Andrés Cepeda He arrives at the interview with his characteristic sunglasses, but takes them off immediately and offers his best smile shortly after landing in Barcelona to continue with his tour, The Purple Route. The more than 30 years of career of this lover of boleros and love go unnoticed when one hears him talk about his collection of projects, where in addition to the tour he includes the new album 'Décimo Cuarto', which for now has It earned two nominations for the Latin Grammy Awards, for album of the year and best traditional music album.
What is the tour that brings you to Europe like?
It's a tour that started when we were still making the new album, and that we designed to do in a series of very special theaters, places like Carnegie Hall, where it started, that's why we call the tour The Purple Route because we We imagine all these theaters with velvet on their chairs, on their curtains, on the curtains, like this characteristic of classical theater. It is a commented repertoire, an opportunity to tell what my relationship with music has been like since I was very young. I ask myself why I make the music I make and I am finding that answer through the repertoire. I start by singing and presenting songs that were important in my growth, the music that was in my house, the music that I inherited from my parents, from my brothers, after my adolescence, I build a little that narrative that gave meaning to why I ended making the music I make, and at the end the successes of the career come.
What reflection comes from this retrospective of your music?
The people of my generation are heirs of a very rich Latin American music and culture that is worth preserving and protecting. Through our elders we managed to understand tango, bolero, son, the music of my land, and I feel that we are called to spread that music more and make it last over time. Obviously it doesn't need us to save it, but it does need us to listen to other people from other generations because it's worth it. As I say in the concert, many of the music of our time that has to do with that of the 40s and 50s, until the 80s of the last century, there are some of the best works of our Ibero-American music and we must not forget that inheritance. That the music we make today has that as a reference and as an inspiration will continue to be very important although the north of what Latin music is today has distanced itself a bit from that.
You have collaborated with young musicians like Sebastián Yatra
I have tried to collaborate with people from another generation, people much younger than me, even from other musical genres, but with all my collaborations I feel that we have in common that love for romantic lyrics in particular. This is the case of Sebastián Yatra, who is a hopeless romantic, and who is urban, the same thing happens to me with the boys from Morat or Cali
Latin music is very popular in the US.
Latin music is prevalent in the world today, the Latin American spore is so widespread and so spread throughout the planet that it is easy to find listeners in any city you go, you don't necessarily have to reach the American public, but you reach migrants who have suddenly been there for one or two generations and go with their partners or their American relatives who have already more or less recruited them into the Latin culture. This theme of the Latin diaspora in the last thirty or forty years is very strong, it is a reflection of the great success of Latin music. There is not a place in the world, a bar or a disco where you go and there is not a percentage of music sung in Spanish, be it urban, be it trap, be it even rock, obviously pop.
As a young man he became fond of rock in Spanish
The first thing I wanted to do when I could get a guitar was make rock, then when the band dissolved and I started to grow a little more I began to discover that I had stored in my head an impressive number of boleros that I had not purposely wanted to learn. but I knew it from listening to them so much at home, and I began to realize that I really liked that music that I knew a lot about. When I grew up, I fell in love and they broke my heart the first time, all those boleros fit me like a glove, that's why after the band I started my career with that personal file that I still carry with me.
After leaving your first group, Poligamia, you were a producer for a time, what has remained of that?
I work hand in hand with the producers, I am often in charge of the mixes, I am very meticulous with recording, I like to explore in one studio or another, record on site, try different technologies. The people who work with me have to be patient with me because I really like to put my hands in the whole production issue, from composition, through recording to mixing, it is something that I really enjoy and that gives me a clearer vision of what I want to do. Understanding how to achieve what I want to do gives me a lot of security when doing my work, it is one of the parts of the job that I like the most.
What weight does the producer have in the success of a song?
It is vital. The same song, although it could be very good, can go unnoticed in the wrong hands. And a not-so-good song, treated well, can have a great opportunity. I define it as this person who helps highlight the best of the artist and hide the worst, makes sure that your best shines and those defects that you may have go unnoticed.
