Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler embarks on his first European tour

MADRID — Capitalizing on a memorable moment in Spanish-language music, Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler embarks on his first European tour.

“Even “Don Quixote” wasn’t as popular as Spanish-speaking urban music is today in the world. You can’t find music written in Spanish anywhere you go. We can,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I’m happy to see that[Spanish]is opening doors to places I never thought I could reach.”

His latest award-winning album, “Tinta y Tiempo” (“Ink and Time”), won 6 of 13 Latin Grammy Awards, including an Oscar.

On his tour, Drexler will perform a new song, “Delumbe,” about the loss of love rescued from a memo, which will be featured in a television show produced by Mexican actor and director Diego Luna. Stated.

The European tour will be more intimate than recent shows, featuring voice, guitar and open repertoire, and will be Drexler’s first “first date” with an audience.

“I’ve always looked to the West,” he says, who has performed in the United States, Canada, Mexico and elsewhere, but “I don’t have enough eyes to the East because I work in that part of the world so much.” I couldn’t direct myself,” he said.

He has visited several European cities for the first time and is looking forward to visiting other cities such as Paris and Berlin for the first time in many years. The tour will take him to Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Sweden and more.

When the tour ends in mid-June, he plans to return to his leather armchair in his Madrid studio, sit with a guitar and a blank piece of paper, and “try to get lucky.”

But as your repertoire grows, songwriting becomes more complex, Drexler said, because “the more you release, the more space it takes up in your brain.”

“Once you’ve written 200 or 300 songs, you have to make some space with each new song,” he said.

At least for now, relying on artificial intelligence is not an option. He tested his ChatGPT, and while the results were “perfectly written from a syntactic and orthographic point of view,” they lacked poetry.

“I like biographies, I like songwriters, I like getting to know a person’s character. And I like mistakes that lead you to unexpected places. So, I still like human beings. “I like the songs I wrote better,” he said.

Drexler also enjoys collaboration in the creative process, including collaborations with C.Tangana, Rubén Blades, and Noga Erez on previous albums.

“It’s a relief for me and a release from myself,” he said. “My biggest enemies when it comes to writing are my past, my obsessions, and the way I work. There is also.”

When collaborating, there are no restrictions on the type of music or the generation of listeners.

“Like a lot of people of my generation, I don’t think the music we were doing in the past was (good) music,” Drexler said. “I listen to a lot more different things than what my generation listened to. So I try to be open to different things.”