class, the other from percussion, and we said to each other “let’s try to play things by Manu Chao, which we like”. And we began to go out at night when miscegenation began in Barcelona, we took the guitar and began to compose songs.
Was it an excellent situation to coincide with miscegenation?
The circumstance was not miscegenation, but the circumstance occurred four years later, when the rumba returned. Then we listened to Dusminguet, Macaco, Cheb Balowski, Amparanoia, many Latin American bands and others, but until there was the rise of the rumba with La Troba Kung Fú, with the return of Sabor de Gràcia, Los Patriarcas de la Rumba, Ai ai ai, with the fact that the rumba was made a world heritage site. And just as important was the emergence of the Internet.
In what sense?
We were one of the first groups that produced ourselves live, traveling throughout Europe since 2007, and doing everything ourselves. In fact, we were one of the first self-managed groups, which published itself.
Self-sufficient, self-made?
Before coming to this we had knocked on doors, they had told us no, and we decided to do it ourselves. Basically, it was the idea of being the smartest in the class: what was happening in the industry, because we don’t give away our music on the Internet so that the whole world knows it, and if it was necessary we made stickers by hand that we distributed in the universities, inviting people to download our music. We already thought as a company and looking for ways to reach people. Our main objective was to reach the largest number of people, and then choose; a different way than the industry did.
When you are considered one of the referents of the so-called festa major pop, what do you think?
Depends on who says it. The festival is a circuit that is associative, and that is an example that they would already like to have in other communities and countries, where each town hall has its party and brings local groups to play instead of an orchestra or a mobile disco. That’s something typical here and I think it’s very nice. Saying festa major by someone who likes to go to festivals and so on, is still classism, because they come to say that the Mercè festivities are cool because they are from Barcelona but if they are from Sabadell, well, it is not the same . In the end, it’s a question of whether you like the culture and the music: when you go to Holland or Germany you are not being judged for making fun music. That’s why it’s something very common here, throughout Spain, that the most danceable style is judged as the most simple or even bad. On the other hand, if you make more relaxed indie pop, it’s better seen. That is why we must never forget that the important thing when it comes to valuing music is that people enjoy it and get excited by it. What you want is to reach everyone but not everyone to like it, because that is impossible. And an example of this right now is Rosalía. And in our case, we cannot forget that when you have been in this for twenty years it is much more difficult to stand out.
Having as there are other sound proposals more or less similar to that of La Pegatina, why don’t they succeed so much in the national and foreign market?
Mainly because they have not known how to move, there and here. Also because we’ve been in this for many years, because we have very clear formulas for live shows of how we like the dynamics of a concert. And also because we have always worked abroad; when we think of a live show, the idea is that people discover us. I wouldn’t say that the structure has much influence, because in the end a good chorus works wherever you put it, but at the level of reaching people what has worked with us is the direct one. There is a playful, fun sound there that attracts attention, but when you go out to play, what attracts is the live, the party, and we also have something exotic in other countries.
In this aspect, has it served to use Spanish as an artistic vehicle?
Do not; Spanish simply facilitates the play on words. It is much easier to compose in Spanish. In Catalan we have a comfort zone at the level of words and rhymes that are always the same.
Do you consider that with this new album the band begins a new stage?
There has been some change of musician in the band, and things have also happened internally, but above all it is about opening up to Latin America, to universality, and in this sense we had never expressly made an album of international collaborations. We have made a dream come true in this last aspect.
How was this last?
In a natural way. The album started with Crystal Fighters asking us for a collaboration, and it was before the pandemic, and we had hit it off. Suddenly the pandemic came, the Crystals went to the Colombian jungle and they were never heard from again, and then we told ourselves that since we were going to do a song like this from a distance, why not do another collaboration like this with the Dutch band Chef’s Special, very famous there and with whom we have coincided? Then we planned to go to a festival in Germany organized by the Querbeat group, and since we couldn’t do it due to the pandemic, we did another one, and the same with South American bands. And what was going to be a series of separate singles we saw that we already had ten songs. And all this happened in 2020, just after we released our previous album Turn it over, recorded by us from a distance.
With so many collaborations, were you looking for a different sound?
Absolutely, another of the ideas of Towards another part is to go to their place, that is, when they tell us that La Vela Puerca, which is a group that has always freaked us out, would agree to do a song with us, we thought of doing a song and taking it to the rock they do. We’ve made this game with almost every collaboration to bring the themes to their turf. That’s why there are stylistic risks on the album, because they’re things we’ve never done.
Is there a common thematic thread in the album?
No, I don’t think so, because they were going to be singles, and I think nobody does that anymore. The concept of disk has been lost. In fact, the single is also the only way to not lose songs along the way.
With this way of doing things, immediacy, anticipating what the follower will like, does art suffer?
Obviously, but when I make a song I don’t think about that. When it’s done, that’s when it’s done, and to decide, of all the ones done, which could be the most commercial or the one that would be given to the radio. But I can’t write music from this, because otherwise I’d make reggaeton or trap, and I don’t feel like it. And speaking of immediacy: an album comes out, it’s up to date for a week with the interviews and so on, and it disappears. That’s why now singles are released earlier to show the album, because once it comes out it lasts a week, unless you play it live.
In this sense, what advice would you give?
To maintain and grow, I would advise her to release a song every month, all year long. He is a slave, mind you. We, in fact, for this year now plan to release this global album and later, in November, an ep with songs only in Catalan. In June we will bring up a theme. We like as a concept, La Pegatina as something global and as something local.
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