Juan Fernando Fonseca He was barely five years old when he stepped on stage for the first time, although his professional career did not begin until 2002, with the release of his first album. Twenty years later, the Colombian singer-songwriter presents his first book entitled Songs, Stories and 20 Years of Memories.
This story, which brings to light the hidden stories behind the most outstanding songs of his discography, is the result of a “short but very intense” writing process between hotel rooms and plane rides, as revealed by the artist in an interview with EFE this Thursday in Bogotá.
The feelings of gratitude and nostalgia, in addition to building the songs of the Bogota native, also cross the pages of his work in an attempt to “remember and thank” all those people who have accompanied him throughout this “journey”, such as the artist manager who passed away shortly after Fonseca began her professional career, Patricia Téllez.
“The theme of gratitude came from an invitation from Mexico to participate in an album about values. They told me to make a song about gratitude. Since then it has become an important and recurring theme in my music for me”, recalled the artist, while he defined himself as a“addicted to nostalgia”.
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DARK COLORS AND A VALLENATO FOR GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
Jealous of showing his private life in public, Fonseca admits that while writing he experienced moments when he felt that he was “wrinkled the heart”, when recalling anecdotes like the day he met and sang his vallenato Gratitude in the living room of the house of one of its greatest referents: the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1982, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Another of the mysteries that the artist solves between its pages is the reason why all his outfits are reduced to black or, failing that, to dark tones.
“I was always a big fan of Metallica from school and played with my band, NASHgroup themes. I stayed that morning to play live”, he recounts between laughs.
In its first lines, the author also vindicates his parents as the fundamental pillars on which he relied to make his musical career, given that at home “music was never an obstacle”.
In this sense, the artist’s mother, Ana Marcela Carrera, acknowledged to EFE that while reading her son’s work, she could not help but remember the times that “when he was little, she took him and brought him” to the singing classes he took at the Four Seasons Academy.
The family residence itself was the setting in which the singer-songwriter made his first composition. Fonseca At that time she was twelve years old when, seeing the harshness of the Bogota reality of the nineties on the news, she grabbed one of the notebooks that was next to the telephone and, guitar in hand, gave birth to “Television”.
“Those ghosts I have been exorcising through my music in phrases and words that only I understand,” he reflected
FIVE LIFE JOURNEYS AND A SINGLE MISSION
Though Fonseca reiterates that, as a good “traveler”, his ghosts and dreams remain immobile, his publication is divided into five “journeys” that coincide with each of the life stages he has gone through.
“I have been exorcising those ghosts through my music in phrases and words that only I understand”, he reflects.
Love is another of those non-changing elements that are very present in the lyrics of the singer, who achieved fame and his first Latin Grammy with “I send you flowers”, a song he composed for his wife Juliana while she was living in Spain and he was finishing his stage on the television reality show The farm.
Looking ahead to his next releases, the artist claims to be clear that they will be “from the heart and being absolutely sincere” with his feelings and thoughts, to fulfill his life mission: to play his music “available to others” so that “accompany, have fun and heal” to his listeners.
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‘Songs, Stories and 20 Years of Memories’, Fonseca’s first literary journey