Guitarricadelafuente Celebrates Latin Grammy Nomination

Spanish singer-songwriter Guitarricadelafuente knows that getting involved in all the works that surround his music, including graphic materials and videos, can be very rewarding, as evidenced by the Latin Grammy nomination of the video for his song “A carta cabal”.

“I always like to be linked in the creative part of everything because in the end I think it’s very important to have one thing linked to the other,” said the musician in a recent interview in Mexico City, where he performed for the first time at the country in the Supreme forum and had as a spectator, nothing more and nothing less than, Dua Lipa.

Guitarricadelafuente originally planned to travel to Mexican soil in May 2020, but the pandemic crossed. On his trip, he said that he ate “everything” tacos, including fish. Guitarrica, whose real name is Álvaro Lafuente, is originally from Benicàssim, a town north of Valencia, and currently lives in Barcelona. At the age of 15, his father gave him a guitar and he taught himself to play it by watching YouTube tutorials.

“Since I was little, I kind of always had people around me who played music,” he said.

At first he secretly composed songs in English, he only dared to share his songs when he began to compose in Spanish, but feeling too exposed he opted for the pseudonym Guitarricadelafuente. Unlike other artists who choose platforms like SoundCloud with their musical ideas, Guitarrica shared them directly on Spotify and YouTube.

Until recently, he also made the covers and all the posters for his concerts.

“It’s something I liked to do because it’s something that represents a lot of your imagination,” he said.

The arts are definitely his thing, he partially studied architecture. But to his surprise, his career was much more technical than he imagined: “You don’t draw, you draw by computer.”

“I felt I had gotten into the wrong place,” he added. “I felt that I had nothing to fill me up and in the end all my energy was devoted to this (music), it’s like I felt that I had to put everything into music to be able to look for an opportunity to get out of that situation, because I didn’t I saw another alternative.

Their music may sound typically Spanish to an American listener, but upon reading the lyrics they are quite abstract and modern.

“When you narrate in a very precise or very clear way, like it doesn’t hide anything or it doesn’t have something that you can succumb to or that people can have an open interpretation of,” he said of why he likes that his lyrics don’t tell stories of start to finish with all the details. But he knows that it is based on a strong tradition.

“In folk music there are very powerful scenes or words that make the interpretation much broader or that through the images is what people can imagine in their heads,” he added.

On the cover of his debut album “La cantera”, released in May, Guitarrica appears with a little sun by the Barcelona illustrator Pepo Moreno.

“This type of art felt that it represented the energy of the album very well because it has this very innocent component of youth and childhood and also of that picaresque that it is an adult who is portraying it,” he said.

The quarry represents youth, that is what the old people from their grandmother’s town used to say to the young people when they went to visit them “the quarry”. That same idea is reflected in the video for “A carta cabal” with children in a desolate town and the impetus of young people to save it and that its origins remain alive, she explained.

The video was filmed in two towns in Catalonia, one of them is actually next to a quarry.

“It is a town that was built in the 50s in the Franco era, a town was built so that workers would go to work the quarry and live in that town,” said Guitarrica. The quarry workers have grown older and the quarry is going to close.

“That town reflects many parts of inland Spain that are becoming depopulated,” he added.

Similarly, there is the town of the grandmother of Guitarrica, in Aragon, which has 70 inhabitants, most of them elderly.

The video for “A carta cabal” competes at the Latin Grammys, which will be held on November 17 in Las Vegas, in the category of best short version music video and is in good company with Cami’s “Mía”; Residente’s “This Is Not America” with Ibeyi; “Hentai” by Rosalía; “No one” by Sin Bandera and “Tocarte” by Jorge Drexler with C. Tangana. It was directed by Pau Carrete and Guitarrica was in the entire shoot, including those moments in which scenes were recorded without him, such as those in which children play and run, as well as a car on fire.

“It’s the same as with the lyrics, there is a free interpretation. I do not like to talk about the specific meaning because I believe in that, that you feel the interpretation, “she said about the video images.

Although he also has specific inspirations, in “Vidalita del mar”, one of the songs on “La cantera”, he mentions Macorina, a name that immediately refers to Chavela Vargas.

“For me there is a round trip in terms of references,” he said. “For me, Chavela is one of my great references and she is an idol.”

After performing in concert in New York, Guitarricadelafuente will perform in February 2023 as part of the Lollapalooza Argentina lineup.