Why the name 'Fourteenth'?
This album is part of a two-album project, the previous one called 13 and this one Decimo Cuarto. I wanted to do a collaborative project and the first one wasn't enough for me, I had more songs and I decided to divide it into two. I wanted to invite all these artists who, being different from me, I felt we had something in common, most of them people I already knew and with whom I had a very good relationship, close friends and a couple of them who I looked for to invite.
It was like workshop work, exchange and learning as I explored composition and production with them, learning new tricks to put in my tool bag when doing the job, and it was very interesting, from each one of them. I learned different things and I think they should also get something from this experience.
What did he learn?
Different ways of seeing and hearing, different approaches to composition and even post-production of music, each one kills their fleas in different ways. I learned very interesting things, for example with the Morat boys the composition work seemed visceral to me, they arrived and they wrote, we made several editions of what arrived so quickly and then the post-production method was very meticulous, a little different from what What I do, I spend more time polishing the text and the melody and then I know how it sounds and I simply record it and mix it.
Has anything in particular changed for the next job?
I have realized how valuable it is to write with four or six hands, which is something that I did not do before. How good it is to debate about a phrase, or debate about a melodic line. As we say in my country, the tiger doesn't eat every day, you can't be right as long as you have the opportunity to be next to someone who suddenly refutes one of your ideas, at first it can be a bit shocking for the ego. , but once you learn to master this and open your head, some great ideas begin to arrive that if they didn't occur to you, they occurred to him, they are great, so let's combine them. And that has been very positive.
It is opening up to co-authorship.
Yes, it seems to me that it is very worth it, and it helps you because if only you write your songs, no matter how hard you try, you will repeat yourself. When you have someone by your side or receive material from someone different, you have more opportunities to be versatile and diverse and to realize things that would not have occurred to you if someone did not ask them to you.
Have you also found any changes at a sound level?
I have found other possibilities, I have always worked a lot with the, let's say, organic and acoustic part of the instruments, but I have realized that I am going to connect the electronic, the programming a little more, it is a very interesting world to which we also have to take care and respect, and it can be integrated and things can be mixed. Nowadays everything is fused and it is worth opening up to new sounds as long as you feel comfortable and believe that you can do them well, you can't wear all the outfits but you can try which ones.
He is also working on the work 'Cepeda en Tablas'
Yes, it is an interesting exercise because it is laughing at yourself. It all started because my friends from Planeta, the publishing house, invited me to make a book where I would tell the stories of the songs, and when I sat down with these crazy people to put together each of the stories, we began to realize that there were some anecdotes. very curious and very interesting behind the origin of the songs, all those clumsinesses and all those stupid things that one commits when one is in love trying to conquer or the mistakes that are made, there were some interesting stories and anecdotes. I have laughed at myself a lot, and to that extent I feel that I have matured a little because the things that one experiences and that embarrasses one, when you can do them with that attitude it is because you have already overcome it and you understand them much better and you are capable of share it and when you laugh at yourself and people laugh with you it is because they felt portrayed too.
Do you have contact with Shakira?
We met very young, I haven't seen her in a long time. We were in the same scene, she is a little younger than me, and she was the girlfriend of a great friend who was a member of the band we started with. I remember an anecdote in which we were hanging out with Soda Stereo in Barranquilla and Shakira was Gustavo's girlfriend, we were 18, 19, she was going to be 15, 16, something like that, we were little, she was even younger, and it was very It was nice to see how in the beginning she had the same naivety as everyone else and suddenly she took this flight. It was very exciting to see in her eyes and in her attitude a great certainty about how she saw herself in the future, that was very impressive to have met her, that from very early on she had a very clear focus and goal that as we saw what was happening time and how his career evolved amazed us more because he always knew it, it is something that not all artists have, that clear, impressive focus.
