In times of pandemic Fito Páez feels the duty to remain a speaker of the world with his music.
It’s something he tried to do with “The Conquest of Space,” which receives the Grammy for best Latin rock or alternative music album on March 14th.
“It’s not a very happy world, but it’s that 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 at least be part of the Titanic gang; I want to play to the end, that’s my job ”.
“The conquest of space” earned the Argentinian rocker two Latin Grammys: best pop / rock album and best pop / rock album for “The song of the beasts”, in which he wonders how we are going to create a future presented as a great desert.
Released in a year as bleak as 2020, the album works like an apocalyptic “sountrack” (for its lyrics) and happy (for its rhythms) at the same time, with songs like “Las things que do me bien”, “Nobody belongs to anyone. And the sweetly painful “People on the street” with Lali.
“Sure!” Said Paez. “Even if you read or listen to it now COVID, it works very well, in a way it seems like a record almost made by a futurologist.”
But on a personal level, for the 57-year-old musician, it is a redemption album in which he is confronted with the possibility of being reborn as the phoenix.
“I would like to tell you that in the end it is like the story that everything can be done over and over again,” he said. That is why the last sentence of the album is “after everything is forgotten”, which he performs to the accompaniment of an orchestra and the sound of a typewriter. The machine, he explained, “writes the history of what must be forgotten.”
Twenty years after “Abre”, which earned him his first and only other Anglo Grammy nomination, Páez celebrates his re-nomination outside the “rock” or “alternative music” labels.
“If you ask me, I have the feeling that in a way I do Argentine popular music if we want to find a possible definition. Although we also know this is a delusional area because the music itself has no specific definition, ”said the eight-time Latin Grammys winner, whose album combines piano and pop with blues and symphonic music.
“Definitions in music are always in favor of trying to calm differences, or soften perceived differences, when music is not a space where that in itself has value,” he added.
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Páez’s career, which began in the early 1980s, was consistent in his quest for constant experimentation. If there is anything that characterizes it, it never stops.
“That what is said alternative … I am a musician, for me it is my natural condition, I will always be curious about something that I do not know musically. In general, it happens to me with everything in life, but in music I can capture it “, he said.” I feel like I’m just doing my job, you see? And that in my mind I have the curiosity that it is good to be a musician. “I am proud to have it”.
Páez, also a writer and filmmaker, was at full throttle in 2020. He completed a script he was pending, took a virtual press tour to present ‘The Conquest of Space’, composed new music and focused on writing the first 30 years of his autobiography.
“That was it,” he said. “A hurricane”.
For 2021, he recommended “taking your shoulder” to face these tough times.
“It seems to me that at this point we all need to think of solidarity as fact, as something factual and real,” he said.