Back to work, back to school, the end of the heat when climate change was just a warning. September, the ugliest month for many people, is Mikel Erentxun's favorite, who has used it to name his (Warner's) 28th album, counting the ones he made with Duncan Dhu. Sitting at the piano for the first time in his entire career, he has extracted 18 songs with sementer sounds in which he once discovers his inner life, where the memory of his beloved Pau Donés also resides. This December he will visit Barcelona as part of the Suite Festival
September is the first album he composed on the piano
The story begins in the year of the pandemic in a quite unique way. I went to see the biopic about Elton John, Rocketman, and discovered a repertoire that I didn't know, everything that Elton John recorded in the early 70s. I was passionate about it and started doing a little musical archaeology, enjoying and soaking up all that. . The next step was to buy a small portable piano and I began to write, to learn to play the piano badly, just enough to be able to write songs. The piano opened up a lot of possibilities for me that I couldn't do with the guitar, that's why the piano is on the cover of the album, because almost everything in the repertoire is written on piano. It is an instrument that is in all the songs and serves as a guiding axis. Without realizing it, I found that I had a handful of songs written on piano, which was something I had never done before. It is an instrument that is in all the songs and serves as a guiding axis, which is a great novelty in my career.
What does the piano give you that the guitar didn't?
It offers me other types of chords and transitions that are completely new to me. In fact, there are songs on this album that I don't know how to play on the guitar. I play a lot of instruments, all bad, but I don't need to play much more. With my little knowledge of guitar I have been making music for more than 30 years, but in the end it is very difficult not to repeat myself. There are seven chords and almost everything I do already sounds familiar to me. The piano offers me other types of chords and transitions that are completely new to me. In fact there are songs on this album that are not played with the guitar.
The album exudes a very seventies musicality.
I haven't looked for it, my influences are what they are, the album has one foot in the present and another in a very specific past, these early 70s, Elton John, the Beatles after the Beatles, Harrison, Lennon, Wings, Bowie , T-Rex, all that sound and that atmosphere that I love, this little trip to the past.
Train to Mars is a song of escapism, of doing things a little more dreamlike and trying to escape, together with the loss of musical references that we are going through, at least those of my generation, which is being a bit traumatic. Probably for today's generations, in many years, it will happen to other people, but I believe that the great references of the 60s and 70s have not been repeated, there have been no substitutes for the Beatles or Bob Dylan. Music these days is much more disposable, Taylor Swift is huge, but I don't think she will leave a mark like Pink Floyd or Bowie have left.
Now it's much easier to listen to music at all hours
Access to music has changed radically, and that has meant that all the work behind an album is not valued. September has been a long year of preparation and recording and I am aware that many people are going to listen to it on a mobile phone, three songs at most. This is bad for music, it has become trivialized, it has become something to be used and thrown away. Before, records had a brutal impact, they transcended fashion. In the 50s, 60s and 70s everything was new, but since the 80s practically everything that has been done in music is going back, updating things that already existed.
On this album he looks back, but collaborates with young people
I live in 2023 and I want to sound like 2023. Both the two producers and the band are very young and very current people, Rufus T firefly from Aranjuez and Remy from London are two current bands with a current sound, they have taken me out of my zone of comfort. Since I worked with Paco Loco, a few years ago, I have become accustomed to each album taking me away from the previous one.
He has been composing all the songs for a long time
I fell by accident, I have always worked with very good lyricists like Jesús María Corman, Diego Vasallo or Rafael Berrio, but in 2010, when I was preparing 24 hits, my primary lyricists failed me and I had to start writing songs. On the next album I wrote all the material, and there was no turning back. I feel very comfortable, I sing in a more honest way with the lyrics that I write and that generally talk about me. It would be very difficult for me to go back, now I write in a way that the music and lyrics become intertwined over time. I had had songs already recorded and not having the lyrics, that came later, but now music and lyrics grow at the same time, I have gotten used to it.
Will write more heartfelt things
All my albums are quite autobiographical, very personal, each one defines very well the emotional state I was in when I wrote the songs, they are like ship's diaries. With this album I decided to look outside because I have had many albums talking only about me. But I haven't achieved it, I think there are two songs on this album that don't talk about my world, the rest is me or the things that surround me.
Those he dedicates to his daughter and Pau Donés
Pau Donés' song is perhaps the most emotional I have done in a long time, I wrote it when he left, during a pandemic, when we were all very sensitive. We were very good friends for a long time, a friendship that was more mountaineering than musical, we met skiing in the Vall d'Aran.
Isn't it difficult for you to sing personal songs in public?
The psychologist has saved me, I see it as a public couch. He suits me well, I have no shame and I have said quite intimate things throughout these albums, but he suits me very well and it also suited Pau Donés very well. Pau carried with a terrible, wonderful dignity, all of his illness and all of his reality.
Train to Mars and Barks in the Chest have a different sound than the rest
There are two contrasts, September takes its name from those contrasts, it is a month of many weather changes and that also happens on this album. There are long songs, short songs, very calm songs or much faster songs, and then there are very rough songs like these two.
Doesn't it happen that over time you forgive songs that you didn't like at first?
I didn't have a very good relationship with some songs, like A Street in Paris, a Duncan Dhu classic that I never liked too much, and yet on the last tour we did a version that I love.
